Tidbits 4/22

Clay and Tyra Banks are featured in today's People Magazine StarTracks. Tyra recently visited Clay on the set of Spamalot to tape a special segment for her Tyra Banks Show. An air date has not been set yet. The same photo is also featured at JustJared.com.

• antiMusic - Clay makes the rounds on late night shows to promote new album -

  f you're a bit underwhelmed by the current crop of American Idols, an old favorite is returning to your television screen and you won't have to put up with Paula to watch. Which favorite is it? It's the guy who's fans sent over dozens emails to let us know that their hero was going to be back on TV. That's right, it's Clay Aiken and he's going on a late night TV blitz to promote his new album.
  
  Claymates will make a run on record retailers on May 6th, when Aiken's new album, 'On My Way Here,' is released and the following week he'll make two late night appearances to promote it.
  
  First up, he'll head over to Burbank to appear on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on May 12th and then he'll make an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel Show on May 15th. We received conflicting information from the fans that wrote in about the Kimmel appearance. Some said Clay was performing and others said he wasn't. So we fired off an email to the show's publicist and she confirmed that "Clay Aiken is booked for an interview" only. The musical guest on that night will be Dierks Bentley.
  

• American Idol mentions:
• All Headline News -

  While judge Simon Cowell often chastises contestants for sounding "too Broadway," all six will have to pull out the big numbers for the Broadway themed show. Despite Cowell's remarks, many former "American Idol" contestants have gone on to have successful runs on Broadway, including Fantasia and Clay Aiken.

• Deseret News on Carmen Rasmusen's thorn with American Idol -

  Rasmusen's April 18 column gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how "Idol" works. She wrote of one experience waiting to consult the show's vocal coach while Clay Aiken was being coached.
  
  "I could hear him going over and over his song, dissecting it. Finally, after about 30 minutes, the door opened. It was my turn. I walked in and sang my song about three times before being dismissed. Hardly the personal one-on-one attention Aiken had just received."

• Courier Post Online -

  But who cares about costing an innocent bystanders hundreds of dollars? In the 2003 "American Idol" finale, 130,000 votes separated winner Ruben Studdard from the runner-up, Clay Aiken. A few days later, a phone company in the Midwest said it had received 240,000 misdialed calls during voting.

• Philadelphia Inquirer -

  It's unlikely that the producers who saw the very pretty Kelly Clarkson triumph over the even prettier Justin Guarini that first summer ever envisioned anything like the tuneful but less-photogenic showdown between Season 2 finalists Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken, much less the Season 5 victory of Taylor Hicks, a twitchy, gray-haired Alabamian whose personality charmed millions but who's been eating the dust of fourth-place contestant Chris Daughtry ever since.

• The Campus Press - Idols ... where they are now: "Clay Aiken, the runner up on season two of American Idol has been singing and dancing his way on Broadway in Monty Python's Spamalot, which tells the story of King Arthur and his knights of the round table."
• antiMusic - random mention:

  You see the Ozzy track was playing on my iTunes when I clicked over to Pendulum's Myspace and one of their songs started autoplaying. It was a strange mix, but actually worked. Maybe we'll start a new online crazy with Myspace/iTunes antimash-ups? We're gonna go try Iron Maiden and Clay Aiken right now.
  

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