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I’m obsessed, but remember how I said that David Cook had done a fabulous cover of the Foo Fighters’ My Hero (my favorite Foo song) on his homecoming trip to KC? Sadly, as I’m sure some of you have found out, all the YouTube videos of it are really crappy. But don’t despair! DC is supposed to perform it tonight on the Tonight Show’s Summer Concert Series segment, right after Magic Rainbow. Not sure if it’ll be posted on the site, but let’s hope.

Update 2008-06-13 00:52—I am such a tool. I sat through the whole stupid Tonight Show (not a fan), and the performance that was televised was Magic Rainbow. The good thing is that My Hero was indeed performed and is available on the website linked above, though I was a bit bummed that it was the original with-electric-guitar version, rather than the killer unplugged version DC did in Kansas City. Well, I guess you can’t have everything, and to be fair, the performance was quite good.

Kobe Bryant’s nostrils, the Lakers cut their two-game deficit to the Celtics down to one last night. I missed most of the second half, sadly, but the first half was some great, great ball.

Fun fact: David Cook, who sang the national anthem to open the game last night, is a die-hard Chicago Bulls fan. Represent!

E! Online has this interesting tidbit about why Analog Heart was pulled from Amazon in April:

At the behest of Idol producers, Cook says he pulled the album pulled from Amazon’s MP3 downloads section last month shortly after topping the site’s charts, due to “fairness issues.”

Fairness issues? A-HA. I knew it was only because he was selling more than the other contestants who had albums out. Though it only sold about 1200 copies in its last two weeks on Amazon, this was apparently significant enough to cause the producers alarm, even though the voting was in the tens of millions every week.

If the producers were really interested in being “fair,” they should have blocked sales of any existing records by any contestant, but of course they couldn’t do that, because the vast majority of those had legal ties to other recording companies. Cook got screwed there because AH was solely his and the producers could lean on him.

Semi-good news, Cook fans! Amazon again has a page up for Analog Heart, though it is not available at this time—you can sign up to have them email you once it becomes available. I’m assuming that, now Cook’s won Idol, he’ll be free to release it for sale again, unless, of course, his contract with 19 Entertainment somehow forbids him to do so.

Even though I said yesterday that I thought Archuleta did a better job, and even went so far as to vote for him, I could not be happier that Cook won by a commanding 12M vote margin.

Because, yes, while he’ll be stuck singing This is the Tritest Song Ever Written (Rise from the ashes? More than just a face in the crowd? Magic rainbow? Fucking seriously?!), well, he’s my favorite, and he deserves recognition. Woo!

Also, for those of you starved for more DC until he releases his next album, be sure to YouTube his performance of the Foo Fighters’ My Hero from his homecoming trip. Awesome arrangement.

I am in the throes of a full-blown obsession with David Cook’s 2006 album, Analog Heart (no longer available, sadly, for purchase anywhere I’ve looked), an obsession the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I got Spitz’s single collection albums last year (and they’re my favorite band). In the two-odd weeks since I got it, I’ve listened to Analog Heart in its entirety at least once a day. No kidding. In fact, I’m listening to it right now—I like it that much.

So I blogged recently about getting Idol contestant David Cook’s 2006 self-produced album, Analog Heart, and how, as of this morning, it was the top selling MP3 album on Amazon.

But now, I’ve noticed a couple of things:

• There were some reports of it being pulled from Amazon briefly, and
• If you look at the album download page now, all sales rank information has been hidden as if it never was.

What do you want to bet that the Idol production team is somehow behind this? I’m sure a wide public perception that Cook is the front-runner—that, indeed, his victory is inevitable—could adversely affect voting patterns.

Update 2008-04-22 06:53—What?! As of now, you can’t buy (or sample!) the album at all, though the item page is still there. The buy and sample buttons have been removed from each individual track and the whole album, too. This I don’t get at all. I can understand removing the sales statistics, but not preventing it from being sold altogether.

First, if anything, that’s like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, and second, this clandestine behavior smacks of under-the-table dealing, which, historically speaking, will only come back and bite the masterminds in the ass.

Mark my words: this is a PR nightmare in the making.

Update 2008-04-22 07:39—There are mutterings about this on Usenet, some wondering if Cook released Analog Heart for digital distribution after the AI season started.

Like others on the forum, though, I’m inclined to believe that the album was available before the season started, as are the albums made by other contestants (Carly Smithson, Kristy Lee Cook and Brooke White among them^*), but since DC has pulled ahead of the pack in recent weeks, there has been an upsurge of public interest in any available previous work, and the resultant sales spike took the AI production team by surprise.

