WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - Blake Lewis checked an e-mail on his
iPhone and gasped.
"Rough cut of the video!" he announced, and quickly a half-dozen 19
Entertainment employees gathered around a computer screen at the
"American Idol" production company's slick offices above Sunset
Boulevard.
Lewis watched himself singing in front of a wavy purplish background
in the clip for "Break Anotha," the uptempo first single from his
first album. "It's good!" somebody volunteered after the video played
a second time.
"For a rough draft," Lewis muttered. "The effects could be more
stylized at the beginning."
No, the 26-year-old beatboxer from Seattle is not another
just-happy-to-be-here "American Idol" finalist. Given a long-awaited
shot at a major label album release with his second-place finish
(Jordin Sparks was the winner), he's trying to exercise as much
artistic control as possible in the Simon Fuller-created machine.
He co-wrote all but one song on "Audio Day Dream," out Tuesday on
Arista Records, and is already plotting a remix album to add hip-hop
and electronica flavors that he favors but wasn't able to include.
"I just call myself a communicator. And all's I wanna do is
communicate my art," he told The Associated Press. "And now with this
album, I get to communicate myself wholeheartedly without any hiccups
or speed bumps, like 'American Idol' has, you know?" Here, he dryly
affects a TV announcer voice: "Theme weeks!"
Lewis got an early start on the love-hate relationship that "Idol"
alumnus like Kelly Clarkson have had with the show and their
post-"Idol" handlers.
The hate part, in fact, began before he considered auditioning. He
found the singing contest flipping through channels several years ago
and could only watch a few seconds of painfully off-tune crooning.
"I saw this, people that cannot perform, they're just standing there
singing. The camera's zooming in and out and stuff. I'm like, 'Cool,
the cameras are doing their job,'" Lewis told The Associated Press.
"What's the artist doing? What's this dude who's been singing karaoke
his whole life doing on this television show? So I turned it off
immediately. I was disgusted. And I never watched it since."
Lewis beatboxed and sang for a living for more than four years after
graduating from high school. When no record deal materialized, he
began working construction to support his music habit. An only child,
he converted his father's barn into a $30,000 studio, caulking windows
and doing metal fabrication to pay off the loan. Under the name
Bshorty, he looped his beatboxing and sang at regular weekday gigs at
local venues.
Which brings us to the love part of his relationship with the show.
In September 2006, a day after playing a show at the Triple Door club
in downtown Seattle, he tried out for "Idol" at the urging of a
friend. Lewis realized he could sell himself to 20 million to 30
million people every week. That potential audience was too tempting
to pass up.
"The machine of 'American Idol' was great for me, because it was
just too much fun for me," he said.
Like other musically experienced contestants (think Chris Daughtry),
he made the show work for him -- not the other way around.
"Idol" music director Rickey Minor said Lewis was more involved in
creating his own take on the music than any other contestant Minor
had worked with.
"He may not have been the most talented, but he was definitely the
most progressive," Minor said. "His approach and his vision for what
he wanted to project was clear from the start."
On "Audio Day Dream," Lewis has created 16 tracks of what he calls
"electro-break funky soul pop music." To get there, he enlisted the
aid of hitmaker JR Rotem (on "What'cha Got 2 Lose?"), Fiona Apple
collaborator Mike Elizondo (on "1,000 Miles") and Timbaland protege
Ryan Tedder, frontman in the rock band OneRepublic. The album was
recorded largely while Lewis was on the road this summer with the
"Idol" tour, which he called "tedious and long."
"Gots To Get Her" is Lewis' most ready-for-radio next single,
borrowing and reforming Irving Berlin's "Puttin on the Ritz" melody
to craft embarrassingly effective fluff.
The urban flavor seen in his "Idol" back-and-forth with Doug E.
Fresh is in short supply on the CD. There's just one guest rapper,
Lupe Fiasco, on the celebrity crush tune "Know My Name."
"I was hoping for more hip-hop flair. It comes down to the time
thing and the release date," Lewis said. "I didn't get as much
beatboxing on there as I wanted to. You know, next record. Me and
Doug E. were trying to get together and get maybe Black Thought,
Talib or Mos Def. I wanted to do like a cipher track."
Whether or not he gets to make that next record, Lewis feels he
already has one leg up on fellow "Idol" alumnus, some of whom have
disappeared from the pop scene after disappointing first-album sales.
"They didn't get to do their own album," he said. "They didn't
write any of their own music. And a lot of people didn't really want
mainstream success. Like Taylor Hicks, I don't think he really wanted
success at all even though he got first on 'American Idol.' Katharine
McPhee didn't get to make the album she wants."
Of "Audio Day Dream," he says: "I made the album I wanted to make.
... I put all this hard work and creativity into this one piece. It
was the right album at its time."
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On the Net:
http://www.blakelewisofficial.com
