Last night on American Idol, Candice Glover gave what I called on Twitter “one of the most astounding performances I have seen in a lifetime.” When she took to the stage to sing The Cure’s “Lovesong,” she brought me to tears, and she brought me to my knees. My husband came home while I was watching it for the fourth time. Tears were streaming down my face. He asked why I was crying. I answered, using words that were clearly inadequate to the occasion, “It’s just so moving.” He laughed. I have to admit it was funny, the childlike wonder with which I tried to explain what cannot be explained. I didn’t try again. I just sat him down and rolled tape.
I can’t tell you what it was about Glover’s performance that made me cry, except to say that it was sublime; that she was emissary through some higher order of consciousness flowed through the Glover portal and into the world. For the duration of the song, Glover was open, a pure channel through which flowed something I can’t even name. Yes, she has an insanely good voice. Yes, there was vocal technique up the wazoo (like such as I may have never seen), yes she poured her whole being into it, body and soul. She was an example for all of us of what it looks like when you get out of the way and let “it” flow through you into the world. We are all here to do that to some degree, but Candice is clearly here to do it in spades — even if she never has another moment like this in all her life.
On HuffPost today there was a post about a mysterious noise in the midst of Glover’s song. I listened to the performance multiple times and didn’t hear it, though I did hear it in the recording above. According to the HuffPost piece, speculation about what that noise was abounds, but my favorite, pulled from the HuffPost piece, is this.
“TVLine’s “Idol” recapper Michael Slezak said, ‘About a third of the way through the song, I’m pretty sure the Holy Ghost hopped by the studio and whispered some kind of unintelligible utterance into the Idol mics — or maybe it was just a boom mic getting dropped? — that, when played backwards, spells ‘Vote Candice, you idiots!”’
And let the church say amen.
VIDEO VIA YOUTUBE
Tags: American Idol, Candice Glover, Lovesong, Music, The Culture
