They'll link with fireworks and more music.

NBC also has Martina McBride and Joss Stone. Then it closes with the New York Pops orchestra backing fireworks.

PBS has gospel star Yolanda Adams, plus Hayden Panettiere (the young "Heroes" star and pop singer), Tony Danza, Bebe Neuwirth and the National Symphony. It also has the emotion that comes with performing on the Capitol lawn.

Danza, who is hosting, can tell you about that.

He recalls a previous Capitol concert, this one honoring World War I veterans on the eve of a Memorial Day.

"It just poured rain," Danza said. "Someone said maybe we shouldn't do the tap-dance number. I said, 'What? They fought in the mud; we can at least dance in the rain.' "

Capitol concerts can be like that, packed with emotion.

"This is true Americana," Danza said. "I'm the son of a garbage man. My parents are first-generation Italian-Americans, and look at all the things that I get to do."

That theme, instant mobility, is especially clear when "American Idol" is involved.

There is Lewis, suddenly a pop star. "I was definitely like a nerdy kind of a loner in high school," he said after the "Idol" finals.

There's Doolittle, shedding the obscurity of being a backup singer. And Sparks, this year's "Idol" winner, fresh from her junior year of high school.

And there's Yamin, who never got that far, dropping out of school. "I did get my GED, though," he said. "And I did half a semester of community college."

That was after he'd started his job at a Foot Locker in Richmond, Va. He stayed there six years with dwindling hopes of being a star.

"I was used to always getting a job, taking care of myself," Yamin said. "I honestly had nothing to do ... I had aspirations, but I didn't know what to do about them."

He'd had plenty of problems, both medical (severe allergies, diabetes, and he's 90 percent deaf in one ear) and personal. Yamin studied for his bar mitzvah, for instance, but never completed it. "That was a terribly difficult period of my life," he said.

He grew up in Los Angeles and then in Richmond, absorbing the music his mother sang at home and in nightclubs.

"She would do the Stevie Wonder songs, Marvin Gaye songs ... It was time-capsule music," Yamin said.

Yamin sang in arenas for the "Idol" tour and in auditoriums for his solo tour behind his self-titled album, which debuted in March at No. 3 on Billboard magazine's Top 200 chart, behind his single "Wait for You." Yet, that will only partly prepare him for the masses — estimated at 300,000-plus — at the Capitol lawn concert.

"It's going to be surreal," he said.