I was able to find out the theme for next week ahead of time…
David Archuleta and the other contestants were featured in a recent US Weekly article titled “Before they were idols.”
Today they’re wowing millions On Fox’s ‘American Idol,’ but the top 12 were once just kids making music - and mischief.
“I love to play outside,” says Archuleta (age 5 at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, CA, with, from the left, cousin Chason, mom Lupe Archuleta, brother Daniel and sister Claudia). “I’d catch bugs, ducks, frogs, and snakes.”
David Archuleta’s singing was an unstoppable force of nature. Somewhere in the family’s genetic chemistry, the music seeped right into his bones, and then fate or providence or whatever you want to call it lent a hand.
What if his father hadn’t left a “Les Miz” record lying around the house?
What if his mother, a singer and dancer, hadn’t emigrated from Honduras to Florida, where she met his father, who was there only to do temporary sales work for a summer?
What if his sister’s boyfriend hadn’t stumbled into a legendary voice coach, or what if the voice coach hadn’t needed help with his computers?
“So many things have happened along the way to make this happen,” says Jim Archuleta, David’s grandfather.
David, the sweet-faced 17-year-old “American Idol” sensation from Salt Lake City, was drawn to singing the way most boys are drawn to football and video games. As fate would have it again, the 5-foot-4 teen developed a big, full voice that belies his stature. And with the soulful voice, he sang with purpose.
“Since David was 8, his goal has been to achieve enough celebrity that he would be able to reach many people with the gospel message through his music,” says his grandfather. “He is very LDS.”
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I’d like to formally recant my previous assertion that David Archuleta is a doe-eyed, ever-smiling, Small Wonder-like robot.
As we learned tonight, he is not perfect. He does make mistakes—including even the most blasphemous of all American Idol sins: forgetting the words. And yet, dangit…Wait a minute…That somehow manages to make him all the more appealing, does it not? Curses! There is no escaping the undeniable charm and overwhelming talent of boy wonder Awwwrchuleta.
And I’m gonna call it now (so you can ridicule me later) and predict that David Archuleta and Carly Smithson will be the final two (even though I love Jason Castro and Brooke White wholeheartedly—I even cried when she cried!).
So why are Carly and David so tough to beat? As I mentioned when this seventh season began, Carly was the Irish “powerhouse” Paula had predicted to me that would win back in season five (when she couldn’t get through immigration to be on the show) and now tonight, Simon has said that her sixth episode performance was so stunning, she’s now “just like Kelly Clarkson” in his book. (That’s sorta like a prospective employer telling you you’re “just like Jesus”–chances are, you’re gonna get the job.)
American Idol one-to-watch David Archuleta will do a Beatles song on this week’s show but he won’t be using their arrangement. Instead, Archuleta will cover the McCartney classic the way his hero Stevie Wonder recorded it.
David will perform ‘We Can World It Out’.
Although the song was first written and recorded by The Beatles, Stevie Wonder had a major hit with a rhythm ‘n’ blues version of song when in the 70s.
Archuleta is the one they expect will win this year’s show. His talent is well above the other finalists.
David cites Wonder as one of his influences, along with Natalie Cole, Kirk Franklin and Bryan Adams.
‘We Can Work It Out’ by Archuleta will come complete with a string section.
Archuleta is from Murray, Utah but auditioned for the show in San Diego.
THE top 12 ” American Idol” contestants arrived as a group at the post-show party in West Hollywood on Thursday night, but the scrum of paparazzi left little doubt who was the object of their obsession.
“David!” the photographers shouted. “David, over here!”
Their desired subject was, of course, David Archuleta, anointed by no less an authority than Simon Cowell last month as the front-runner in the singing contest, now in its seventh season and still far and away America’s No. 1 TV series. Archuleta was doing his best to oblige as the strobes kept popping. His chipmunk cheeks were illuminated with a perfect smile. He meandered alone toward one beckoning photographer until a handler ushered him away to rejoin the other “Idol” finalists.
Every “Idol” season has had its early favorites (Chris Daughtry, Melinda Doolittle), but the focus has fixed notably fast and hard on young David. His enormous, obvious-even-to-the-tone-deaf vocal gifts have at times made him look like nothing so much as that beloved show-biz trope, the competition-crushing prodigy: Think Tom Hulce as Mozart in “Amadeus.”
The gossip site TMZ.com offered an unsourced report last week claiming that out of this year’s “Idol” crop, music-industry execs are interested only in Archuleta and David Hernandez (whose own back story is filling in thanks to a recently revealed past as a stripper). An amateurish home video of Archuleta soaring through “O Holy Night” last year has become an unlikely favorite on YouTube. Archuleta’s rabid fans — akin to Taylor Hicks’ Soul Patrol — call themselves, amusingly, the Archies.
He may be the one to beat on “American Idol,” but David Archuleta still has a lot to learn!
The 17-year-old gets on-set tutoring for three hours a day while on “Idol,” but TMZ has obtained the required reading list of lil’ David’s 11th grade class at Murray High School.
While David has been belting out John Lennon and Phil Collins classics, students at his Utah high school have been trudging through the classics like “Catcher in the Rye,” “The Crucible,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Macbeth,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” and “Hamlet.” Will he win or not win — that is the question!
No wonder the young favorite on American Idol an stare down the judges and the cameras and perform so well. Star Magazine reports that if not for his voice coach, his singing career could have ended before it even began. The report notes that Archuleta’s dreams of hitting the big time were in tatters when one of his vocal cords was paralyzed in 2003 while he competed on CBS’s Star Search.
But David didn’t just overcome the problem – he went on to win the show and $100,000. Now David, who just turned seventeen, stands on the brink of stardom, thanks to the voice coach who helped him beat the affliction, which is usually caused by a virus.
“Normally, both vocal cords come together tightly and neatly when you speak,” the coach, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Dean Kaelin, tells Star. “But David’s paralyzed cord was just sitting there doing nothing while his good vocal cord had to come all the way over so that they could join. This overstressed his voice, causing swelling and pressure in his cords.”
According to the report from the weekly entertainment magazine, Dean immediately started David on a rehab program based on a unique set of vocal scales and breathing exercises Dean learned while studying under Seth Riggs, who has coached superstars including Stevie Wonder, Barbara Streisand and Josh Groban.
Then David was faced with another challenge, one common to all boy singers. “His voice began changing just as we started our program!” says Dean, who still works with David.
“We had a one-week window between Star Search performances, so the therapy was on the fly. But we worked our way through – David really kept it together.”
