Nightline Playlist: Clay Aiken

May 8, 2008— -- Long before he starred in Broadway's "Spamalot," Clay Aiken was a performer. Some might say he always knew his audience.

One day during a trip to the North Carolina coastline, Aiken and his mother came across a Christian puppet show on the boardwalk. The performers were singing "Kum Ba Yah" and asked if anybody wanted to sing along.

"At five years old I threw my hands up and I was like, 'OK, I'll come sing,'" Aiken said. "And they said, 'Sing whatever you want to,' and my mom said she was paranoid, petrified, that I was going to sing "Islands in the Stream" at this little Christian puppet show and embarrass her. But I think I sang something like 'Jesus Loves Me.'"

When all the other kids were proclaiming "I'm a Little Teapot," young Aiken favored "Islands In The Stream," by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, after hearing it on the radio.

Today Aiken, 29, still knows how to please a crowd and remains the most successful of the male "American Idol" contestants. His first three albums played it safe, with few original songs and lots of crowd-pleasing covers. Critics complained Aiken wasn't revealing enough, and after belting out Brian Adams and Mr. Mister, Aiken himself has admitted that it was tough for him to make a statement via repackaged music.

But unlike his previous albums that conform to a particular genre, Aiken considers his newest album, "On My Way Here," which arrived in stores this week, to be an eclectic mix that reflects his personal style. Aiken only wrote one song on the record, "Lover All Alone," but selected the remaining songs to represent experiences he's had in the past five years.

"I feel kind of lucky that we're in a position where I don't have to make everything sound the same on the album so people can say, 'Oh he fits in this category or this category.' We've been kind of lucky to do what we want to do and kind of test the waters in different places," Aiken said. "I mean, there's so much I like to sing and there's so many different styles I think are fun and worthy of being performed. So we don't let ourselves get pigeon-holed too much. We spent a lot of time making sure that we just found songs that we good for me."