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Access Atlanta > American Idol Buzz > Archives > 2008 > February > 18
Monday, February 18, 2008
2/19: Alexandrea Lushington interview, Idol rewind, Josiah Leming update
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I wrote a print edition piece for today summarizing my three interviews with Michael Johns, Carly Smithson and Alexandrea Lushington here..
Alexandrea Lushington could be this year’s local Diana DeGarmo. She’s only 17 and has performed many a National Anthem at local ballgames, just like Diana. She grew up mostly in College Park and only her sophomore year moved to Douglasville. So I don’t anticipate she’ll be pushing the “Douglasville” angle as much as Diana promoted Snellville. She’s now a junior at Douglas County High School, though obviously she probably is going to miss most if not all of this semester if she makes the top 10.
She was my last interview at about 6:15 p.m. EST Friday. She was clearly distracted as she was getting ready to rehearse in Los Angeles. There was a lot of background noise and I had to repeat questions a few times. Her answers were fairly short, too. So as I went over my notes, I realized I didn’t have much at all. I figured I spoke with her for less than 10 minutes compared to 15 minutes with Michael and 20 minutes with Carly.
Alexandrea began singing at age 2 or 3, said she wanted to be part of “Sesame Street” at age 5. Both her parents are musical; her mom was in a gospel group, he dad studied music at a Brooklyn conservatory. She said she performed at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem at age 7. She sang Jackson 5’s “Who’s Lovin’ You” and made it on stage twice. “The stage looked huge to me. Now when I looked back, it’s kind of small,” she said. She also did National Anthem work with Georgia Tech, the Atlanta Fire Department (her dad was a firefighter, her mom her agent/assistant), the Braves and the Hawks, to name a few.
She attended school in College Park until sophomore year of high school when she moved to Douglasville and attends Douglas County High School (better school system).
Her great grandmother, 94 years old, got more airtime than she did during the Atlanta audition episode. “She’s at the peak of her life,” Alexandrea said. “I’m glad Ryan liked her.” She said 20 people came to her audition.
As for her lack of airtime, “I can’t be disappointed not getting a lot of airtime. I’m just glad I have made it this far. They can’t help but give me airtime right now! It really doesn’t bother me. I’m focusing on my next performance.”
She said she loves all kinds of music— soul and rock & roll. Then she got cut off and the conversation abruptly ended.
UPDATE: I just heard she actually competed against David Archuleta on “Star Search” a few years back. Here’s the proof.
Onto other topics: I caught “American Idol Rewind” from this past weekend and it was the night Charles Grigsby was eliminated with the appropriately titled “Wiz” song “You Can’t Win.” He really wasn’t very good but seeing him five years later in an interview, I just can’t believe how much hair the poor guy lost. These performances simply solidified why Clay (“Somewhere Out There”) and Ruben (“A Whole New World”) would finish in the top 2 and why Julia DeMato would be eliminated the next week with her so-so take on “Flashdance.” Ruben, at this point, was really pimping out the “205” Birmingham shirts.
And do you wish Josiah Leming had made it? He was definitely an interesting story but he may not have been quite ready emotionally to handle the competition.
Access Hollywood caught up with him and I anticipate he will get a few more minutes of fame.
“My belief is that they were trying to make me look bad. They were trying to make me look like a crybaby and then trying to make me look like I was overconfident - but I’m thankful. If I could see them right now, I would give them the biggest hug ever because they have launched my career.”
It’s true! Josiah told me, thanks to this publicity, he has sold over 1,000 albums on his MySpace page and has earned himself a cool $9,000 in the process. Not a bad take for a kid who lives in his car. Although, he doesn’t live there anymore, Josiah tells me. It sounds like those days are over. Mostly, it’s because his car is broken down. Not to worry. A local car dealership in his hometown of Morristown, Tennessee has come to the rescue and offered him a car to borrow while he pursues his dreams.
Plus, it gets better. The President of Fox has called him and requested a meeting about casting him for something else and “The Ellen Degeneres Show” is flying him out on Monday to perform on the show.
Need more? MTV.com has him gabbing and gabbing about himself. There’s even video.
And his appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”:
Finally, Carrie Underwood is performing this Saturday on the first post-strike “Saturday Night Live” featuring Tina Fey as the guest host.
2/18: Carly Smithson interview
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At the Wall Street Journal, I worked in Atlanta with a colleague named Jennifer Ordonez. Now at Newsweek, she eventually moved to Los Angeles to cover entertainment and in 2002, wrote a memorable page one story about the screwy economics of the record industry using Dublin native Carly Hennessy as an example. Two numbers stood out: MCA Records spent an estimated $2.2 million on Hennessy including recording production living expenses, a video, a mall tour, imaging, and radio promotion. The teen-ager sold 17,000 singles and just 378 copies of her album three months into its release when the story came out.
Fast forward six years and we now have Carly Smithson, a possible favorite to win “American Idol.” I got a few minutes with her on the phone Friday because she lived in Marietta for two years with her eventual boyfriend from 2003 to 2005. That’s a good enough excuse for me, especially given how her story has been floating around the Web since November, when the top 50 were named. I didn’t particularly like her audition in San Diego, thought it felt desperate. But given her past, that desperation is truly heartfelt and justified. I started liking her a bit more when she sang “Alone” during Hollywood.
Talking to her one on one, I liked her a lot. I brought up the WSJ story immediately and she groaned - but goodnaturedly. She kept talking about her past record deal in the second person as in “you feel horrible” or “you can’t believe it’s happening,” like it was an out-of-body experience. I’m glad I caught her now because I’m sure after she answers the same questions 100 times, they won’t come out quite the same.
