American Idol Rankdown 2.0

[sublymonal]

24. Lee DeWyze

Average Score:

17.375

Rankings:

@Elliott - 1st

@*Chris - 11th

@Solaris - 16th

@NGM - 19th

@Zoey - 21st

@1234567890 - 23rd

@Alex95 - 24th

Public - 24th

 

  

Quote

It's probably no secret that I ranked Lee first as well. I'm sure Elliott's write-up will do justice to the impact Lee has had on our relationship over the years, but I still want to say something about why I'm a fan of his. In the ten years we've been together, we've seen him at least once (but usually more than that) per year. Even when we had barely enough money for gas, food and a hotel, Lee put us on his guest list and we found a way to get there. Needless to say, the road trips to see him, the shows and Lee himself have had a huge impact on our life together.

 

During his run on the show, I constantly feared he would be the next to go. In retrospect, it seems silly now that we know about the WGWG domination between seasons 7 and 11, but at the time, there was no guarantee that he would win and since IDF was full of people who couldn't stand him, it seemed like I had every reason to be worried. Personally, though, I think Lee had some of the best performances that season, alongside Crystal and Siobhan (and Didi and Andrew in Hollywood week). His renditions of "The Boxer", "Treat Her Like a Lady" and "Simple Man" showed his range. He could do Simon and Garfunkel, he could do Lynyrd Skynyrd and he could reinvent an old song and make it sound modern.  I also loved his duet of "Falling Slowly" with Crystal and the two of them remain, to this day, one of my favourite Top 2 match-ups, right up there with David vs David, Trent vs La'Porsha and Candice vs Kree. I would have been thrilled either way by who won, but I was secretly rooting for Lee to prove the haters wrong.

 

I'm sure Elliott will tell the stories of how we met him on the Idol tour and gave him a pair of converse and how he ran back to take a picture with us after our first one turned out too dark, or how he recorded a video of his song that we used for our first dance ("Carry Us Through" from his album Paranoia), or how we've been to so many shows that we've met his brother, cousins, aunt and various other relatives. 

 

I'm so happy for him that he's found success in all the different ways that he has, whether recording songs for TV shows like The Walking Dead or for movies like Ben is Back with Julia Roberts. One day, Elliott and I hope to take him up on his offer to go out to LA and hang out with him, his wife and his dog, but until then, Lee remains my favourite contestant in this Top 24 and probably my favourite Idol contestant overall just because of our friendship with him and all that he's done for us over the years.

On 8/31/2020 at 2:55 PM, Elliott said:

01. LEE DEWYZE

 

Me getting Lee into the final vote as the sole representative from his criminally underrated season?

 

I don't think me ranking him at #1 comes as a shock to anybody, since it's absolutely no secret that Lee is my all-time favourite Idol contestant. My journey with Lee started a few months before his season, when I first become aware of him. At the time, I had a coworker from Chicago who had mentioned his name to me to check out. I looked him up on MySpace (lol, back when that was still a thing) and liked what I heard. So when I saw him on the spoiler lists, I was #shook and knew I'd be stanning forever if he made the final vote.

 

Owing to the weird schedule for filming season 9's Hollywood Week episodes, Lee's audition didn't get aired in full until the last audition episode, which was dubbed "the best of the rest" but really meant "People who made it through Hollywood Week that we need to show you." His audition, which was montaged with Crystal Bowersox's no less, was solid, and had me excited for what was to come. Though we saw his group round performance of Get Ready and his final round performance of You Found Me, I'm still forever pressed that we never got to see his first solo performance of Joan Osbourne's One of Us.

 

For the top 24 round, Lee sang Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol and did well, especially considering how most of the guys flopped that week. His second performance, which was Hinder's Lips of an Angel, actually wound up as my favourite of his semi-finals performances and one of my top favourites from him overall. The final week - Owl City's Fireflies - was actually my least favourite of his performances in the semi-finals, but that's largely because I absolutely loathe that song.

 

After sailing through to the finals, Lee's performance for Rolling Stones week was Beast of Burden. While I'm not too familiar with their discography, I did know of that song so I was glad that Lee picked it. For the infamous Top 11 week, which saw the contestants have to pick new songs just a few days before the show, Lee went with The Letter, which had notably been done by robbed g.oddess Carly Smithson and Michael Johns in both seasons seven and eight. Though a solid performance from Lee, I think it's actually the performance of his I'd consider my least favourite? Ah well. With Paige Miles's Against All Odds performance thrown in the mix, everyone was basically given a free pass to the finals, so I won't too worried.

