Laci Kaye Booth of American Idol Season 17 during her mentoring session with Lauren Daigle. (ABC Photo)
If not, just flash forward to the four-minute mark in the video I’ve embedded below.
After the show, Laci told People she expected the judges to save Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon “just because I know what an amazing vocalist and person he is.”
Instead, Idol judges Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan came to her rescue, making the 23-year-old from Livingston, Texas, a member of the Top 5 and keeping alive her hopes of making the show’s May 19 finale.
Laci took to social media Monday to thank fans — and the Idol judges — for their support.
“I want to start this off by saying I never tried out for this show because I thought I was the best singer,” she writes. “I tried out because making music is what I love & what I want to do for the rest of my life.
“To think that @katyperry @lukebryan & @lionelrichie saw something in me enough to bring me back for another week astounds me. I am so grateful & so blessed.”
Laci adds that she had very little confidence when she auditioned, but has gained more and more as the show has progressed thanks to fan support, the judges and Idol mentor Bobby Bones.
As for Jeremiah, she writes that he “deserved to win the whole thing, but nonetheless he will be SUCH a STAR. His voice touches my heart & soul.”
Laci might have been shocked by the judges decision; I wasn’t.
This show isn’t called The Voice, where the top vocalist is supposed to prevail, but seldom does.
This show is called American Idol, and its judges are fond of saying they’re looking for “the whole package.”
Take a look at the Top 6. Which contestant jumps out as having the most long-term star potential?
To me, it’s Laci. Heck, it’s been that way since the Top 40.
Yep, She still appears to have a way to go in terms of confidence, stage presence and the ability to completely cut loose during a performance.
And in terms of relatability, I’m not sure Idol does Laci any favors by dressing her up like a Disney princess one week and giving her more hair than Daenerys Targaryen the next. Just let the young woman be herself.
But Laci’s idol is Stevie Nicks, a singer with an instantly recognizable voice.
Have you listened to Laci’s pre-show EP, “Something New?” If not, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s very good.
And those smoky vocals are instantly recognizable. That’s Laci Kaye Booth you’re listening to.
My hunch is that star potential is what the judges see. That distinctive voice is certainly what they’ve been hearing throughout Season 16.
And that’s why Laci Kaye Booth was saved by the Idol judges Sunday night.
American Idol American Idol Season 17 Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon Katy Perry Laci Kaye Booth Lionel Richie Luke Bryan
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6 Comments
No. The producers (and trampy Katy Perry) are pimping the latest what’s-his-name WGWG for the win.
Can’t you just picture him wearing Mouse ears?
Meanwhile, here’s a take from “Idol” blogger Muse273 for you to consider and possibly comment on.
“Those shock boots are, of course, the reason that the Save was created. It exists to save strong contestants who undeservedly face elimination. This was THE time for it to be used, and instead the judges chose to save the legitimate worst performer of the night. To be fair, Laci has been the only other contestant of the season to approach the same highs as Jeremiah, though she has been far more inconsistent. Paired with any of the other four (barring perhaps Laine), who have been equally inconsistent without comparable standout moment, an argument could have been made to save her. It would have potentially been an outrage on its own merits, given all of them outperformed her on the night, but that’s the inevitable penalty of reintroducing the Save into a short season full of multiple eliminations. However, saving her over the one person stronger than her on every scale made a mockery of bringing the Save back at all. That was what turned a familiar Idol shock into a true debacle. Why did it happen? There are multiple possible explanations, and all of them reflect the issues which have turned what had the potential to be one of the strongest seasons ever into one of the worst.
The least problematic (well… comparatively) was that given a season which has been gender-skewed from the beginning, the idea of saving a male contestant and ending up with a 4-1 split in the Top 5 gave the producers hives. While there have been several seasons with equal or worse imbalances…intentionally producing one isn’t a great look. Of course neither is eliminating the last LGBT contestant, and probably the best chance Idol has of getting an openly gay person into the Finale in any foreseeable season…However, Idol has nobody to blame for being in that situation. They’ve been playing with fire all season with their casting, with the Top 20-14-10 all being skewed. While the last one is not strictly the fault of the producers/judges, they chose to start the semifinals with an unbalanced field and allowed that to continue when they still had control. Even in its current state, Idol has thousands of people auditioning. It is outside the realm of possibility that they couldn’t find manage to scrape together sufficient strong female contestants to achieve gender balance, especially given they had room for Eddie (and Shawn, and Logan, and Wade really). This is leaving aside the corner they had backed themselves into by only putting a single woman of color up for the public’s vote. Was their explicit intention to guarantee a male winner? Given the way Idol’s voting patterns work they hardly needed to put in the effort, but if that were the case they shouldn’t have minded ending up with a mostly male endgame. Did it just occur to them that it might be a problem?
