Clay Aiken captured national attention as runner-up on the second season of Fox’s American Idol, where his Southern charm, gentle personality, and commanding tenor quickly turned him into a mainstream pop act and, years afterward, a regular presence on Broadway. He had originally intended to try out for the reality series The American Race, yet auditioned for Idol instead at the urging of a supportive friend. Among seven thousand aspirants, the Charlotte, North Carolina native earned the approval of the judges and the devotion of millions of viewers worldwide.
Born November 30, 1978, Aiken began performing as a child and, by age five, sang the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream” at a local high-school dance. Two years later he was ordering records through mail-order catalogs, collecting every style of music he could find. During his teenage years he sang regularly with the Raleigh Boys Choir and appeared in productions of The Music Man and Oklahoma! along with numerous stage plays and regional theater productions.
Although music remained central to his life, Aiken chose to major in special education at college and planned to pursue a master’s degree in administration at Virginia’s College of William & Mary. That path changed when he auditioned for American Idol and, in early 2003, performed weekly for an average audience of twenty-one million viewers. His version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” endeared him to the public; although Ruben Studdard ultimately won the season, Aiken secured a recording contract with RCA through Simon Fuller’s 19 Recordings Limited within weeks of the finale.
Later that month his debut single, “This Is the Night,” ascended to number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 and moved more than 392,000 copies in its opening week, surpassing the first-week sales record previously held by Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997.” In October 2003 Aiken issued his first full-length album, The Measure of a Man, which sold 613,000 copies during its debut week and entered Billboard’s Top 200 at number one. His holiday release, Merry Christmas with Love, followed in November 2004, topping the Top Holiday Albums chart with the largest opening-week sales ever recorded for a Christmas album in SoundScan history.
September 2006 brought A Thousand Different Ways. Early the following year Aiken made his Broadway debut, portraying Sir Robin in Spamalot, and later in 2008 he released On My Way Here, which included a song written by OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder. In 2010, on the Decca label, he issued Tried & True, an album of standards drawn from the 1950s and 1960s. After appearing on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2012, Aiken returned with Steadfast, a collection that revisited material from Tried & True, added several concert favorites, and featured his original single “Bring Back My Love.”
