Adam Lambert's Early Recordings Unearthed for New Album

If you heard the "new" single from current Rolling Stone cover boy Adam Lambert and felt it didn't quite capture the bold showman who rose to fame on American Idol, there's a pretty good reason.

While the freshly leaked track "Want" is indeed the first single from an upcoming Lambert album titled "On With the Show," the song — and the rest of the collection — has actually been around for a while. The material was recorded back in 2007 and 2008, before Lambert auditioned for Season Eight of American Idol (check out photos of Lambert's Idol run here). The then aspiring Lambert recorded the material with producer Mark Endert, who has mixed recordings for The Fray, Madonna, Maroon 5 and Rihanna. That material is now being packaged for release this summer by HiFi Recordings and Wilshire Records.

The single caused rumblings in Lambert-ville when it surfaced Friday on Perez Hilton's Website, which touted it as the Idol star's first single. Hilton later clarified that the "new" track was actually an old recording.

As for Lambert's post-Idol material, he's working with Lady Gaga producer RedOne, who says "I want to go rock — David Bowie and Queen, but make it more easy for people to get." The "Poker Face" hitmaker also said, "It has to be rock, but with an interesting dance angle to it."

Lambert himself told RS, "I want to do something that has theatricality, a nod to the glam rockers that I love, but is also contemporary."

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Song Stories

“1999”

Prince | 1982

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.

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