 

For R&B/Soul week, Lee came up with a new arrangement of Treat Her Like a Lady, which is frequently cited as his best performance. While I suppose I agree, it's not the performance of his I'd consider my personal favourite.  For Lennon-McCartney week, Lee clearly had one too many joints and decided to add bagpipes into Hey Jude, which was legendary.  Hey Jude is also one of my favourite Beatles songs, so I was glad that's the song he picked. After the judges wrongly decided to save Michael Lynche, the top nine was intact for another week and Lee took on my favourite Elvis Presley song (A Little Less Conversation) for Elvis Presley week.

 

For Inspirational Songs week, Lee took on The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel, which was another one of his shining moments in the season. I actually thought this was his best performance, but again - it's not my favourite of his. Nonetheless, Lee easily advanced to Shania Twain week, which I'm sure was Chris's worst nightmare given his feelings on this season. Anyway, Lee picked a song from the iconic Come on Over, and it was actually my favourite Shania Twain song - You're Still the One. Since I loved it, naturally everyone else hated it.

 

Frank Sinatra week saw soon-to-best best American Idol judge Harry Connick, Jr. come in to mentor, and his involvement helped Lee turn in the best performance of the week with That's Life. (lol at how HCJ's advice to help Lee stop being so nervous was to "just take a deep breathe" before going on stage. #mood) Anyway, it's another performance that I loved, and naturally Lee was the designated "Huff" of the results show the next night.

 

The annual "Songs from the Movies" week was up next, and Lee kicked off the evening with Kiss From a Rose by Seal, which was from a Batman movie. That noise you heard? Me, stanning. I remember thinking it was a decent performance, so colour my surprise afterward when IDF hated it. Except not really because IDF just hated everything Lee did by that point. Anyway, the studio version of it is absolutely gorgeous.  For the duets, he and Crystal teamed up to take on Falling Slowly, which showed why they were the rightful top two from the season.

 

For top three week, Lee's first performance was to my favourite Lynyrd Skynyrd song and one of my all-time favourite songs, Simple Man. For anyone wondering, this is my favourite Lee performance.  For his second performance, he was given Simon Cowell's assignment of Hallelujah by Leonad Cohen, which leads to my favourite trivia for season nine: Lee wasn't a fan of the song selection, and they actually had to re-tape the segment of him finding out he had Hallelujah because it was evident all over his face that he didn't want to do that song.  In retrospect, I don't blame him because he's since had to perform it at every single concert by the flop fans who want to hear it. For what it's worth, I thought he sounded fine, but I shared in his annoyance over it being a manufactured moment.

 

In the finale, he reprised The Boxer, did Everybody Hurts and then performed Beautiful Day as his coronation song... because for some reason, he and Crystal were given covers. I don't get it. Anyway, as I was fresh out of high school and thus could stay up late, I proceeded to spend the next four hours voting as much as possible for Lee by calling via phone and text message via my computer. I want to say I probably logged close to 10,000 votes altogether, but I lost count after the third hour so who even knows. After being on pins and needles the entirety of the next day, the finale ended with them announcing Lee as the winner, and I was absolutely thrilled and went crazy. I also got the added benefits of being able to troll IDF for the week because they were pressed AF.

 

The immediate aftermath of the season saw the Idols Live tour get shortened, but one of the final dates was in Cincinnati, so Andrew and I were able to go. We got to meet Lee after the show, and gave him a pair of Converse as a gift. After our first attempts at taking a photo with him backfired, we managed to get his attention as he was being led away and he jumped off the golf cart to come back and get a new photo with us.

 

A few months later saw the release of his post-Idol debut, Live It Up, which... is an album that exists, I'll say that. The summer afterward saw him going on tour in support of the album, and I was able to see him a few times. The first was by myself, and some members of his family and Jonna were there as well. A couple weeks later, Andrew came down and we made the drive to Akron for another one of his shows, before seeing him in Detroit at a jazz festival a month or two later.

 

2012 was pretty quiet on the concert front, as he didn't put out any music and most of the shows he did were on the west coast. In 2013, his touring picked back up again ahead of the release of Frames. We saw him in Columbus one night with some friends we'd made at his shows previously. When we talked to him afterward, he said he had some slots on his guest list open for the show in Cleveland the next night and asked if we wanted to be added, so we naturally decided to drive - with barely any money and I'm almost certain no new clean clothes owing to our prior road tripping - the few hours to Cleveland for his show the next night.

