Larry King: "Clay Aiken, one of my favorite people"

Clay returned to CNN's Larry King Live last night to talk about his life since last appearing on LKL back in 2005. Larry introduced Clay saying: "Clay Aiken is our guest. His CD is going through the roof." I particularly loved the way Larry ended the conversation: "Clay Aiken, one of my favorite people."

Here's a quick synopsis courtesy CNN's full transcript.

• On ATDW, Clay says: "It was kind of a process to get this thing together. It started out as an album that was going to be all original material and we kind of took a turn and decided to make a lot of -- do some remakes of some old love songs."
• On moving home: "There are plenty but, you know, I just kind of like the small town local, quite, know where everybody lives, know my way around town, no traffic. There's a lot of plusses to every place in the country. But, you know, home is, it's always better to be at home right?"
• On being classified a nerd: "Nerdy will work but, you know, some people kind of root for that and I think that's kind of why I ended up people want to -- people want to root for the underdog. I mean I guess that's the only explanation I can think of. I don't -- I can't -- I don't know why people like me."
• On his panic attacks: "There have been times where I thought I was going to have a heart attack because I've been so nervous and I think that what finally brought me to say something about it was the fact that I couldn't control it. And I -- I'm really actually pretty good about -- about handling myself and not being able to control it made me want to go and say "help"."
• On the gay allegations: "I've responded every way I can, you know. I said, "Listen, I'm not going to deal with this anymore now because it doesn't matter what I say. People are going to think what they want to say.""
• On talking with his brother Brett who is serving in Iraq: "Yes, we talk to him. He tries to call every week or so. And I've gotten to -- I've gotten down -- he has one of the MySpace pages so I've gotten one from the record label and I've learned how to use that and talk to him."
• On Faye: "She's -- yes -- it's been really tough. I think for her it's been extremely tough because she has, you know, in the space of essentially in the space of three years, our dad died in 2002 and then I left home in 2003 and haven't been back. And then my brother left in 2004. So in the space of three years she's really gone from a full house to an empty house. She's such a strong person. I mean, I don't know the answer to that. She's always been the person who I've learned the most about letting people -- you know, I got picked on as a kid growing up relentlessly and she was always the person who told me..."
• On "Lover All Alone": "'Lover All Alone' was actually a song that David Foster wrote the music to about six, seven months ago and he gave me the music and he said write some lyrics to this. And I have never written anything, you know, like that in my life. And so I thought to myself, we'll try it. And I finally sat down one day maybe five months later and took a crack at it and came up with this. And what ended up coming out of that was something a little more depressing than the album intended. You know, we wanted to do a love song album and "Lover All Alone" is not..."
• On why he hasn't taken legal action against the tabloids: "You know, again, probably something my mother always told me. I think this is -- we're not very litigious. My mom has always hated law suits and what not. And so that's one reason. The second one is I think a lot of people have had their moment of fame, you know, and bringing it back up and suing people while it might be personally gratifying for a minute, it's probably going to be more gratifying to some folks who just wanted to do things for attention. And I'm not really into pandering to that type of thing."
• On his faith: "After going through this whole change of life from going from small town to big city and people looking at you. I think that my faith has grown stronger just because you've got to call on... I think that certain people within any -- any denomination have -- have tough -- not standards but strict beliefs or views. And I think that it's unfair really to pigeonhole every Baptist or every Christian or every Muslim or any Jew, anybody and lump them into one category because they are a Christian or any denomination within that Christianity and say that they believe this because, you know, a certain televangelist might believe it or a certain politician."
• On the BAF's new book: "'Our Friend Mikayla' is a book written by third graders about a student in their classroom who has a disability and their experiences pretty much with having a friend with a disability and so the Bubel/Aiken Foundation works to include kids with disabilities. So this is really a very touching tribute really to kids who -- and it kind of talks about the power of having inclusive populations and people can find out about that and..."
• On fame: "I do sometimes sit at home like right before I go to bed a night and I sit in there and think, OK, I am in Los Angeles by myself. Mom's not paying for anything, you know. And if something happened today I would be able -- I would be able to go buy a plane ticket right now and go wherever I need to go. And that kind of blows me away sometimes."
  

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