Beatbox Blake Lewis Makes Good


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Beatbox Blake Lewis Makes Good

American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis is poised to move ahead with the release of his new CD.

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 stylised 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 on Arista Records, and is already plotting a remix album to add hip-hop and electronica flavours that he favours but wasn't able to include.

“I just call myself a communicator. And all I wanna do is communicate my art,” he said. “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 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 US$30,000 (RM99,000)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.

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 realised 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 he 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”.

The urban flavour 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.”

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.” - AP

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