Blake Lewis didn't win American Idol, but don't worry about his future: He's already talking about collaborations with folks like Nick Hexum from 311, whose ''All Mixed Up'' he covered early in the season (''As soon as we met, it was like we were homies already,'' reports Blake). In Mr. Lewis' immediate future, though? Pizza. We caught up with the 25-year-old backstage as he scarfed down a few slices after the big finale.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you deal with having to perform ''This Is My Now''? It seemed so... not you.
BLAKE LEWIS: [When I first heard it] I was like, really? All right. I gotta sing this song, shake hands with it, make friends with it. And hopefully perform it well. It's definitely not my style. That track would never be on my album.
Did you think about rearranging it?
They wouldn't let me do that, because it was the song that won the contest. If it had been a song for me and a song for Jordin, I think that would've been a lot different. They could've picked two songwriters.
Did you want to speak out?
I don't care — it is what it is. You have your good, your bad, and your in-between.
Moving on to the songs that you were allowed to rearrange: How did you decide to remix ''You Give Love a Bad Name''?
They say ''make it your own,'' so from a producer's standpoint I just remixed a song if I felt like the piece needed it. I'd do that with my own songs, whether I was on Idol or not. After you've been singing for a couple years, you want to revamp them and make them fresh. So I just tried to be true to myself and let my creativity take hold.
Do you think that taking those chances mostly helped you or hurt you during the competition?
I honestly never looked at it that way. I did what they told me. They told me to make a song my own, and that's all I tried to do. So I don't think it was taking a chance. See, they contradict themselves a lot, the judges. With ''You Keep Me Hanging On'' [during Diana Ross week], I totally revamped it and kept the main ingredients of the song, but they gave me some criticism about that. So you never know — you can't win, you can't lose.
So what's next for you?
I did some work with Nick already — a song I had written and another that he and Kevin Griffin from Better Than Ezra put together for me and I improvised over — which is like a dream come true. [Producer] BT is my other main inspiration. If we could get together and create a song, I'd be like a kid in a candy store.
One of the highlights of the finale was watching you and Doug E. Fresh together on stage...
Hip-hop on American Idol, you can't beat that! The experience has been so amazing, I can't even explain in words. It's bittersweet right now, because it's over. Two seconds before I got on stage, it was like, ''It's done — this is the last time I'll step on the Idol stage.'' The journey was truly a blessing.