The most frequently trotted out claim is that Laci was ‘the most marketable’, which has a whole boatload of problems. For starters, there’s my opinion, stated elsewhere, that ‘marketable’ is an almost entirely meaningless Idolsphere shorthand for ‘Pretty, preferably white, preferably country, girl’ with basically no understanding to the reality of the current music world. Beyond that though, making the show worse for the sake of helping ‘marketable’ contestants is the cardinal sin of Idol’s latter years. We’ve seen the producers put their thumb on the scales over and over again, and it’s never been for the better. Not even taking the after-show into account: None of those ‘marketable’ contestants have actually gone on to stardom since the show. Not Sam. Not Jax. Not Tristan, or Angie, or Amber. The meddling has achieved nothing in the long run…if Idol’s going to have ANY chance of continuing viability as a show, it’s going to need to take a brutally hard look at what relevance ‘marketable’ really has to its success.
While those are both believable reasons, I suspect the reality is much simpler, and much more damning of the season: They had no idea what they were doing. Not just with the Save. With the show.
The judges openly admitted that they expected Wade to be in the bottom, and were unprepared for any other scenario. That they were comfortable openly admitting that one contestant was a dead man walking…who they would have saved anyone else over is its own problem. That they didn’t bother to create a contingency plan is another…But the utter chaos reigning as the credits started to roll, and their inability to muster a coherent explanation of what happened after the fact, suggests otherwise. Especially because everything else about the show has been a mess. The real red flag of the episode wasn’t the debacle of the Save. It was when six contestants walked into a room with Lauren Daigle, were given basic advice which any coaching staff should have handed out on their first session, and reacted like someone had just handed them a mindblowing revelation. Normally the show tries to play up the brilliance of the mentors, but given the changes some of them made this legitimately seemed to be the first time anyone has bothered to help them. Which begs the question: what have they been doing up until now? Even with that advice, while they made some improvements, all of them (including Jeremiah) fell victim to the same issues which have been plaguing them all season. Beyond that, how are we two weeks from the Finale and the sound techs haven’t managed to get the balance right on half the performances? What is wardrobe’s obsession with coats, the sparklier the better? How did we end up with a Showstopper song list where only 1 ½ of the songs qualified? How, given a Woodstock song list numbering in the hundreds, did we only get a single song that was actually written by one of the bands performing at Woodstock? Is anyone actually working here?
(I)n a format where the elimination is done at the same time as the performances, these writeups are as much about what’s happening next week as what just happened. And next week looks like a bunch of disasters coming home to roost. It’s not like these are new problems, they’ve been there since at least the Top 14. I haven’t exaggerated what was already there. I just don’t have a reason to expect they’ll get any better. That’s how Idol tends to go more often than not: a collision of a hundred problems, held together by one or two contestants who do well enough to keep it chugging…If you’re lucky, you get casts where enough people are bringing their A-game to keep things going even if a strong contender goes down. This season should have been one. But it wasn’t, and they just consciously chose to ditch the one consistent pillar of the season, at the point where even the strongest contestants start falling apart. That’ll make for some interesting times.”
Hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I’ve had Laci’s 2017 EP playing on repeat since I went back and listened to it a week ago, and I’m pretty sure she’s the contestant who will release the music I most want to listen to most post-show. And I’m not a big fan of country music.
I don’t know why you think your an authority on this show. But your option does not match mine on many levels.
I’ve watched every show since Season 1 and blogged about every show since Season 7, and blogs — by their very nature — include the blogger’s opinion. But, please, feel free to disagree at any time.
Wade Cota is the whole package. From his story and especially his voice. The females need to be voted off.
Wade Cota was allowed to cheat during Group Week. He should have been cut then.
Otherwise, he’s the return of Scott Savol. He has the same story, the same look, and the same unlikability.