So, I need to tell you that I hate American Idol. I mean, I loathe pretty much everything it stands for. Now, full disclosure, I don’t hate all of the artists who have come out of American Idol; I pretty much dig Kelly Clarkson’s new album – or part of it, anyway – and I really dug Breakaway. I rather like Carrie Underwood so far, and I sorta want to have Jennifer Hudson’s baby. Still, the show gives birth to so much mediocrity that I find myself able to list only two artists it has birthed that I hate – Daughtry and Clay Aiken – and anyway, that it launches mediocre careers gives me no more reason to hate it than I have to hate most of FM Radio.

So all that is to say, I don’t like the show. I don’t watch the show. I used to enjoy the first few episodes of each season, when people who genuinely believed themselves to be talented stood before Randy, Simon and Paula and warbled like asthmatic donkeys before seeing their “dreams” crumble before them. Even that stopped being fun after awhile; you suddenly realize that every single person in America has “dreamed” of being a rock star at one time or another, and it’s very sad that some people never had that moment of dawning realization where they realized, “Hmm. I seem to have little or no musical talent. It’s possible that I should not be a rock star.” The members of Nickelback seem to have missed this realization, for example, as did Ashlee Simpson.

So I didn’t watch this season, though you’d practically have to have been living in a cave not to have heard something about it somewhere. Still, I guess I’m cave-adjacent, because I’d never heard Adam Lambert sing or speak until this morning when he was on Good Morning America. And I’m just wondering if anyone else has caught on to this similarity:

On the left, Idol runner-up Adam Lambert. On the right, Garth Brooks’ late-90s alter-ego Chris Gaines. Now, I haven’t really heard enough of these two gents’ music to compare them, but the physical resemblance is a little uncanny, no?