Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Brent Keith, 29, of Nashville, was one of the 36 semifinalists in season eight of American Idol.

A native of Blanchaster, Ohio, Brent says he grew up playing music and spent about a year and a half with a rock band while still in high school before “I kind of found myself in country music.”

He wasn’t exactly a stranger to the spotlight when he showed up on the Idol stage. Back in 2004, he placed sixth on the televised country music competition Nashville Star.

Then, in 2007, Country Music Television released “Dale,” a documentary about racing legend Dale Earnhardt Sr. Brent sang the featured song, “Looking for a Road.” In fact, you can still go to CMT.com and see more of Brent than you did on Idol this season. Check out four acoustic numbers here.

Brent recenty took time to talk to Idol Chatter about his American Idol experience.

To learn more about Brent, and hear more of his music, you can check out his MySpace page. He’s also on Facebook and twitter.

Brent will be among the performers next Monday (June 15) at the fifth annual Stars for Hope show to benefit the Lupus Foundation. The show will be held at the B.B. Kings Blues Club in Nashville; other performers include Idol semifinalists Kristen McNamara and Ann Marie Boskovich.

Now, for the interview:

Idol Chatter: During one of the American Idol videos, you indicated you tried out for the show because you wanted to give the music business one last shot. Can you explain what you meant by that?

Brent: “There tends to be a shelf life on people’s opportunities here in Nashville, sometimes. Usually it seems to be guys have a good shot at it up until they’re about 33, or something like that. My wife and I have been trying to make this thing happen for
almost a decade now. I’ve gotten really close with Nashville Star and I got really close with the theme song I had for Dale, but things just build up and then they started to fall apart.

“It just seems like I’ve never had my big shot yet as in a record deal. I had a production deal with a company here in Nashville called Combustion Music for a while, and that’s where the theme song for Dale came from. I figured I’d give it another good shot to see if I could get that big break finally.”

Question: Now, the first time you appeared on Idol, during your audition, they flashed up your name as Brent Keith Smith. What was that about?

Brent: “In the music world, I’ve always been known as Brent Keith. My last name is Smith; Keith is my middle name. That’s just how they put me up there. Then after the first show, they asked me if i wanted to go back to Brent Keith and I said sure.

“There’s actually a story behind Keith. I had an uncle who was the only blond-haired person in the family, and I was born with blond hair. And he was a musician, and I’ve turned out to be a musician. His middle name was Keith, so my father gave me that middle name as well. So when I play music, I use that name to honor him a little bit because he was killed in the ’70s. Because he’s been gone, I can let his music dreams live on through me as well.”

Question: Did he die tragically?

Brent: “It was before my time, but the story that I’ve always heard was that he was in
Chicago, living there, and he was walking home and was mugged and thrown off a bridge. . So it means something to me to have his name.”

Question: So how do you think the Idol experience is going to work out for you? What’s been the reaction since you’ve been home?

Brent: “You know it’s been mixed, just because I didn’t get a lot of camera time, which is fine. It’s just the way it worked out, I guess. I stayed away from the drama and everything, so I ended up not being on TV as much as some of the people who were crying and screaming and fighting and all that stuff. I figured I’d stay away from that and try to be a little more professional and figured that might be what they were looking for.

“So i didn’t get a lot of camera time. Some people who watched the show remembered me from it. I’ve been getting recognized and been able to get in some good meetings, and some doors have been opened to me that weren’t before. It’s an interesting thing when you come home from that.”

Question: Idol seemed to give you plenty of experience in dealing with awkward situations. During your audition, the judges seemed more focused on bickering than listening to the singing. What was that like?

Brent: “It was very surreal. I mean, I’ve watched them on TV. I’ve been a big Idol fan since season five, I believe. So first of all, it was very nerve-wracking and really cool just to be in the room singing for them. So it was a neat experience in that way.

“But then when they went off on that little argument they had and then, when the women (Paula and Kara) went under the table, it just got very strange. I had performed. I had done my thing. I was waiting to hear what they were going to say about it. So I really didn’t have else much to say, didn’t know what else to do. So when they’re doing that I couldn’t do anything but just stand there and feel awkward and laugh. I really wasn’t sure what to do.”

Question: And then, during the Idol video interviews, they paired you up with Tatiana Del Toro. What was that like?

Brent: “I tell you what, I think that was maybe kind of strategic on their part because the way that she is, she can make certain people crazy. She gets a reaction out of people because of her personality. Her and I were OK; we got along. If you can get past kind of the quirks that she has and the things that she does, she’s actually a sweet girl.

So I think they could tell that I knew that, and they put us in the interview together because they knew I would be professional with her and deal with it, maybe a little bit better than some others would. It was interesting.”

Question: Now, they made a lot of changes to the show this year, including the way the semifinals were handled. As a contestant, what changes did you like? What changes weren’t you so fond of?Brent: “I tell you what, changes that I liked … To tell you the truth, not too many come to mind. I’m sure that there were some, but none come to mind right now. The major one that comes to mind that I didn’t like was the fact that they changed it up so much this year going into the top 36 instead of the top 24.

“The top 24 in the past, each person has actually gotten a lot more time to be seen on
TV and for the fans to decide whether they like that person or not. This season, there were more of us grouped together. It seemed like there was no time for a lot of us to get any camera time for the fans to relate to us. I think a lot of fans, if they see a lot of a story on a person, they kind of make up their mind and decide that they’re going to vote for that person before they see the actual show and see them perform.

“And I think that’s what happened to a lot of us. A lot of us didn’t get very much camera time. We just didn’t have the chance for fans to really decide if they liked us or not before they had to vote. And there were people in each group that they had seen quite a bit already and had kind of decided that they liked. So even if they didn’t do as well as they should have, they still voted for them anyway because they liked their personality and things.

