Daniel Powter

Chances are you've heard Canadian singer-songwriter Daniel Powter's hit single, "Bad Day," and you don't even know it. The piano-driven ballad, which is burning up adult-contemporary radio here in the States, figured prominently during early episodes of American Idol, where it was used as the soundtrack to montages of each week's losers. When it was released overseas last year, the song made such a splash that it pushed sales of his debut to almost a million copies in Europe and Australia.

SOUND Powter set out to make "a keyboard rock album that's really anti-Ted Nugent." The thirty-five-year-old pianist distills his love for old Motown records into sweetly groovy tunes laced with falsetto vocals and buoyed by an unexpectedly hefty backbeat. "Most of the record was made in this tiny apartment in Vancouver where Errol Flynn died," he says. "If you mute all the tracks, you can still hear people telling us to shut the fuck up." After he got signed to Warner Bros., Powter enlisted Elvis Costello producer Mitchell Froom to give his songs a smidge more polish. "You don't have to be the hippest band in the world to be good songwriters," he says. "Songs can have a simple verse-chorus-bridge format and still be great."

RAW TALENT Originally trained on the violin, Powter switched to piano when he was eleven. "Actually, the whole American Idol thing reminds me of when I was a little kid and I'd play violin in this thing called the Kiwanis Music Festival," he says. "I competed for a few years, but I could never get past the second round. I figured I'd never make it as a solo concert violinist, so I gave it up. And my mom played piano, so I used to sit at the piano in our den and try to play along with old Fleetwood Mac albums."

DON'T GO CHANGIN' Powter admits he has noticed a larger contingent of cute young girls in the front row at his shows. "In high school, I was not the guy that had it going on," he says. "I could never get girls. I look out at these girls in the audience and I think that, if I wanted to, I could probably do some nasty shit. But I can't! I'm still that same person." Powter even refused to star with twenty-five-year-old former O.C. hottie Samaire Armstrong in the "Bad Day" video. "I'm old enough to be her father!" he says.

Next: Bonde Do Role