

Multi-talented artist Harry Connick Jr. mentors the final 4 on 'American Idol' on Wednesday. With Connick are Angie Miller, left, Amber Holcomb, Candice Glover and Kree Harrison. / Michael Becker, Fox

Here's maybe the biggest side benefit of not getting eliminated from American Idol last week: Whoever was going to go home got to be mentored by the always excellent Harry Connick Jr. Tonight, the four remaining finalists -- Amber Holcomb, Angie Miller, Candice Glover and Kree Harrison -- tackle the Great American Songbook and more contemporary tunes, too. Tune in, then tell me how you think they did. -- Brian Mansfield

Tonight, the Final Four will sing songs from 2013, followed by standards. Harry Connick Jr.'s offering his mentoring help.

"American Idol's lucky this year to have four very, very talented singers in the top four," he says. He thinks tonight will be exciting because it'll present two different sides of each singer.


The show's got a few minutes left tonight, so the Final Four gets a group sing. Strangely, it's a song made famous by a British X Factor group -- Little Mix's Wings. Bet Simon Cowell is loving that.


Kree Harrison's singing Stormy Weather. She tells Harry Connick Jr. she listened to Etta James' and Lena Horne's versions. "If you sing simply, it can be very, very powerful," Connick tells her. He wants her to get rid of all her runs. "They're gratuitous. And they're wrong." Plus, they take away from the melody.

"Do you want to be a great singer?" he asks her. Of course, she does. Then sing the melody, he tells her, and forget everything else. He thinks it'll be almost impossible for her to actually learn the melody in a few days, but she'll probably get enough of it to get by on the show.

Harrison pares back some of the gymnastics for her performance, but she can't resist adding a few, almost as afterthoughts to the main phrase. When the song modulates, she adds a lot of volume to it, and her runs don't quite work. It's a crowd pleaser -- but Connick was right.

Mariah Carey says she was interested by the song choice, because it's so overused. And she thinks Harrison looks gorgeous. (Uh-oh.) She was expecting something bluesier, less lounge-y. She wonders if Randy Jackson agrees with her, but I don't think he even understands her. She does think Connick was on point.

Keith Urban agrees with Connick, too. "I would have chosen a different song, and we wouldn't be having this conversation," he says. "Your instincts are beautiful, and they set you apart from everybody else."

Nicki Minaj can see how Connick's advice would be startling to young singers. Outside of that, "I wish you guys would have paid more attention to the song choice, because it means so much, whether you're going to put someone to sleep or give a memorable performance."

Randy Jackson heard the disconnect, too. But in a confusing situation, he recommends,"Always stick to who you are."

Connick gets into the act. "She has to learn the melody first. ... You have to learn the song first, and then be Kree. But you have to learn it." He can't believe Jackson told Harrison to be herself but that she should have sung Stormy Weather more like Etta James. Jackson doesn't think that's quite what he says. And now they start bickering.

"You're making Nicki and Mariah look very benign here," Ryan Seacrest tells them.

Grade: B-


Harry Connick Jr. tells Ryan Seacrest that he loves singers who do runs -- he mentions Kim Burrell specifically -- but the thing about standards is, they don't need them. "Hitting high notes at the end of My Funny Valentine doesn't make any sense," he says.

He tells Candice Glover something along those lines when she tries to play with Billie Holiday's You've Changed. Just sing the melody, he tells her. "Maybe some of the 14-year-olds in the audience won't get it, but I'd be willing to take that risk."

Glover responds to the suggestion. Her performance is all tone and phrasing and dynamic shifts, with just the occasional jump into head voice or extra bit of vibrato delivered with such an intensity that it can induce chills.

Another standing ovation -- this one deserved.

"Candice is in it to win it tonight, y'all," which is Randy Jackson's way of saying that he's speechless. He says he disagrees with Connick, that it's not about runs, it's about feeling. Of course, that was exactly Connick's point -- he was criticizing Amber Holcomb for not feeling her song enough. Which just shows Jackson doesn't always know what he's hearing.

"Oh, I hate it, that was the worst thing I've ever heard in my life," says Mariah Carey, trying her hand at sarcasm.

