5.26.13 The day after Live Ball 2013!

whatculture.com/music/5-singers-who-could-replace-freddie-mercury-in-queen.php/6

"Perhaps my most controversial pick, especially to some Queen fans(!) Lambert rose to stardom on the “American Idol” TV show a few years ago. Shortly after finishing second that season, he publically came out as a gay man which could have hurt his burgeoning career. It didn’t. His debut album placed at #2 and his most recent album debuted at #1 in America (also, Lambert became the first openly gay singer to have an album debut at #1.) His brief career has been filled with taking chances and a willingness to be raked over the coals for his choices (in song, in fashion, his sexuality.)

His soaring voice is incredible, Queen’s Brian May said that only two male voices have ever given him goosebumps, one being Freddie Mercury’s and the other belonging to Lambert. He’s only 30 years old and obviously still has some growing left to do (don’t we all?) and as he grows more confidant in his voice and finds solid footing as a live performer, I think he’ll really take the world by storm. My one bone to pick is that at times he insists on these unnecessary vocal runs live which are more distracting than anything but when he hunkers down and moderates his singing, it’s a thing of pure beauty.

Much like how the Queen+ Paul Rodgers collaboration happened, Queen ended up performing live with Lambert at a televised awards show in Europe. The resulting performance sparked interest from both sides to doing something again at a later date. The following Summer, Queen+ Adam Lambert went on a short mini-tour of Europe ending in three sold out shows in London.

Lambert’s youth added a certain vitality and freshness to the old Queen classics, something that we hadn’t seen from any of the Queen+ projects to date. His vocal range and versatility showed he could indeed handle the majority of Queen’s wide variety of song styles. Brian May has said that he and Lambert are in constant communication so perhaps something more substantial is coming than just a handful of live shows and I certainly hope that to be the case. I have to think that a young, openly gay and fantastically gifted performer like Lambert would be exactly the choice Mercury himself would give a rousing thumbs up to."


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