'American Idol' top 6 performance

Don't Miss American Idol XIII-American Idol 2014 - Season 13

Don't Miss American Idol XIII - The Search For A Superstar Wednesdays at 8/7c and Thursdays at 9/8c on FOX! Visit AmericanIdol.com for exclusive videos, ...

Wednesday, American Idol was a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

'Cause the first thing a show that desperately wants to win back younger viewers needs to do is reference Donny and Marie Osmond.

Even judge Jennifer Lopez knows it's a down year for Idol: "I haven't got a lot of goosies this season," she told Sam Woolf after his performance of Imagine Dragons' It's Time (which gave them to her).

How bad is it? The show's now relying on guest appearances by second-tier boy bands (R5) and viral-star animals (Grumpy Cat) to entertain the audience between numbers.

Forcing the contestants into two genres did yield some surprising results, though. C.J. Harris, for instance, the closest thing to a country singer remaining on the show, stumbled horribly on his country choice, with an abysmally out-of-tune performance of the Zac Brown Band's Whatever It Is. There's no excuse for the Alabama native to have the night's worst country performance, but it may have saved Alex Preston, who stumbled when he tried to go uptempo with a version of Neon Trees' Animal.

Caleb Johnson continues to be the season's most consistent performer, blowing the judges away with the Black Crowes' Sting Me, then delivering an underwhelming but still solid rendition of Carrie Underwood's Undo It.

Jena Irene continues to help herself in the competition, starting the night with an exceptional performance of Heart's Barracuda, then splitting the voting panel with Carrie Underwood's So Small. Even Connick, the dissenter, said his issues probably wouldn't matter in the voting. And he's right. I wasn't a big fan of Irene's at the start of the season, but now I'm starting to think she might be the only winner worth having.

Here's how I ranked Wednesday's performances.

Alex Preston, Always on My Mind (Willie Nelson). Preston returns to his comfort zone with this ballad, with exceptional results. He plays with the melody the way Nelson would have, which serves both as a tribute and as a way of personalizing the song. The band reharmonizes the song, too, adding even more magic. And Preston does an odd little run at the end, followed by a falsetto note, and it's just gorgeous. "I think this is a good night," Connick says. He feels lucky to have heard the performance. Urban says he would have liked a little more heartbreak in the song: "I heard it, but I didn't feel it as much as I wish I would have." Lopez calls it "really beautiful … Right here was the perfect balance of Alex and a great, beautiful song that everybody loves." Grade: A

Caleb Johnson, Sting Me (Black Crowes). The rock choice puts Johnson perfectly in his element, and he picks a Black Crowes song that sounds a lot like the Rolling Stones. Johnson's probably the one performer on the show for whom a strong performance like this is more important than the actual song. And he turns a near-disaster into a great moment, losing the mic, then retrieving it by sliding into it, never missing a beat. "That was some real rock 'n' roll!" Lopez says. Connick adds, "When you take a perfect song choice and you couple that with an incredible performance, it's virtually impossible to beat." Urban commends him for turning a potential disaster into TV gold. Grade: A

Jena Irene, Barracuda (Heart). Irene brings a touch of Paramore's Hayley Williams or Evanescene's Amy Lee to the '70s Heart hit — a song that found a younger audience several years ago via the Guitar Hero video game franchise. Irene continues to look like she's peaking at just the right time. The show introduced her as "The Wildcard" at the top of the show — if she keeps this up, she could be "The Favorite." "That was a perfect song for your voice and your range," Keith Urban told her. "You set the bar high." Lopez feels she has a real chance at making the finale: "What it's going to take is performances like that, every single time." Connick tells her, "You have such a strong voice, Jena, and it was such a perfect match for that song."Grade: B+

Sam Woolf, It's Time (Imagine Dragons). Woolf picked a great song for his voice, and the backing band swiped the staging straight from Imagine Dragons. I wish he'd relax a little bit. He looks so earnest and intense when he's performing. But he does connect with the camera. Lopez starts the commenting, though she has a hard time over the screaming audience: "I got goosies on that one. I haven't got a lot of goosies this season." She calls it a full-blown performance. Connick says he could hear Woolf singing that song in a concert. "All those wonderful things that make you you — you're such a sweet, humble, kind guy … You're blossoming, man." Urban liked two moments in particular: A high note and the last note. "There was a gravitas, there was a weight about it. You've got a lot of stuff in you, Sam. You've got a lot of emotion." When he learns to tap into that, "it'll explode. You've just got to release it." Grade: B+