^* Whose albums, by the way, are still available for purchase, making the removal of Analog Heart seem kind of unfair, if it was done just because it’s the only one of them that’s gotten enough public interest to become a phenomenon in its own right. Like I said: P. R. Nightmare.

Update 2008-04-22 10:39—More at MJ’s Big Blog.

Update 2008-04-22 14:47—Charming. Now Analog Heart no longer comes up in a search on Amazon, and if you try to follow the link I provided above, you get a 404 error.

Update 2008-04-22 14:56—If you intended to buy the album legitimately but missed the opportunity before it was pulled, you can still buy it from Fuzz. I’d recommend getting it before the same thing happens there.

Update 2008-04-26 16:25—And, quelle surprise, it is no longer available from Fuzz, either. Hope you got the chance to buy it before it disappeared.

on American Idol that, more than anyone else on the show, David Cook (whom, I’ll admit, I have formed a bit of an obsession for) was ready to make an album, and I said that I couldn’t wait to buy his music.

Turns out that (a) I didn’t have to wait so long, after all, and (b) there’s a reason DC seems to be more ready for the big time than the rest (in the words of my sister, he’s the only contestant that has never sounded like an amateur this season): he produced and released a solo album in 2006 called Analog Heart, which I sampled and bought this morning.

After listening to it, its assured polish makes me feel almost bad for the other contestants; Cook shows he’s an accomplished musician and songwriter, and we already know about his formidable singing talents. It seems evident now that he’s just biding his time before he hits it big. But back to the album: Analog Heart, though not as slickly produced as Daughtry’s larger-budget debut, shows a depth and a confidence you don’t normally see in a debut effort, and has enough rough edges to make me anticipate Cook’s future work. Very nice.

My favorite songs on the album include Don’t Say a Word (hands down), Searchlights, Fall Back into Me and Makeover.

Oh, and a bit of trivia: Cook put his degree in graphic design (of all things) to use by designing the cover art for Analog Heart. Neat-o.

Update 2008-04-21 11:41—Apparently Analog Heart is currently the top selling MP3 album on Amazon, outselling the new Mariah Carey CD and the Juno soundtrack, among others. Wow.

magnificent understatement when I say that I do not enjoy Mariah Carey’s music. Which is why, when I learned that this week’s American Idol performances were all going to be from her songbook, I was dismayed.

Partly this is because Carey’s heavily pop-style songs would be very difficult to adapt to suit the voices of a number of this season’s contestants. And, as much as I don’t like her music, she is an enormously talented vocalist (much like Celine Dion in that respect), and just about anyone trying to sing one of her songs would be unfavorably compared to her. Unless they colored outside the lines and made the song their own.

To my mind, two of the Idol finalists did this last night. Jason Castro, who has been increasingly good in recent weeks, did a heartfelt, low-key rendition of I Don’t Wanna Cry, and gave the second best performance of the night.

You know how, when you go to see your favorite artist in concert, and at one point during the show (or more, if you’re lucky), the energy of the audience and the talent of the musicians and the charisma of the artist come together, and magic happens? For the third time this season, magic happened in David Cook’s performance (the first and second being Hello and Billie Jean, respectively). He turned the extremely pop Always Be My Baby into a gorgeous rock ballad, and like his previous two breakout performances—Eleanor Rigby, Little Sparrow and Day Tripper were merely excellent—it absolutely gave me chills.

I’m no longer worried that he won’t succeed. He will, and I will buy his music. Bravo, David.

unfashionable enthusiasm, but this is the first time ever that I’m watching a season of American Idol, so it’s all very new and exciting to me. I’m going to throw down and say that David Cook is—or at the very least should be—the next American Idol.

By all accounts, there is a hell of a lot of talent in the show this season, so much so that the truly deciding factor is going to be song selection—and that’s exactly where DC has it all over the other contestants (with the possible exception of Brooke White, but she’s not as compelling a performer).

Maybe he seems so remarkable to me because at the beginning of this competition, I didn’t think he’d get very far; he just seemed a bit of a nonentity. But week after week, he shows his vocal versatility, his charisma (something I didn’t think he had a lot of initially, but which I have done a 180 on), his incredible instinct for picking songs—and more importantly, arrangements—that showcase his talents, and somehow on top of all that doing something unusual to make himself stand out from the crowd even more. He deserves the win.