Phillip Phillips' 'Home' - How it Rose to Olympic Fame

Thanks to being aired alongside a women's gymnastics special segment during the 2012 London Olympics last week, "American Idol" winner Phillip Phillips' hit track "Home" has jumped from 84 to the no. 9 spot on Billboard's Hot 100 this week.

"Home" was used as the accompanying music track to various video footage aired on NBC of Team U.S.A.'s "Fab Five" - the girls are pictured soaring through the air and snatching the gold to the sound of Phillips' soothing vocals. Since being involved in the London Olympics coverage, "Home" has been downloaded an outstanding 228,000 times as of last week (a 472 percent increase), and even with the closing of the Olympic Games, Phillips still slides in at no. 2 on the iTunes singles chart (following Taylor Swift).

So, how is it that Phillips got so lucky to snag the attention of Olympics producers to end up in Team U.S.A.'s gymnastics footage?

As reported by Entertainment Weekly, it all started when senior Olympics producer David Michaels was introduced to the Phillips song back in May by his daughter, Megan Michaels, who is a supervising producer on "American Idol."

Michaels claims, "My wife and I were actually sitting at home watching the finale, and I heard the song for the first time, and I said to her, "Wow, I bet I could use that in the Olympics on some night."

Coincidentally, around the same time 19 Entertainment representative Myles Lewis (who helps to manage many of the "Idol" albums) asked Megan if she knew of anyone working on the Olympics. Of course she mentioned her father David.

After meeting with Lewis, Michaels began editing some footage, stating, "I took some old gymnastics footage on my home computer... and I laid down the song. I just wanted to see if it would work, and then it was one of those a-ha moments of, 'Wow, this could really be something cool.'"

The original "Team Trials" video made by Michaels is posted below. People responded positively to it right away.

And that was that - Phillips rose to Lond Olympic fame without even having to athletically compete.

Michaels knew "Home" was a perfect fit for the women's gymnastics coverage, especially given its sound structure and lyrics:

"The song is so perfectly put together for our purposes... you had this great instrumental lead-in, you've got the vocal that can play in the clear, and then you've got the instrumental out. For me, that's perfect... [The song] has got a team feeling to it - it doesn't really work as well for an individual. So, it fit perfectly for the team concept."

Congrats to the "Fab Five," and congrats to Phillip Phillips for being able to join in on their glory.

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