Jessica Meuse, Somebody to Love (Jefferson Airplane). Meuse is looking more and more like a star. She looks — and, more importantly, sounds — like she belongs with this song. "You're here because you have this fantastic voice," Connick tells her, adding that she presented it in the strongest possible way tonight. Urban agrees, saying it played to her tonal strengths, thought "I would still like to see a little more release, and you've got to figure out how to do that." Lopez says, "There has to be a freedom to the performance. … Once you get up there, you kind of have to throw all that out the window and just feel." Grade: B+

Caleb Johnson, Undo It (Carrie Underwood). Considering what a hair-metal fan Underwood is, having Johnson pick one of her songs probably wasn't that much of a stretch. Johnson strips any pretense of country away from the song and plays it like a full-throttle rocker. The only problems with the performance were with the song itself. "Sometimes magic happens," Lopez says. "It happened for you tonight. It just happened earlier." Connick also was underwhelmed. "The magic really happened in the first song." This one, he says, sounded more forced. "It was still an extremely strong performance." Urban thought it was great: "I can't wait to hear what country song you do later." Grade: B

Sam Woolf, You're Still the One (Shania Twain). Woolf makes a smart move, flipping the gender on the Twain song, which gives him lots of bonus romance points. He gets even more when he crouches at the edge of the stage and starts holding hands with the girls in the audience. And it's a good vocal, too. "It's a good song for you, lyrically," Urban says. "These girls were going crazy down there." Woolf still needs to relax more, Urban says. Lopez thinks he's "so cute, it's crazy." Her favorite parts are when he goes over to the girls, or has feelings: "The more you can tap into that, the better and better you're going to become." Connick says, "You have found the people, now it's just a matter of not singing it so perfectly." That is, to the point of being dull. Grade: B

Jena Irene, So Small (Carrie Underwood). Irene takes a smart approach to Underwood's song, letting piano and string patches carry her through it. She throws in a lot of vocal embellishments at the top end of her range, though, and, while she nails most of them, not all of them work. Urban doesn't care. "You're everything that Idolhas always been about," he says. "We watch you get better and better and better every week." Lopez, who got goosies during the performance, thought the power of her vocals took over: "Very, very beautiful." Connick thinks the song has so many vocal ornaments that it was hard to hear the melody: "The ornaments that you chose to sing didn't necessarily match what was going on underneath you. … It didn't work for me, but I don't think it's really going to matter tonight." Grade: B

Jessica Meuse, Jolene (Dolly Parton). The only way Meuse could have made a more obvious choice would be for her to have chosen Patsy Cline's Crazy. She rocks out on the song, completely obliterating the fragility and vulnerability that makes the song special. It's bar-band stuff, the reason she'll have a hard time building a career for herself beyond this show. Connick thinks she delivered it in a strong and convincing way. Urban hated the arrangement: "It didn't need the weight and the darkness of the way the band played it." Lopez says, "Your vocal was really strong." And it was, but that's not all there is to delivering a song. Grade: B-

C.J. Harris, American Woman (Guess Who/Lenny Kravitz). Harris' voice has an enjoyable rootsy quality, but a hard-rocker he's not. His version of American Womanowes more to Kravitz than the Guess Who, and he just doesn't have Kravitz's raw funkiness. A strong performance from the band props him up. Connick thought it was a good performance and continues to like the "cry" he has in his voice — though he notes intonation continues to be an issue for Harris. "I thought it was pretty good; I've heard you do better." What struck Urban about the song is "it's all attitude." The guy in the song's not a nice guy, he says (actually, he's a Canadian — it's the woman, America, that's the problem, but whatever). Lopez loves the look: "You look the part." Even she can't tell rock and roll's not his thing, "but I really did think you pulled it off."Grade: C+

Alex Preston, Animal (Neon Trees). Nice to see Preston step out of singer-songwriter mode for a change. Too bad he doesn't just drop the guitar entirely and play the crowd at the foot of the stage instead. It might distract people from one of his most inconsistent vocal performances. "Man, I just wanted you to release a bit more," Urban tells him, saying he didn't dominate the band the way he should have. Boos ensue. "You expect so much, and it just felt there was a little bit something missing, for me, from you," says Lopez, who didn't think it had the explosiveness rock needs. (Urban blames the socks, which Preston doesn't usually wear.) Connick thinks he'll get a pass for having been so good in the pass: "It almost sounded like you couldn't get your breath," though he was pleased to see Preston finally sing an uptempo tune.Grade: C

C.J. Harris, Whatever It Is (Zac Brown Band). I don't usually notice Harris' intonation problems as much as Connick does, but, boy, I do this time. It's bad enough to make you wish for AutoTune. Lopez says, "This is more your style, but, I have to say, I expected a little more from you." Connick says, if he's lucky enough to stick around, he should find some songs choices "that will kill. … You have to come out and give everything." Urban says, "I love you as a guy." But, "at this point, you've really got to choose these songs carefully." Grade: D