From American Idol to Queen, is LGBT icon Adam Lambert just a charismatic entertainer with incredible cords but nothing to say?
As Adam Lambert prepares to release ‘Velvet’, his first new album in five years, STYLE tries to make sense of this contradictory chameleon
A reality TV star who went on to front a classic rock band, Adam Lambert has his feet deep in both the present and the past – but he’s already made history.
But are his outsized theatrics losing their charm? Not a single solo track has charted since 2015 electro-folk anthem Ghost Town, and as Lambert gambles it all on his first new album in five years – the seductively disco-flavoured “Velvet”, dropping worldwide on March 20 – STYLE tries to make sense of this bewitchingly contradictory chameleon.
He’s (way) more than a copycat
A singer who made his name singing other people’s songs – #ICYMI: as runner-up on season 8 of American Idol in 2009 – and significantly broadened his demographic filling Freddie Mercury’s shoes in a dollar-churning, stadium-strafing ongoing Queen reunion, it’s been too easy for detractors to write Lambert off as a charismatic entertainer with incredible cords but nothing to say.
But remember that when RCA encouraged the singer to follow up the breezy electropop flavoured second album “Trespassing” with a covers LP, he quit the label and signed with Warner Bros, who promised more control and promoted a more rounded image – ultimately leading to the mature, and much-self-penned, reinvention that was “The Original High”.
Yep, he really did insure his voice for nearly US$50 million
It was back in 2012 that Forbes first broke news of Lambert’s hefty US$47 million insurance policy on the health of those priceless vocal cords – a fact he was only too happy to verify when speaking to this writer four years later.
“That’s my bread and butter man, I got to insure this,” he told me at The National. “J-Lo insured her booty, right? Listen – this is what I’m making my money on.”
Lambert was depressingly ahead of his time – and he paid the price (but didn’t let the haters win)
The entertainment landscape has undergone a welcome, long overdue representational awakening since Lambert came out as gay in the summer of June 2009.