Josiah Leming Calls "Idol" "Glorified Karaoke," Preps Debut Album

Former American Idol hopeful and newly signed Warner Bros. artist Josiah Leming has lobbed some shots at the show that rejected him but certainly contributed to his record deal. "The fact is, it's glorified karaoke — they pick people with pretty faces and the pretty voices, and they don't let them write their own songs," Leming, who will forever be known by Idol fans as the emo kid who was living in his car, told MTV. "And therefore, it lacks passion, it lacks emotion and it lacks the things that set an artist off from being good to being great. So that's my feeling on it." Leming's own album is written and waiting to be recorded, with producers Nick Launey (who's worked with Gang of Four and Talking Heads) and David Kosten (the man behind Faultline) taking the reigns.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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