Chris Daughtry, Unplugged

What do you have on your iPod?
I've been listening to Kings of Leon a lot lately. But I've also been listening to Lady Gaga a lot, too.

Really? I wouldn't have pegged you as a Gaga fan.
I just like music. If it's hookey and good, I dig it. I think the coolest thing is that she writes her stuff. I think she's ahead of the curve there. And she's a phenomenal singer, a really good singer, it's not the Auto-Tune crap that everybody is using. She's really good. She could do a totally different record, she could do—maybe not a Christina Aguilera record—but something of that caliber and she could nail it.

Is there a specific song that you like?
"Poker Face."

Do you remember where you were the first time you heard yourself on the radio?
The first time I heard myself on the radio was in Charlottesville, Va. This band I was in called Cadence, we performed acoustic on the local college station. I thought I had made it. You thought everybody in the world heard it. This was about eight years before Idol.

How did you feel when Alvin and the Chipmunks covered your song "Home"?
I was horrified. Alvin should have come to me and at least showed me that he was going to oversing it, so I could tell him to tone it down a little.

Did you know about it?
No. My kids heard about it before I knew about it. Then on the way to the airport, the song was on the ra-dio. The local station in Greensboro. It didn't sound anything like "Home." Then it got to the chorus, this guy is doing runs all over the place. I was flattered, but it was kind of weird at the same time.

You debuted your new single on American Idol. Do you still watch this show?
I watched it this year more than I have since I've been on it. I did catch the season where David Cook won, but a lot of it had to do with timing. We were off for a good portion of this season. I got sucked in. I became a Kris Allen fan. We had fun going to see it, probably because we followed it more this year. The fi-nale was probably the best finale they had. We were three rows back in the audience. It was so loud—Steven Martin, Kiss, Keith Urban, Cyndi Lauper. What you hear on TV and in the audience is two totally dif-ferent things. In the audience, everything sounds amazing and huge.

Were you surprised that Kris Allen beat Adam Lambert?
Yes and no. Yes because there was so much media attention on Adam. But I had a feeling the underdog was going to win. I like Kris, he's great at what he does. Adam, there's nobody like that guy to enter the competition—or the radio, for that matter. His voice, I really don't know how that guy does it nonstop it. When you hear him talk, you'd never picture those notes coming out of his face. Sebastian Bach would be proud.

© 2009