LITTLE ROCK — Finishing third on the famed American Idol competition is not a bad outcome the way Casey James sees it, especially since he had never watched the show before becoming one of its contestants last year.
And though James is still working on his debut album, he has already made a major leap toward the musical stardom he has sought, thanks to a gig as one of the opening acts on eight dates of Sugarland’s “Incredible Machine Tour 2011,” which will be James’ first big-time tour since last summer’s American Idol Live Tour.
“We didn’t have the channel that show was on where I lived,” says James, 28, of Cool, Texas, northwest of Fort Worth. “But my mom heard about it, and she asked me to go to the auditions. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was playing a gig in Florida and the auditions were in Denver, but I managed to get there in time, although I was running on empty and I was pretty nasty.”
His making it onto the ninth season of the show came as no surprise to his family and friends. After all, they had seen him survive a serious motorcycle wreck at age 21 and prove wrong the doctor who had told him he would never play guitar again. He recovered sufficiently by last March that USA Today’s music critic, Brian Mansfield, called James “the best guitar player the show has seen.”
The biggest challenge these days is trying to compress his several hours’ worth of material into the 25 minutes he will get as an opening act.
The debut album will be released by Sony Nashville’s BNA label later this year, with James hoping it comes out sooner, rather than later.
“I’m hoping we get it out by May. It’s a mixture of stuff I wrote and things I co-wrote with those who really know the craft of songwriting. It’ll be a sort of Texas country blues-y thing.”
Weekend, Pages 38 on 03/03/2011