Today's Pick

American Idol's reigning champ Kris Allen is back in front of a camera, but instead of having to win the hearts and minds of "American Idol's" TV audience, his new mission is to win the hearts and wallets of America's music buyers. Allen has unveiled the new music video for his first single, the up-tempo "Live Like We're Dying," off his upcoming self-titled album, due out November 17. The song was written by Andrew Frampton, Steve Kipner, Danny O'Donoghue, and Mark Sheehan. It originally performed by the Irish rock group 'The Script,' as a bonus track for the Japanese release of their self-titled debut album. What would you change about your life if you knew that you were dying? Despite his ultra quick rise to fame the 24-year-old AI rocker managed to stay grounded.
The single has met with mostly positive reviews. About.com praised the song for being an excellent first single, calling it "possibly the best first post-American Idol single yet by an American Idol champion," and Entertainment Weekly called the song "a future smash hit." Yahoo! News' Billboard singles review described it as "impressive" and felt that Allen's version of the song "improves on the unreleased version with a nuanced vocal and a nimble, rhythmic delivery." The Seattle Times described the song as "a marked improvement over what some Idol winners have put out as their first post-show single".
The music video was directed by Marco Puig and was shot all night at a junkyard in the LA desert. Throughout the video, Allen is shown playing both an acoustic guitar and a piano, as well as singing without any instruments. Arkansas native described the video that "The idea behind it is that I plug in the clock and I'm pulling the big cord through the junkyard and through all these other things and then I plug in the clock and it starts counting down to zero and there's performance stuff in there. In the end when it hits zero, it's kind of like the song, it's like we only have so much time so we gotta do what we want to do. It was my first video, so I was really trying to have a great time."