 

Afterward, Frames came out and it was a marked improvement over Live It Up. (He didn't have the Idol major label machine forcing him to do generic pop songs, so that was to be expected). I even had my name in the booklet under the special thanks (though spelled wrong), which was nice.  The touring continued, and I got to see him in October when he went on tour with Toad the Wet Sprocket in support of the album. He was the opener, so I just hung at his merch table for a while afterward chatting with him. 2015 rolled around with a few more Lee shows throughout the Ohio area (it's nice being from the same city that he has family in because it means he's always coming to the area!), and 2016 saw the release of his newest album, Oil & Water.

 

I saw Lee early on the year by myself in Indianapolis, and then in the summer, Andrew and I made the road trip to see him just outside of Cleveland, where we got to hang out with Lee and some of his other fans for a bit afterward too. 2017 saw some early concerts by myself when Lee came to the area in April and May. The summer saw him return to the west coast for a while, before he finally came back to Ohio at the end of 2017. By that point, Andrew and I had already gotten engaged, and when I talked to Lee about it, he had me call Andrew so he could congratulate him too.

 

In 2018, Lee released Paranoia, which it goes without saying has become my favourite album that he's put out yet. When Andrew came down in February, we saw him and Wally's favourite Phillip Phillips in back-to-back days for a makeshift road trip. When we saw Lee, he asked how us the wedding planning was going, and we talked to him about having him involved in the wedding in some capacity since a big part of our relationship had been going to see him all these years.

 

We didn't get to see him in concert again before our wedding, though we had talked to him a few times to figure out what we wanted for our wedding. Since we were planning on doing our first dance to one of his songs, he offered to record a video for us to do our first dance too, which we received the day before our wedding:

 

We got to see him in December en route back to Cincinnati to visit my family at a part of Michigan that I was not aware existed. Shortly after we moved to Kingston, we drove out to Toronto to see him there as well, which was nice since I'd never seen him in Canada before. As per usual, we finished our summer by seeing him back in Columbus in August, where we sat next to his aunt and cousin and talked to them for a bit.  We also decided to do a last-minute trip out to Vermont to see him as well, which was extremely fun considering it was two days after I'd had major oral surgeon. #dedication

 

When December hit, we saw him in Michigan once more en route to visit my family for Christmas & New Years. Unbeknownst to us, it would be the most recent time we'd seen Lee as a result of Miss Rona.

 

Nonetheless, my love for Lee has only continued to grow over the years as we've gotten to get close with him and some of his family members (boundaries? what are those?). He's always been so great and appreciative of our support for him, and - as evidenced above - has played a large role in mine and Andrew's relationship. Though IDF has an undying hatred for him, I still have some of my best memories on here back when the fan boards were active and we all hung out there. I've also gotten to make some really good friends over the past decade at various Lee shows, and I can't imagine what my life would be like nowadays had he not auditioned for Idol when he did.

 

I'm expecting him to be one of the first few out, but I'm just glad I was able to get him this far.  

  

On 8/31/2020 at 12:38 AM, *Chris said:

 

This ranking is for Elliott and a deal made - otherwise, Lee would have been lower than this placement.

On 8/27/2020 at 8:20 AM, Zoey said:

Lee lands here by default as he’s one of my least favourite winners ever and I wasn’t mad about his season. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think Lee is talented but he isn’t the kind of contestant that I’m usually interested in. His style of music isn’t the kind of music I’d choose to listen to so it just makes sense that he falls here below a couple of contestants I’m indifferent on and above the contestants that I cannot stand.

  

On 8/31/2020 at 12:44 AM, 1234567890 said:

Lee DeWyze

 

 

I think think about coming to @Elliott and making a deal but I figured he would never go for it so I just placed him where I felt he deserved to be. Well, if I was being honest I would rank him last place but I fee like Lee DeWyze is no thread to win this competition and he is more like getting a thanks for coming award for being in the finals. No shade, but he was the worst winner until Nick Fradiani came along and sometimes I still think that is debatable. Crystal Bowersox was robbed that season. Point, blank and the period. His best performance on the show was "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová which was a duet with Crystal so that is saying something, American Idol Season 9 was a stain on the shows history and it's only saving grace was Crystal winning. I commend @Elliott for getting him against all odds. I guess people are really scared of his chaotic ways.

