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but that's the only part I really give a shit about, lol. To read it all see linky dink below. It's about 1/2 to 2/3 way down on the page.

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2008-05-25.shtml





This year, however, it was not all about big voices. The decision to let the performers use instruments to accompany themselves was long overdue. Put Brooke White at a piano or give David Cook a guitar, and they were in hog heaven.

Putting the band onstage for some numbers really worked for Syesha Mercado -- she was at her best when she had someone else to relate to. All in all, this year was the friendliest to performers who are more comfortable with the intimacy of the studio or the small house than in big arenas -- and, when you think about it, that's the decisive element in a recording career.

After all, David Cook was not pleasant to look at when he first arrived on the program. It took a while for him to find the right way to deal with his hair, the right amount of facial hair, and the right costuming to fit the way he sang. It was a great help in our ability to hear his voice and understand what he was actually doing with his music.

Which brings me to David Archuleta. This young man has an amazing vocal instrument, and his smile is so real, so infectious that almost everyone loved him instantly. But he's also young, and so far, he hasn't actually discovered what his own voice is.

All his licks, all his decorations of the melody, are actually standard pop-music stuff. Behind those decorations is a rich tone and an earnestness, an understanding of the songs that would still be there if he dropped the decorations entirely. Which I wish he would do!

Why? Because he had to share a stage with David Cook and the differences showed. The judges often talked about "making a song your own" and "being memorable," but there are two ways of doing that.

David Archuleta made every song fundamentally the same. It was his style -- but all the obvious elements of that style were from the standard pop sound. This was never clearer than in his duet with One Republic. He needed to adapt in order to sound good with this singer -- and he couldn't. He could only do that pop sound.

If he had been covering the song alone, Archuleta's version would have been terrific -- a different take on the music. But singing it with the original performer, he needed to adapt his style, to work with his partner, and he didn't know how to do it. Those pop licks are, so far, a crutch that Archuleta hasn't learned to let go of.

David Cook, on the other hand, had no crutches. He could strip his voice of all affectation and sing "Music of the Night" exactly as written -- pure voice. Even when he used pop licks (as on "Eleanor Rigby") he still kept it fairly minimal and sang the song.

Where David Archuleta decorated almost every sustained note, David Cook would find one or two moments where he could change a note so that we felt a powerful surprise that was nevertheless quite satisfying. Archuleta did the same things to every song; David Cook found the secrets inside the songs and exposed them to us in a way that was different every time. Think of those final notes in "Music of the Night," or the unforgettable "Little Sparrow."

Yet even when Cook is at his simplest, his voice is instantly recognizable. He sounds as if he has been through all the trouble in the world. He sounds wise. Which is, of course, absurd when you consider how young he is. And how nice he is, by all reports. But that's the quality he brings to his performances, and it is transcendent.

David Archuleta will grow as he gets older. While he will never read or care about my advice, I'm going to give it anyway: What you already do, you have mastered. To grow, you must do something different. And the first step is to do song after song in which you never decorate a note. You just sing it straight, note for note, as written. This is not a permanent change, but it's important that it be an extended exercise -- that you do it for months. Why? Because that's the only way you'll start to find new ways to freshen and own the songs.

Here's why this matters: It's fine to decorate familiar songs. But when you do all those vocal pyrotechnics, it stops mattering what the actual song is. We found that when Mariah Carey was the "mentor" on the show. Her music exists only to be decorated. Time after time, there was no song there.

Which should have been a complete killer for David Cook, by the way. Yet he took a song that is, lyrically and musically, as shallow as can be -- "Always Be My Baby" -- and, by simplifying it, stripping it, he showed us there were some bones and meat in the thing after all.

Of course, Archuleta can sell a lot of records doing exactly what he does right now. But time will change things. He will go out of fashion; then he will do what Donny Osmond and Ricky Nelson and other young pop singers had to do: He will find out what his grownup voice is.

Meanwhile, David Cook is, quite simply, the best singer American Idol ever produced. He is, right now, already so good that I would like to hear him cover every song that I ever liked, because I think he'd bring something new to it. I mean, I want to hear the David Cook version of the Cat Stevens catalog "Wild World," "Tea for the Tillerman"), the Stephen Sondheim songbook ("Being Alive," "Pretty Women"), everything Carole King wrote that a man can possibly sing, Chico Buarque's "Traffico," Paul Simon's "Homeless" and "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis," Bob Seger's "Night Moves," Martin Page's "House of Stone and Light," and I can imagine amazingly insightful performances of seeming fluff like "Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon," "Muskrat Love" -- even the appalling "Feelin' Groovy" could have a wonderful David Cook version. He could do it slow, making it ironic and sad; he could do it as a pounding rock anthem. It would work -- if David Cook was singing it.

Meanwhile, though, I know for a fact that there are songwriters out there yearning to have David Cook be the first singer of their best new songs. Because his performance will show the real song, not hide it behind production and decoration.

Proof of this is Cook's pre-Idol cd, Analog Heart. It's a noisy-band rocker -- he has had much better arrangements on Idol. But the voice is there, with songs I've never heard before, which he sings with such clarity that I understand every word, and everything behind those words. He can introduce a new song and make it work. (And I forgive him for the ear-destroying final instrumental note on "Let Go." Barely.)

But he has changed on Idol. Working with the arrangers and musicians on the show has greatly broadened him and he has responded by stretching his voice into different avenues. Analog Heart is a very good album, but his post-Idol albums should be better.