Friday , March 29 2024
Singer-songwriter Kris Allen sits down with Blogcritics Magazine before performing to a sold-out crowd at Café du Nord in San Francisco, CA.

Kris Allen: Total Request Idol

Not every singer would choose to hit the road a handful of days after breaking their wrist in a head-on collision, but back in January, Kris Allen did just that. The season eight American Idol winner has been soldiering on – sans guitar – through his aptly named Out Alive Tour, which hit the West Coast in early February and is wrapping up in Colorado later this week.

To mix it up a bit on this tour, the singer-songwriter got his fans involved by asking them to request songs via Twitter that they would like to hear him and his band (Cale Mills, Chris Torres, and Andrew St. Marie) cover each night.

“In coming up with the set, you just want the fans, especially nowadays, you want them to have a reason to come to shows,” Allen explained during my interview with him last week prior to performing to a sold-out crowd later that evening at Café du Nord in San Francisco, CA.

“People aren’t coming to shows like they used to and that’s okay, I get it, but I think that’s just another reason for them to come every night and see if I’m going to do their song, possibly. It keeps us on our toes too, which is really good, because we could … [do] the same thing every night, which is cool and a lot of people do that, but … it helps us get warmed up before the shows too. We get to play and kind of sing a little bit, so it’s good.”

The singer said that he lets people know he’s looking for a song “around two-three o’clock in the afternoon” and doesn’t start going through the requests for the night until a few hours prior to the show as to allow for a greater choice of options.

“We pick like three [songs] and go over it with the guys, like, ‘What do you guys think you can do?’ Because if it was up to me, I would do anything, because I could sit down and I could play by myself, but these guys have a lot they gotta do, so we kind of have to go over it together. It’s fun, though.”

Check out my full interview with Kris Allen below, and find out what the band’s process of putting together the request song each night is like, what has been his favorite request to play, and what has been the most enjoyable part of the Out Alive Tour.

 

Out Alive Tour Dates:

February 20 – Wheeler Opera House – Aspen, CO

February 21 – Soiled Dove Undergound – Denver, CO

February 22 – Old Main Chapel – University of Colorado – Boulder, CO

For news and additional tour dates, check out Kris Allen’s official Facebook page.

 

Photo credit: Karen Datangel

 

 

About Kirsten Coachman

Kirsten Coachman is a writer and editor from the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her long-running music blog, Wait...WHAT, at waitwhatmusic.net. Follow Kirsten Coachman on Twitter: @KirsCoachman

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