  

On 8/22/2020 at 6:07 PM, Alex95 said:

Lee DeWyze

I wasn't sure how I was going to do these final rankings, but no one reached out to me to offer any deals, so I decided to easiest way was to rank everyone honestly. I only had one petty ranking who I'm sure will be revealed much later than Lee (unless Elliott made deals with literally every other ranker in the game which I would not put past him). Anyways, Lee is easily my least favorite member of the top 24, so I decided to rank him last. I just don't think he's really that talented at all. Lucky for him, I never had the energy to truly hate him because he was on season nine which is one of the most truly awful seasons of Idol anyone has ever seen. Like yeah his win was undeserving, but who did he rob? Michael Lynche? Aaron Kelly? Tim Urban?! I kinda like Casey and Crystal and Siobhan had a decent amount of highs, but I mean, I'm not throwing any hissy fits over any of them losing American Idol. My favorite performance of Lee's would probably be "The Boxer". He connected well with the emotion behind the song and sang it mostly well. It wasn't a pitch perfect vocal, but I'd struggle to find a single pitch perfect vocal from Lee. After the tongue lashing the judges gave Lee after "Treat Her Like A Lady" I was surprised how high the judges were on the performance and wondered what could be happening there. Then "Hey Jude" happened and it became such a performance with the pimp spot and everything and the judges were salivating over it and the writing was on the wall that the producers have decided Lee would be our season nine winner and I was not about to get on board with that whatsoever. Nothing personal Elliott and Andrew, I'm sure Lee's a nice guy (though I found him painfully uncharismatic on the show). Just like the other 23 more!

 

Edited September 3, 2020 by sublymonal

[Alex95]

Omg has someone with a number one ranking ever been last in a final ranking before?  

[FrogLenzen]

mother effing gasp

 

I honestly didn't expect it

[1234567890]

At least I didn't rank him last so consider that a personal victory.

[Elliott]

[Elliott]

Just now, 1234567890 said:

At least I didn't rank him last so consider that a personal victory.

"I think think about coming to @Elliott and making a deal but I figured he would never go for it"

 

You clearly don't know me.

[Elliott]

3 minutes ago, Alex95 said:

Omg has someone with a number one ranking ever been last in a final ranking before?  

Here I am, constantly setting a new standard for flopping in a final ranking 

[Deeee]

Things have started off well here I see. 

[Elliott]

Just now, Deeee said:

Things have started off well here I see. 

[Solaris]

Pretty sure I ranked him 16th? not 19th @sublymonal

Edited September 3, 2020 by Solaris

[1234567890]

12 minutes ago, Elliott said:

"I think think about coming to @Elliott and making a deal but I figured he would never go for it"

 

You clearly don't know me.

This should say: "I did think about coming to @Elliott and making a deal but I figured he would never go for it..."

[*Chris]

Crazy that someone's #1 is already out

Andrew & Elliott, I always love hearing about your relationship with Lee especially how he recorded a song for the wedding  

[sublymonal]

8 minutes ago, Solaris said:

Pretty sure I ranked him 16th? not 19th @sublymonal

Oops I swapped you and Nico. Nico ranked him 19th

[Solaris]

Just now, sublymonal said:

Oops I swapped you and Nico. Nico ranked him 19th

 

okay just so @Elliott cant be mad at me, as I was Lee's third highest ranker!

[sublymonal]

Also #23 is ready to be posted too

[Solaris]

Just now, sublymonal said:

Also #23 is ready to be posted too

 

Post it!

 

Also whoever it is, should just give up their spot to Ryan Starr

[Elliott]

2 minutes ago, *Chris said:

Crazy that someone's #1 is already out

Hopefully that doesn't mean my #24 is at #1.

 

[1234567890]

2 minutes ago, Solaris said:

Also whoever it is, should just give up their spot to Ryan Starr

[Elliott]

3 minutes ago, Solaris said:

Also whoever it is, should just give up their spot to Ryan Starr

What if it's Carrie?

[Solaris]

Just now, Elliott said:

What if it's Carrie?

 

It won't be.

[*Chris]

6 minutes ago, sublymonal said:

Also #23 is ready to be posted too

I'm nervous :shiver: 

[1234567890]

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[Alex95]

So if Chris made a deal with Elliott (assumedly Carrie and Lee get high rankings) I could now totally see Carrie winning 

[Elliott]

Just now, 1234567890 said:

Elliott

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[1234567890]

Congrats to @Elliott for at least getting Lee to the finals. I've always loved your friendship with him and wish I had one like that with one of my favorite Idol alumni. It's truly magical what he did for your wedding. To @Elliott and @sublymonal. Lee will always be apart of your lives, your wedding and The Walking Dead.