American Idol: Phillip Phillips Single Named Goodbye Song of Season 12

FOX has announced that season 11 American Idol will be providing the soundtrack to live eliminations during season 12 with “Gone, Gone, Gone,” the second single from his gold album “The World From The Side Of The Moon.” It’s the follow-up to quadruple-platinum debut single “Home,” the most successful coronation song in the show’s history. Not coincidentally, it’s by far the most modern coronation song and was been used by the Olympics this summer, which gave the song a pretty tremendous boost in awareness.

Phillips is set to return to the Idol stage on Thursday, March 4th to perform “Gone, Gone, Gone” (you can check out the official music video below); also scheduled to perform on the live results show are Bon Jovi. Past Idol goodbye songs have included David Cook’s “Don’t You Forget About Me,” Scotty McCreery’s “Please Remember Me,” and Will Young’s “Leave Right Now.”

While it makes sense to give Phillip more exposure and ensure that his success lasts beyond “Home,” Idol judge Mariah Carey recently released an inspirational and thematically appropriate song of her own in “Almost Home”; the song, written with and produced by Stargate, will appear on the soundtrack to Oz the Great and Powerful. It would have made a fairly solid choice for a goodbye song if only celebrate the new judging panel, which will be going live beginning next week. However, the movie is produced by Disney (which owns ABC), so there’s no way FOX would have wanted to put money in the pockets of a rival when they can profit off of (and promote the heck out of) the most recent winner.

American Idol airs tonight at 8:00 on FOX, with the second group of 10 male semi-finalists – Lazaro Arbos, Nick Boddington, Josh Holiday, Vincent Powell, Cortez Shaw, Gurpreet Singh Sarin, Bryant Tadeo, Burnell Taylor, Mathenee Treco and David Willis – performing for the chance to make the top 20 and face the American voting public for the first time.

Did American Idol make a good choice for their next goodbye song? Have you been surprised at how successful Phillip Phillips has been? Is there anyone on this season that could be as successful?