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I'll go ahead and say it myself. David A *should* go home this week.
They are rough on the competitors during HOLLYWOOD WEEK, saying "this is too far into the competition to forget your lyrics."
You just can't.
In fact I'm not sure that's happened before in the Top 12 ever.
I'm sorry, David, but the judges were waaaaaaaay too nice.

I was most impressed with Chiekeze last night. Where did that come from? He's been holding back! I also liked Amanda, Brooke, Carly, and David Cook. The rest didn't sparkle much for me.

There's something to the way Brooke's voice sounds that I really like. She reminds me of Carly Simon, who's one of my all-time favorite artists.

Our unanimous feeling with Kristi Lee's song is that she didn't MATCH her vocal to the style she was singing. The words needed to be tighter and more clipped. You can't sing long flowing notes over that kind of arrangement.

Amanda was VERY, very smart to choose a song that wasn't a giant hit that not everybody knows - so she could make it her own and sound like it.

And if you noticed from the interviews, she wasn't familiar with the song much before this week either - just like 2 or 3 others who performed LESS well (including David A) and mentioned not really knowing the song/s. One week IS long enough to learn a song, even a song you've never heard before. It sounds like they kept them busy this week - but I'm sure they had rehearsal time. If you're in a competition like that, you take the lyrics and an MP3 with you everywhere you go, you sing it in the shower, in the bathroom, in line, EVERYWHERE until you're so saturated with it you can't lose it. This is a BIG competition, and there's no excuse for not being dead sure of the song before you go out there to perform.

PLUS they had what, 2? 3? weeks' lead time on this one to start choosing the song... which is not something you can just pick willy-nilly. Hop out to MP3 sites, listen to 30-second clips, FIND SOMETHING. My bet is that's what Amanda did. A couple of them sounded like they just picked the only Beatles song they knew. Others picked for sentimental reasons - again, not the greatest reason to choose a song.

Kind of a rough night. I was gritting my teeth a lot as they announced the songs. Happily surprised with a few of them. Especially Chiekeze!! All right!

Linda