2009 Lookback | Kris Allen headlines Season 8's American Idols Live Summer Tour

It's summer, it's hot, and it's time to lookback at a happier time - Summer of 2009, when Kris Allen and his fellow season 8 American Idols went on tour! Devoted fans of the season logged on their computers for each show's cellcast. (Yes, that's right, back in 2009 we listened to someone at the show sharing the garbled audio from their cell phone.) A few of the shows were livestreamed thanks to some intrepid Adam Lambert fans who started a UStream account (gotta give credit when credit is due! The Adamcast as it was called was much better quality than the cellcasts.) People had nice cameras in 2009 and where livestreaming was off and on, pretty much every show featured spectacular live videos, which made the Idol tour 2009 easy to follow.

As for this blog's subject? Kris Allen, having won Idol, got to close the show.  I'll have a few more posts about the 2009 summer tour coming up that will focus on some specific fun things (the NY shows, the show I went to (Philadelphia) and the tour finale in Manchester, NH). This post, however, will focus on the overall tour and also contain Kris' setlist and some favorite videos from the starting shows of the tour (including the now hard to find official Bright Lights video). Enjoy the memories from a far more innocent summer ten years ago!

2009 Lookback | Kris Allen Does Post-Idol Winner's Press, May 2009

So it's May 21, 2009, and Kris Allen just won American Idol.



Now it's time for him to do a TON of press. Back in 2009, American Idol was still a BIG thing and the finale, with its "upset" winner, got a lot of attention. In this post, we'll look back at some of those interviews... Full disclosure. May 2009 was a busy time in my life, and while I made time to watch Idol, in a lot of cases, writing this post will be the first time I watch most of these interviews! Hopefully for those of you who have seen them before, you'll enjoy some fond memories or pick up on some new items. I also have a lot of mp3s of live Heartless and No Boundaries in this post. So sit back, and check out all the media from May 2009 after the break. And if I missed anything from May of 2009, please comment and I'll add to this post!

Idol | Kris Allen wins American Idol Season 8 on May 20, 2009!

Our look back at 2009 has reached a big anniversary! On May 20, 2009, Kris Allen won American Idol Season 8. If you've been reading the Season 8 lookback posts (linked at the bottom of this post if you would like to), you might agree with me that this wasn't as much of an upset as Idol and the media like to portray it as being. While Adam Lambert certainly was a talented and extremely memorable contestant, Kris put together a solid and consistent run of great song choices and exceptional performances, coupled with an ability to straddle genres.

Future posts about 2009 and Kris will cover the post-Idol frenzy of media, the Season 8 Idol tour, and the making and release of KATA, but in this post, we'll fondly recall the last two Idol episodes of 2009. Onward for lots of videos, photos, mp3s and memories!