Idol 63 - Andrew Garcia

63. Andrew Garcia

Season 9, 9th Place

Andrew Garcia. The original frontrunner of Season 9 that seemed to hit a wall once he made it to the semifinals.

To be perfectly honest, if you had told me during Hollywood Week that Andrew Garcia would finish 9th place on American Idol, I would have thought that it would have been the biggest travesty on American Idol History. Well, we all saw what happened, didn’t we? I mean, Andrew seriously suffered from severe expectations that doomed his run from the start.

I was seriously rooting for him after his audition. His version of Sunday Morning was so good that I immediately tagged him as one of the top contenders for the Idol crown. And then he continued to dazzle me when he sang a brilliantly composed cover of Paula Abdul’s Straight Up. I was very impressed and he was able to prove to everyone that he was the complete vocal package.

Unfortunately, something happened when he hit the semifinals round. He was just not that good. Sure, I love the tone of his voice, and he's technically one of the better male singers of season 9, but he obviously lost his mojo. He did sing pretty by the numbers most of the time but it wasn't brilliant.

During Top 24 week, he tried to be creative and served up an acoustic Fall Out Boy cover that Simon immediately threw back in his face and it was at that moment that I realized something was WRONG. Seriously.

If Simon had praised that performance, we might have seen Andrew Garcia stick to his acoustic track and feel confident about his abilities, but then confusion set in and it was too late. He gave us mediocre performances every week, from the upsetting Gimme Shelter to the awful I Heard It Through The Grapevine and even to the lazy performance of the Elvis Presley hit, Hound Dog.

He was just.. well.. not improving! His performances were mostly flat in vocals and delivery and his voice turned out to be not versatile enough with absolutely no range. I realized this after Hound Dog where he shouldn't go big with his performances because he isn't a stage performer.

That worked for him when he covered Chris Brown's Forever. The look. The feel. The sound. Everything clicked in Andrew's favor with that performance. The bridge of that song really made the whole performance amazing and if the rest of it was that powerful then I would have been blown away.

Favorite Performance(s): To me, he only gave two good live performances - Forever and Sugar, We're Going Down. Good thing, he was good during Hollywood week and his audition.

Audition

Straight Up

Forever

#62 - Simon: It's okay to smile.