"I enjoyed watching Mariah watch you," Keith Urban says. "Your power and your control was just beautiful."

"I'm not going to add anything else," Nicki Minaj says. "Ryan, come on out."

Grade: A+


"Can we stop you?" Harry Connick Jr. says as Amber Holcomb sing the first line of My Funny Valentine. "What is this song about?"

"A guy. Who, I guess, they're being real funny, weird," Holcomb says.

"To be truthful, she had no idea what the song was about," he says. And he grills her about every line in the song. And, with that, he has revealed Holcomb's fatal weakness. She sings well, she just doesn't know what she's singing about. It's that connection thing that the judges seem to sometimes hear, apparently with everyone but her.

Holcomb sings beautifully, elegantly, but it's almost impossible to hear her without thinking of that stinging critique. It brings every note, every impressive run into question. But that voice is certainly impressive. Impressive enough to get a standing ovation from all four judges.

"Up there looking like a beautiful, budding red rose," says Nicki Minaj. "Why are you looking like you want to cry?"

"I'm just overwhelmed," Holcomb says. But Connick's comments - and the fact that her fatal weakness has just been exposed publicly - have to be weighing on her heart.

"You're up there crying because you're thinking about votes," Minaj says. "No matter what happens tomorrow, you have a lifetime ahead of you to make incredible moments in music. Please believe in yourself."

"I think you made a believer out of a lot of people," says Randy Jackson, who believes the ending of the song "was absolutely unbelievable." Even though she sang it early in the season, "You slayed it tonight, you added new wrinkles."

Mariah Carey's been asking for Holcomb to return to the spirit of the first time she sang that song, and she did that tonight. "Thank you."

From the point she hit her big run to the end of the song, "that performance was stellar," Keith Urban says. "All you needed was a little bit of confidence."

Grade: A-


Someone to Watch Over Me is a perfect song, because you don't have to do anything but sing the melody, Harry Connick Jr. thinks. So when Angie Miller starts playing with it, he tells her, "Don't sing notes that are not in the chords."

Miller picked the song because she often heard her mother sing it. By the time she takes the stage, she has simplified it. It's pretty enough, but there's more drama in the string arrangement than there is in Miller's performance. Good, but hardly great.

Keith Urban asked why she picked the song. "Because my mother used to sing it around the house," she tells him. "You sang it so beautifully," Urban says, adding that the clarity and the timbre in her voice was beautiful.

Miller puts Nicki Minaj in mind of a Disney princess. She could totally hear her singing Beauty and the Beast-type songs. "It definitely was better than the first performance."

Randy Jackson wasn't crazy about the arrangement, but "this girl can sing, and that was an amazing vocal."

Mariah Carey's mom used to sing that song, and she's in the audience tonight. "So thank you for choosing the song, because it has a special significance to me." She tries to disagree with Minaj, saying she doesn't have to sing at the top of her voice the entire time, but Minaj didn't say that, and the bickering begins again.

Grade: B+


Kree Harrison has been doing some soul-searching since getting raked over the coals by the judges last week. Hopefully, she'll be more believable singing Carrie Underwood's See You Again, her current choice for tonight.

"Smokin, absolutely smokin'," Harry Connick Jr. says after she runs through the song in rehearsal. "I wouldn't change a note of that. ... I would buy that in a second." And, if she calls him when she's making her record, he'll come help her.

Harrison's arrangement puts pedal steel front and center. And where Underwood starts belting from almost note one in her version, Harrison holds back. It's very tender. And she does connect: When Harrison sings, "Sometimes I feel my heart is breaking," she looks and sounds like it actually is.

"I felt like you were very connected, in the beginning of the song, particularly," Mariah Carey says. "You delivered that soul that you have within you." Even though she didn't go on a "vocal tirade" at the end, Carey appreciated its authenticity.

Keith Urban wasn't quite getting connected, though. "It's a power ballad," he says, and he felt like there was a conflict between the size of the song and the intimacy of seeing Harrison and the guitarist seated. "But your voice is faultless, it always is."

Nicki Minaj "loved my Kreedom performance, I really, really did." She wrote down that Harrison sang with her eyes. "I feel you absolutely connected to every lyric in that song." The technical things that Urban noticed didn't bother her.

