Entertainment, Music - Army Times

Sailor tries to make Idol judges ‘love him’

Results from Tuesday’s American Idol voting won’t be revealed until Wednesday night, so there is no way to know yet whether viewers have forgiven Navy singer Phil Stacey for his controversial performance on March 6.

But in the eyes of the show’s judges, at least, he improved.

Exactly halfway through a two-hour show devoted to the music of supreme Supreme Diana Ross, Stacey, a musician third class with the Navy Band in Jacksonville, Fla., sang Ross’ down-tempo ballad “I’m going to make you love me,” and escaped the scorn he encountered after the March 6 episode.

The three-judge panel did fault him for overreacting to last week’s criticism and going a little too conservative.

Randy Jackson said Stacey’s performance was “boring,” but was sure to add that “the vocals were hot, baby.”

Paula Abdul concurred that the overall act was underwhelming — she suggested a livelier song might’ve done the trick — but she agreed with Jackson that Stacey’s voice was “strong.”

And Simon Cowell, who by this point had withstood repeated fusillades of audience “boos,” broke character by almost complimenting Stacey’s song choice. “It wasn’t outstanding, it wasn’t awful, it was somewhere in the middle,” he said.

For his part, Stacey explained in a taped segment before his song that his main goal was to shake off the previous week’s performance, which Cowell dismissed as “insane.”

He asked Diana Ross for advice on “just gathering myself, getting the right mindset to go onstage.”

“Look at the audience,” Ross counseled him. “They’re really real people.”

Viewers had just a couple hours after the Tuesday show ended at 10 p.m. Eastern Time to text or call in and vote for their favorites. The slate of 12 who performed Tuesday will be winnowed down once those votes are tallied, and viewers will find out who’s voted off Wednesday night. That show starts at 9 p.m. eastern.

Tuesday’s slate of performances seemed to confirm what “Idol”-watchers had predicted beforehand — that generally weak offerings from the men on the show make it a very good bet that this year’s “American Idol” winner will be one of the women.

Jackson told USA TODAY after last Thursday’s results show that the women were “definitely stronger than the boys vocally.” Stacey acknowledged that had been the case so far, but he predicted the male contestants could step it up.

“We’re capable of doing more than what we’ve been doing,” Stacey said. “When we get out there with the girls, with the energy and everything, we’re going to rise to the level that they kind of set.”