I didn’t properly prep for the interview - like re-reading the WSJ story in detail. Part of it was the last-second nature of my request since I only knew Thursday night about her Atlanta connection. And I should have written questions down because by winging it, I missed an obvious one. I forgot to ask her if she felt like “Idol” should have revealed her MCA deal early on and whether that would have any impact on people voting. She’s certainly not hiding it herself because she did bring it up in her video interview on www.americanidol.com.
“I kind of had a bad experience,” she said. Her viewpoint of the WSJ story: “It was nonsense. It was very damaging.” She ultimately didn’t buy the $2.2 million figure. Unfortunately, I didn’t recall the details in the story so I couldn’t go through it and have her dispute or agree with the specifics. I presume someone will eventually do that or already has. She did scoff at the fact in the story that she drove a convertible but the label did get her a Volkswagen Golf (which comes in a convertible option.). Anyway, she recalled getting signed at age 15 and moved to L.A. and said she lived in Marina Del Rey.
“We did a fantastic recording for a 15 year old,” but she said the label wasn’t happy with it and it sat around. Her sound didn’t match up with that of Britney and Christina and the hot sounds of the day. (This was 1999-2000, the peak time for boy bands and such.) She worked with Gregg Alexander, then lead singer of the New Radicals (“You Get What You Give”) and he pushed her more alternative.
“Gregg pushed the envelope with the lyrics,” she said. “I thought it was a great, cool record. I listen to it to this day. It had some great tracks on it. He helped me find exactly what my sound was. I was pleased.” Though she had been signed at 15, she said this record didn’t get done til she was closer to 17. Given the adult nature of the CD, they waited until she was 18 to release the single “I’m Gonna Blow Your Mind” (about oral sex). It was gaining traction, she said, but then 9/11 happened and “nobody was interested in shopping a new record.” It died. And that’s when the WSJ came out.
At that time, they tried to promote the CD in Europe. She moved back there. But she said the record company went away at that point and promotion really stopped. “The story forget to mention all that,” she said. “It looked like I put out a record and it went nowhere.” She said the reacton to the story “was kind of crazy. One article can have such a snowball effect. They believed everything in it.” [I gently told her this was the Wall Street Journal, not the National Enquirer.] “It was just bizarre. All these facts are in this aritcle and they’re taken as facts. Now you have no record company. The record company overnight was imploded. You have nobody with you.”
That’s when she moved to Atlanta with her new boyfriend Todd. “At that point, I really hated the music industry.” Singing “wasn’t my thing anymore” in Atlanta. “I just needed to take a rest, just be normal for a minute, have a normal job.”
She had met Todd (who is from South Carolina) in a Los Angeles airport and moved with him to Marietta with some of his roommates who did custom hot rods. She’d help out. “I have little hands so they’d hand a wrench to me. They’d fit my little hands in little spots in motors. It was cool.”
Carly worked at Buckhead’s Irish bar Fado as a waitress to earn cash. Her husband Todd worked at Sacred Heart Tattoo in Little Five Points. After the MCA debacle, she said she didn’t sing at all in public while in Atlanta. Strange coincidence: “Michael Johns used to sing at Fado Thursday nights,” she said. “We never spoke to each other until Idol.” Because of their name changes, she didn’t make the connection until they talked in the top 24. “I just wrote his name [Michael Lee at the time] on the chalkbaord every Thursday.” She said she loved Fado. “It was a great spot. It was very sad when we had to leave to come to California for music reasons.”
In 2005, she moved to San Diego and tried out for “Idol” but had visa problems, as “Idol” mentioned several times. “Paperwork got misplaced in the system,” she said. When she got cut from “Idol” in 2005 over visa issues, “it was awful, I swear. If you had no talent, that would have been easier than a glitch in your paperwork.”
She didn’t try out again in 2006, she said vaguely, “due to things happening in my life at the time.” Todd and Carly had opened a tattoo shop in San Diego. With auditions in San Diego this past summer, Todd convinced her to try one more time. “I went, I queued up. I got sunburned and auditioned. I had a great time.”
She said the reason she was so emotional was her low self esteem. “In this industry,” she said, placing her situation in second person, “you get so beaten down, your confidence is trashed. By the time you do something like auditioning again, it’s very hard… Everybody else had told you no. Why not these people? When they said yes, they were nice and excited, tell you you’re good. For me, it’s so emotional. I was overjoyed. I kept telling myself to stop crying. I couldn’t stop.” By the time the top 24 came along, she said she didn’t think she’d make it. She also said this was going to be her last try. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” she said.
About her tattoos: “everything seemed to be positive. Todd and I talked about it. Should I wear long sleeves? But wearing tattoos is becoming not so taboo anymore. That’s just who we are. If people don’t like it, they won’t like me… I wouldn’t want to hid who I am at all. We’ll see how Middle America takes it. The public hasn’t voted yet. I have no idea.”
She said she agrees that this is an especially talented top 24. Her husband said, “you auditioned the wrong year!” She hopes the ratings rebound as people glom onto the better singers.
As for her struggles, “it was definitely meant to be. If I had everything when I was 19, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it. Right now, I love life. With the bartending and singing in bars, I had been at the lows and the highs. Everything is a bonus compared to the life I’ve had. Todd and I are lucky if we have $2 to our name. We’re still happy. We’re great together. We’re a great team. We’re very simple people. We’re not into going out and partying. We like to go to the beach and cook dinner at home. I’m a nester. I like decorating my house… I used to be excited about shopping and fancy restaurants. I’m not like that anymore.”
Interestingly, her CD “Ultimate High” that sold in the hundreds in 2001 is readily available on eBay. A week ago, it was selling for $5 or $6 including shipping. The day after she was named in the top 24? $18.99. The WSJ story said only 10,000 were even placed on shelves so if she goes far, this could become quite the collector’s item.
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