“I was a really big fan of the way it was set up in season seven.”

Question: And, basically, the way they changed the semifinal this year, you got to perform one two-minute song for your Idol life. That had to be stressful.

Brent: “It is really stressful. A lot of people said, ‘I saw you on Idol,’ and that’s really cool. But friends and family that actually know that the process was so long, we’ll be out and they’ll say, ‘This is the guy who was on Idol.’ And I’m like, ‘I guess you could say I was on Idol.’ You know, I was on for a total of about eight minutes for the nine months I put into it. That’s not a bitter thing for me. It’s just kind of a funny thing that that’s the way it worked out this year the way they had it set up.”

Question: Looking back, what’s your most memorable Idol experience?

Brent: “Probably Hollywood Week. Hollywood Week is insane. They say it’s really hard and you watch it, and you can see that. It’s hard and people are cracking under the pressure and breaking down. But man, it’s really tough.

“There was one night where I got two hours of sleep, I bet. It’s such a stressful situation because this is your big chance, this is your dream on the line, and you know you just have to go, go, go and stick with it, and the emotions get high. I’ll tell you what, I’m not an extremely emotional person and, by the last two to three days that I was out there, I was just so wore out and stressed, and all of us were.

“And they pulled me off to the side to do a regular standard interview, and they just asked me the right question and I guess the dam finally broke loose because I broke down and I cried. They asked me what this meant to me and how much my friends and family and everybody have sacrificed for me to try to make this dream happen. I don’t know what happened, but from all the stress and everything, I broke down and cried like a baby on camera. I couldn’t believe it. I figured they would have shown it, but they didn’t, thankfully.”

Question: Though you’re a country artist, you really didn’t sing much country until the semifinals. (Bad Company in the audition, followed by Billy Joel, Daughtry and “Some Kind of Wonderful” in Hollywood Week). What was the strategy there?

Brent: “As an artist, the things I have always listened to growing up, I try to incorporate all of that into what I’m doing because I feel you have to include the things that are all of your influences so you can develop your own individual sound and stick out above the rest of people who are making music that all sounds like the same thing.

“I played Bad Company for first audition, ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ for the group performance. I actually didn’t even really sing country music. What I did sing is older music mostly that sounds like what’s on country radio now. Country radio has changed so much in the last few years. It’s kind of just classic rock with a fiddle or with a banjo.”

Question: Do you write much of your own music?

Brent: “The stuff I recorded in the last few years with Combustion was not anything that I wrote. But I’ve really gotten back into (writing music) in the last year and a half. Since I got home from Idol, I’ve been taking a lot of writing meetings. I’m trying to put together at least five or 10 news songs that I can record and get out there for the fans and start selling at my shows and put up on iTunes.”

Question: There’s a great song on your MySpace page — “She Believes” — that isn’t among the videos fans can find on CMT. Can you tell me about that song?

Brent: “That is a song that was written by two really good writers and friends of mine. One of them’s name is Michael Logan and the other guy’s name is Luke Brown. Neither one of them are country writers per se, but they write some good stuff that fits in with artists like me, who do country but something that’s on the edge of pop or rock.

“I absolutely love that song and I get a ton of great feedback on it. For me, I can relate to it personally because I grew up in a family where my parents got divorced when I was about a year old. My dad moved to Georgia, and I lived in Ohio my whole life. So I lived with my mom and my sister, and I’ve just always been surrounded by women.

“That song is about she believes. The first verse is about your mother, praying for you and knowing that some day you’re going to find the right road. The second verse is about your wife. That was a big one for me. It’s basically about a wife who … the man in the song is saying, ‘I’m sorry, life hasn’t turned out the way we thought it was going to. This dream’s taking longer to get to than I thought.’ And she’s says, ‘I don’t love a dream, I love a man.’

“I don’t have a daughter for the third verse, but I’m hoping sometime soon. That’s a song that really means a lot to me.”

Question: So when can fans expect to hear some of the new songs you’ve been writing?

Brent: “Probably sometime in the next couple months. I’ve got probably four or five really good songs. If nothing else I’m going to try to get a quick demo up so that people can at least see what I’m doing, what I’m working on.”

Question: What have you been doing since you got home from Idol?

Brent: “To pay the bills, I’ve gone back to my day job. I work at Home Depot still. When I get home throughout the week and on the weekends, I’m just doing everything I can to try to make this thing happen and try to capitalize on the momentum Idol has given me.

“Like I said, I’m taking a lot of writing appointments. I’ve had a lot of meetings with people around town, people that have been in the industry for a while that can kind of help me create a game plan to try to make sure I can still make this thing happen. And just trying to book a lot of shows and get some good guys to put a band together so I can get out and do some touring as soon as I’m free from my contracts with 19 (Entertainment) and I’m allowed to get back out there.”

Question: What kind of sound can fans expect from a Brent Keith album?

Brent: “The sound that I’m going for is something along the lines of the newer contemporary guys that are out there like Keith Urban and Dierks Bentley or something like that. What I want to do is take music like that, like a Keith Urban type of sound, and mix it with kind of something like 38 Special or Bad Company, kind of an arena rock kind of sound mixed in with contemporary country.

“One thing that is cool about the position I’m in right now is I’m kind of in a free spot to write whatever comes out. And if it’s good music, it’s good music. I’m not going to worry so much about trying to sound like the same thing in every song. I just want to get out there and play some new music and see what people respond to and kind of be guided by that.”

American Idol video links:

Brent performs “Hicktown” during the Idol semifinals

The interview with Brent Keith and Tatiana Del Toro

Previous interviews with semifinalists:

Kendall Beard

Kristen McNamara