Didi Benami: 'It's been a crazy-cool ride'
4/02/2010 01:05:00 PM
kenmouse
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When Didi Benami got on to American Idol, she wasn't prepared for the level of scrutiny she was about to receive. After all, she told reporters during an exit-interview conference call Thursday, "I wasn't an avid American Idol watcher." When she got to Idol, she found an environment that was "insane, intense -- like boot camp for singers."Didi seemed in good spirits and mentioned several times how excited she was about getting to go on the summer tour (since, for one thing, that means she won't have to spend another summer waitressing). As for getting eliminated from Idol: "You get kicked down, you've got to get back up and start over. It's not anything I haven't done before."
In fact, Idol was a lot like her Los Angeles experience in general. "You get kicked down a lot," in Los Angeles, says Didi, who moved there from her native Tennessee when she was 19. "I've had crazy roommates and all sorts of ridiculous experiences," she says, including living briefly in her car several times. Those ridiculous experiences gave her the motive to teach herself to play guitar, so she could write songs as a means of getting out words and emotions she couldn't otherwise express.
"Music is therapeutic for me," she says. "I do it as a release."
That's one reason her moment with Ryan Seacrest Tuesday got so awkward, as he tried to press her for details about the person she had in mind when she sang the Jimmy Ruffin hit What Becomes of the Brokenhearted. "I was trying to convey a message through the song, not through somebody asking me why I was singing it," Didi says. "It was an uncomfortable question." Though she never named her directly, Didi said she believed that most people who watch the show would have known who she was singing for -- Rebecca Lear, Didi's roommate at Nashville's Belmont University, who died in a car wreck on her way home for Christmas break after their first semester there.
Had she lasted one more week, Didi says she was looking forward to singing either The Beatles' Blackbird or Across the Universe.
Asked about Kara DioGuardi's comment that Didi had lost her way, Didi responded. "I don't feel like I lost my way. I feel like they wanted to me do something specific week." When she went outside the judges' playbook, she feels, she got criticized. "It's not every day you get to sing in front of 30 million people, and I wanted to do different things."
She, Siobhan Magnus and Crystal Bowersox became particularly close during her Idol stay. "Crystal actually came down and stayed with me last night," she says.
Going forward, Didi hopes to record an album -- "singer/songwriter-type, low-key, relaxing music" -- and she'd also like a nap. "I can't wait to sleep," she says. "I never thought I'd say that."
All in all, she says, "It's been a crazy, cool ride. ... I'm not at all distraught about anything."
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