In A Dream

Album: Voodoo Highway (1991)
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Songfacts®:

  • With a stripped-down approach to hard rock, Ray Gillen, formerly of Black Sabbath, and Jake E. Lee, former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist, fronted the supergroup Badlands, which lasted for only two albums before inside tensions ripped the band apart. Badlands' second CD, Voodoo Highway, included this song, which former American Idol Bo Bice shed new light on when he performed it sans any accompaniment during the 2005 competition.

    Bice remembers choosing to perform the song a cappella, and the reaction of the Idol producers. He told Songfacts: "Initially, I had picked the same song as Carrie (Underwood), and I can't remember exactly what it was. And you're not supposed to change your song at the last minute, because obviously, they've got a huge band and they can't just learn a new song at the drop of a hat. But the song got cleared. It had not been cleared before. So it had come in that week or whatever, and been cleared, and I asked if I could change my song. Of course, I had to perform it for some folks, for some producers and stuff. And they kind of looked at me funny, and one of them I remember saying, 'You know that no one has ever done an a cappella version of anything this far in the competition.' No one's ever done it past the Top 24 or whatever. He said, 'You've got a 32-piece orchestra and band, and you want to go on in the Top 3 and do an a cappella? Okay. If that's what you wanna do, you do it.' And I did. And it was no stretch or anything, to be honest. I love the song, I love Ray Gillen and Badlands, and I used to use the song every night to warm up, so I could set my levels in clubs and in acoustic gigs and stuff. And I would sit and tweak the cues while I'm singing instead of going, 'Check, check, check one-two, check one-two.' So it's just a song that I love that got cleared."

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