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 |  Subject: Adam Lambert loves 'sexy s**t'  17.02.10 6:23 | |
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- Tucked away in a back corner of Watusi restaurant in Toronto, Adam Lambert, the guy with the stratospheric voice who came in second on American Idol, is trying to get through a day of press on two hours sleep. It's not like he was out late partying, not that night, anyway. He actually went to bed by midnight but awoke suddenly at 3 a.m. Must be all the excitement.
After this interview with MSN, he has a phoner and wants to go outside to do it so the chill can wake him up. Still, besides a couple of pronounced yawns (followed by apologies), he is garrulous and open, not yet affected by protocol or media training. In Canada, his debut album, For Your Entertainment, is Top 10 on the retail charts.
On Idol, he was the one with the staggering voice, a rare breed in the Freddie Mercury category. Even when he did a slower number, he drew you in, much in the way the late Jeff Buckley did. An acoustic album from him would be killer, but For Your Entertainment doesn't focus on his voice. It is a contemporary chunky mix of electro rock and dance club numbers and big emotive ballads.
"See, that's the thing, I hear people emphasize 'the voice,'" Lambert tells MSN. "Obviously, that's my thing -- that's what I do. I'm a singer and they talk a lot about the vocal, the vocal, you know, the voice, and I don't listen to acoustic music leisurely. I don't listen really to vocal music leisurely. I listen to sexy s**t, not even rock these days. I listen to electronic music a lot. I just happen to sing rock music a certain way."
Related:Exclusive behind-the-scenes Adam Lambert footage | Download Adam Lambert music
While a professional demo, On With The Show, recorded years ago, was recently released by Hi Fi Recordings without Lambert's approval, For Your Entertainment is the first release that projects who he is and how and what he wants to communicate through music.
"They were really open to what I had to say," he says of record label RCA. "I was like, 'OK I want to the mix classic rock cred that I got on Idol with glam pop electronic stuff. I want it all - glam from the '70s, glam from now. I want it all to be an electronic pop dance rock thing. I didn't want it to be one genre. I didn't want to do the typical Idol sound. I didn't want to do all retro sounding stuff either because I thought that would've been too derivative. I want to come up with something for 2010.
"Lyrically," he continues, "the stuff that I wrote, it was important for me to have a meaning, a message, even if it was a song that sounded at first a bit frivolous and kind of silly. I wanted there to be a deeper undercurrent to it, even if it's something as simple as 'empowerment.' Anthems are really powerful to me and some of the songs too, I wanted them to be personal and come from my own experiences."
The songs he didn't write were submitted through publishers and artists and management, and his A&R team filtered through them.
"All the ones we settled on were ones that I felt that I could stand behind, that were believable coming from me," Lambert says.
He recorded songs by former Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins ("Music Again"), Matthew Ballamy of Muse ("Soaked"), Pink ("Whataya Want From Me"), who wrote hers with Max Martin and Shellback, as well as by numerous other professional songwriters whose names can be read on albums by some of the world's top charting artists (Aerosmith, Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys, James Blunt, Kelly Clarkson).
"I hope in the future I can write more, but I'm definitely a firm believer for today's industry, and for pop music in general, that [the album] just has a mix of songs that I contributed and that other writers contributed," Lambert says. "I mean, I was so excited at the prospect of getting music from people like Max Martin and Dr Luke and Ryan Tedder and Linda Perry. These are people that write great music and produce great music and I couldn't believe I was getting the top of the top."
Ferras, Ely Rise, Alisan Porter and Adam Lambert
Ferras, Ely Rise, Alisan Porter and Adam Lambert
Strangely, the only five songs Lambert did co-write on For Your Entertainment all involved a Canadian collaborator. Greg Wells co-wrote "Strut," "Pick U Up," "Broken Up" and a bonus track, on the digital version only, called "Down The Rabbit Hole." Some of those involved other writers too, such as Idol's Kara DioGuardi on "Strut" and Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo on "Pick U Up," but Lambert was there in the room.
"I looooovee Greg so much. He's amazing," Lambert enthuses of the in Peterborough, Ont., native who has written for Celine Dion, Mika, Pussycat Dolls, Rufus Wainright, and wife Louise Goffin, Carole King's daughter. "He's like a musical chameleon. A lot of producers have a signature style and sound, but what's so cool about Greg is that he approaches each song as it's own piece. He's just so easy going and there's no ego. I really like working with him and I will definitely work with him again."
Related:Exclusive behind-the-scenes Adam Lambert footage | Download Adam Lambert music
The other Canadian on the album to get a co-credit is Toronto's Ely Rise on "Aftermath." Lambert only met Rise that first day in the studio but is great friends with the other writers on the track, Alisan Porter (the lead actress in 1991's Curly Sue movie) and Ferras, a recording artist on Capitol. Lambert did The Ten Commandments: The Musical ("a piece of s**t," he laughs) with Porter and Rise is good friends with her too. "When I can, I really love bringing my friends into it, when it's appropriate, when it works," says Lambert.
Rise, who plays keyboards with Virgin/EMI act The Last Goodnight, and recently did three songs with Macy Gray, is excited to have a song on Lambert's album. He calls the writing session "a magical few days." He, Ferras and Porter started the idea and then an hour later Lambert came by to hear it.
"He loved it, and we all started working on it," says Rise. "We got together once more, the four of us, and finished the writing of the song. Adam knows what he wants, and was very particular over being maybe too cheesy, lyrically, or not doing the obvious, always keeping an ear outside of the box.
"We also knew only a handful of vocalists could pull the song off. 'Aftermath' has a huge range vocally from low low notes to high high, almost unsingable ones. The song could be viewed as a 'coming out' song, which we joked about, but it really relates to everyone who feels they're alone -- they're not."
Rise adds the demo version "was way more 'Halo,'" referring to the Beyonce hit, but the end result -- produced by Howard Benson (Creed, Daughtry, Three Days Grace) -- is more rock.
"After it got produced," says Lambert, "out of all the songs, that one has that real Top 40 rock radio, very American Idol, type tone to it. It's very much a traditional rock ballad and we needed one of those on the album. It kind of rounds it out."
Although Idol albums are typically made really fast -- this one in two to three months -- and one would assume the artist wouldn't have much say in the songs or the direction, Rise freely offers his observation after working with Lambert.
"He knew exactly what he wanted for this album," says Rise. "I've never seen an artist who was so in charge of his first record, and how he wanted the album to sound like -- the mix of styles, sounds, vibes -- how he wanted to portray himself musically to the world. RCA must have had complete faith in Adam and his vision." http://entertainment.ca.msn.com/music/features/article.aspx?cp-documentid=23466361 | |
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