Adam Lambert 24/7 News

Lambert's trying something even these bands didn't attempt -- to succeed in both the rock and pop camps at once. He loves his glam, but he admits that in terms of today's stars, he has more in common with Beyoncé than with Chris Daughtry.

"People look at me and immediately say, 'Oh, he's doing the musical-theater thing,' " he said. "But if you look at most female pop stars right now, how are they any less theater? Beyoncé is doing 'Single Ladies' with two girls in character shoes and leotards, doing Fosse choreography from 'Sweet Charity,' and 'West Side Story.' "

Lambert obviously learned some of his moves from his youth in the theater, but he's also always credited the friends he made through Burning Man, the annual festival of makeshift art that turns a patch of the Nevada desert into its own magic kingdom. If "Hair" introduced him to the language of the counterculture, Burning Man showed him how people spoke it every day.

"There's a community here in L.A. that's part of Burning Man," said Lambert, a San Diego native who moved to Hollywood after high school. "It's an underground community, and when I found out about it I was so much more excited about living here. The people I was meeting were a lot more interesting, more original. And happy, just happy.

"Los Angeles can be a really sad city. If you go to the clubs you meet a bunch of people trying to be actors and not fulfilling their dreams, and they're bitter and sad. . . . But in [the Burning Man] community no one cares. You're living your life, and you feel fabulous about it, and you might be doing it on $5 a day."

Lambert is certainly enjoying his bigger budget now -- especially the "expensive, beautiful and weird" clothes -- but he seems to have preserved the perspective he gained hanging out with serious bohemians.

SOURCE