American Idol winner Phillip Phillips will issue his debut album, The World From the Side of the Moon, on November 19, Interscope Records announced on Monday.
The album is led by his hit, Home — Phillips’ “Idol” coronation song that got an impressive boost when it was paired with Olympic promos this summer — and it was produced by Gregg Wattenberg (Train, Daughtry), with Phillips writing or co-writing the majority of the disc.
When Phillips took the “Idol” crown in May, he earned a majority of the 132 million votes cast, but some critics wrote off the 22-year-old troubadour as just the latest “white guy with a guitar” to win — a trend that’s dominated the show for the last five seasons.
Earlier this year, The Times profiled the annual “Idol” tour, the last hurrah under the brand for the show’s finalists before their music careers become trickier. In an interview for that story, Phillips acknowledged that post-”Idol” success has been hard to come by for boys with guitars, but he hopes to break the mold. “If they paid attention to each person’s artistry, then they would know the difference between a lot of us,” Phillips said. “Kris [Allen] is different from David [Cook], David is different from Scotty [McCreery] and I’m different from all of them. I feel like I play the guitar and approach music a lot different than they do.
“A lot of people that have come out of ‘American Idol,’ it’s a lot of poppy stuff, there’s some country stuff, but I really wanted to show the world what I was trying to do with my album. I like writing my own stuff. Hopefully, people recognise No 1 hits aren’t always the best songs in the world.”
