David Archuleta Calls ‘The Masked Singer’ Experience 15 Years After ‘American Idol’ ‘Healing’
Subsequent to putting second on season 7 of American Symbol, David Archuleta never expected to partake in another singing rivalry.
Archuleta, 32, stated, “I was intimidated to do any kind of competition.” “Oh my gosh, I don’t think I ever want to put myself in that kind of environment again,” I just thought to myself.The “Crush” singer admits he “wasn’t thrilled” about the initial prospect of going on The Masked Singer season 9, but ultimately decided, “This is going to be the perfect way to face my fear and rewrite the narrative of my experience in a competition.”
Archuleta competed as Macaw on season 9 and was runner-up in Wednesday’s finale behind Medusa, who turned out to be singer Bishop Briggs.”It was so much fun,” Archuleta says. “It took some encouragement for my team to do something like this, because I developed a fear for some reason of doing competitions on TV, but I’m really glad I did it. It ended up becoming a very healing experience.”
Archuleta shares how performing as Macaw seemed like a workout at times, what it felt like recovering from vocal cord surgery months before competing and how coming out as queer and leaving the Mormon church shaped his new music.
Do you think that performing inside the costume helped you feel a little bit more comfortable?
Yeah, I think you’re so used to having to be a performer, you become a character and you feel like you have to live up to it. You don’t know what you’re supposed to be to please everybody. It can create a lot of pressure.
Being in a world where you’re constantly critiqued, it’s so healing to be complimented and that they highlight the good qualities in you. I’m really thankful to them.
What was the biggest challenge of performing as Macaw?
The biggest challenge I had was my head, and also my arms. In some of my rehearsals, if I really jerked or jumped, made a quick movement or bent over, my head could potentially fall. There was one rehearsal where it did fall.
Otherwise, I had to just glide around being very careful with my steps and the position of my head. There’s like this little wire that ran down from my wrist to my armpit underneath, so it was kind of hard to bend my arms. It was like having workout bands in my arms, so it wasn’t too bad.I was supposed to go on tour last year. There was a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, which added to the pressure on my voice. A blood vessel on my vocal cords basically popped. I also had vocal nodules on top of that, so I had to not speak for three months. I had to get this text-to-audio app. I would text everything and then hit the button and it would speak it out loud for me.
That’s how I spoke to everybody for three months. If I went to a restaurant or groceries, or to the store and stuff, if I needed to talk to someone, I would type it out and then play it for them. Three months later I was able to speak again. I started doing voice therapy just to get my voice back to strength. It was April or May that I was able to speak very much again.
And a year later to be in The Masked Singer finals is such a triumph.
It is really interesting because there’s certain things that I’m like, “Oh my gosh, my voice” … It’s still kind of recovering because there was some scarring that happened from the surgery that was giving me problems as well. I just found out about the scarring while I was on The Masked Singer. It worked out. To make it to the finale of another competition after that felt really good.