"You got an amazing voice, and that was a great vocal," says Randy Jackson, who says he focuses more on the vocals at this point in the competition than any other thing.

Ryan Seacrest then brings out Harry Connick Jr., who, he says, loved her performance.

"Didn't she kill it?" Connick asks the audience. "She sounded great, right?"

He's going to stick around and listen to more.

Grade: A-


Candice Glover has an emotional connection to Bruno Mars' When I Was Your Man. Though it's sung from a man's point of view, she likes the idea of trying to put herself into that man's shoes.

"It's a hard thing to do, what you're doing," Harry Connick Jr. tells her, "and I hope you're happy with it."

She sings it beautifully, easily the strongest of the three performances so far tonight. And when the falsetto run hits, she lets the background singers handle, giving her own, lower run as counterpoint. The judges just shake their heads in amazement.

"First and foremost, this is a singing competition," says Randy Jackson. "If you can sing, you can sing anything! Yo! This girl right here, that's how you sing a song!"

"I must agree," says Mariah Carey. "Huge hit, Candice knows how to take any song and has the musicality to change it to suit her."

"I didn't care about the man thing, at all," says Keith Urban. "When you sing like that, you could sing When I Was Your Giraffe."

"That performance actually deserved a standing ovation," says Nicki Minaj. So she stands. So do Urban and Jackson. "Today, you gave me every single thing that I was talking about last week. I could see Candice as a current R&B artist right now. ... You feel and look, to me, like an artist right now." She's the first of the singers tonight to sing the song like it was her own.

Grade: A


Amber Holcomb considers getting to perform again this week a bit of redemption.

Holcomb has picked Pink's Just Give Me a Reason for her 2013 choice, but she's a bit iffy on the words. That's not a big deal to Harry Connick Jr., especially when he sees Holcomb start snapping her fingers and getting into the groove of the melody - something she does very, very well. Connick thinks it even improved the tone of her singing.

Like Miller, Holcomb has found a contemporary song with a lovely melody. Unlike Miller, Holcomb has an arrangement with some shape. The breakdown, where all the instruments except the drums and Holcomb's voice drop away, is especially impressive. But it doesn't quite have the swing it did when Holcomb was snapping her fingers in rehearsal.

Nicki Minaj notices the difference, too. "This particular performance, I didn't see that it was connected all the way through. Sometimes it was in, sometimes it was out."

"Did you have a good time tonight? Are you having fun?" Randy Jackson asks. "You look like you are out-of-your-mind nervous, thinking 20 things at once." Holcomb sort of grunts a response, indicating that Jackson's put his finger on something.

Mariah Carey wants everybody to understand how difficult it is to learn a new song, but she'd also like to have seen a more confident Amber Holcomb.

Keith Urban thinks Pink is an under-rated singer, so he understands why Holcomb had a hard time keeping everything together. Even with all her problems, he still loved the tone of her voice.

Grade: B+


Harry Connick tells Angie Miller that his whole house loves her -- except that he doesn't (it's a joke). Miller plans to sing Rihanna's Diamonds, and Connick compares her version to a lullaby.

Miller pulls way back on Diamonds, beginning it solo at the piano -- maybe the best way to experience her full personality. Bass and percussion come in at the chorus, as does a second voice. It's intimate and haunting, a very different experience from Rihanna's record. And when he stares at the camera, her eyes sparkle like, well, you know. It's pretty enough, but it lacks the magic of the hit version.

Keith Urban likes the muscular weight that Rihanna's record has, but he didn't feel Miller's arrangement kept that. "If you're going to take a song and change the arrangement, you're free to change the melody, too," he says.

Nicki Minaj felt like Miller's performance was different from her other piano performances because she's making more eye connection with the audience and trying to sell the song more with her body than her heart. "You can do better."

Randy Jackson doesn't think the arrangement went anywhere. But he does like Miller's leather shorts.

Mariah Carey feels like she tried to take the song to a different place, but she also noticed that Miller was playing to the camera more than usual.

Grade: B

Copyright 2014

Read the original story: 'American Idol': Top four, take two

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