Adam Lambert is looking back at his American Idol audition and admits his life would have looked very different had he not chose to perform Queen‘s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“What I remember is that I went in there singing a Michael Jackson song, and the judges kind of looked at me like they weren’t sure about it. They weren’t really feeling it,” Lambert told ET Canada. He had no intentions of leaving the audition without a golden ticket, so he offered to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“If I hadn’t have picked that, I don’t know if the past decade would have looked like how it looked,” Lambert said. “It’s kind of one of those fate things where you have to give fate… a little nudge, but something stepped in and took care of me.”
“It was an interesting time [in my life] because I was 27 and I had been doing theatre in L.A… But it slowly started one of like fantasizing about like, ‘Oh, I want to be an artist. I want to do this like outside of theatre. I want to make my own music. I want to write my own music,'” he added.
Lambert also toyed with the idea of which Idol judge would make a great duet partner. “I want to hear Simon [Cowell] sing. Because I bet he can’t,” Adam laughed, adding Randy Jackson would be “really fun” to sing with.
But there’s only one judge he had in mind. “It’s got to be Paula [Abdul],” he said. “She’s amazing.” Lambert also entertained the idea of duetting with former judge Mariah Carey, though she came to the judges table “after my time.”
Lambert finished as runner-up in the 2009 season of Idol, losing to Kris Allen.
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