Adam Lambert on the Demons and Dance Behind "For Your Entertainment"

In our new issue, Adam Lambert tells Rolling Stone how whiskey and David Bowie influenced his debut album, For Your Entertainment. American Idol's first real rock star also opened up about working with Muse and writing one of the record's most tender ballads. Here's more from Jenny Eliscu's conversation with the man RS dubbed a glam-rock sex god during his fantastic Idol run:

Tell me about the process of making this record.
We did some recording on tour, not that much, though. What we ended up doing was conceptualizing on the road, and then just collecting as many demos and ideas as possible. Before the tour started, I did write for like a month. Over the course of the tour, we collected a lot of different music and found what resonated with us. The cool thing about the whole process was that we took a lot of the songs from demos and really developed them and tried to tailor them to the vibe that I was going for on the album, which was to blend old and new, to take classic rock-sounding track and say, "How can we modernize this, how can we give it an electronic edge?" I think it went pretty well.

See how Rolling Stone's reimagined Adam Lambert's campy For Your Entertainment cover

Going into it, before you heard a single demo, what were the things you were certain you wanted it to be?
I wanted to do somehow not a classic and Eighties rock thing, the stuff I got credibility for on Idol. I wanted it to be dance, I wanted it to be pop, I wanted it to be international — these were our check boxes. I really wanted to do a new pop glam thing. I didn't want to create an album that was cohesive, because that's not my personally, I wanted something that was all over the map, because that's the kind of music I like to listen to, and I like to sing a lot of different styles of music, and there should be something different for every mood you're in.

Check out exclusive shots from Adam Lambert's Rolling Stone cover shoot

Do you think your look will go through different phases?
I love dress-up, I love costume, I love make-up and all that shit, so I have a feeling that I'm going to tailor a look for each song. I kind of think that for the first single, "For Your Entertainment," we're going to go for more of an old Hollywood look, like 1930s style, but influences of Berlin, kind of dark, black and white, opium den, old glam? I want it to look like Valentino, old movie star, like black and white, pencil moustaches — that kind of vibe.