WATCH: Laine Hardy Returns to 'American Idol'

Mother's Day 2020 (May 10) on American Idol was split down the middle: The Top 7 contestants (revealed that evening) were expected to both sing a song to honor their mothers and hold up to the show's time-honored Disney Night tradition and perform something pulled from the company's well-revered catalog.

In a fun touch, as the hopefuls belted out numbers plucked from The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and elsewhere, reigning Idol champion Laine Hardy showed up for his own Disney turn. Fans of the Louisiana-bred singer will recall that he threw an entrancingly swampy, thoroughly unexpected swagger into the little-known "Oo-De-Lally" from the equally overlooked Robin Hood for his own Disney Night in 2019; this time, he chose a more well-known song from the Disney repertoire, but the performance still had all of the muscle of his previous one.

Hardy put a rollicking spin on Cars' already ramblin' and rollin' "Life Is a Highway," made famous first by Tom Cochrane in the '90s and again by Rascal Flatts for the Disney/Pixar movie's soundtrack. Contestant Dillon James had just performed the more melancholy "Our Town" from the same movie, so it felt a bit uneven to have two songs from the same flick so close together, but that Hardy's upbeat version (performed, of course, at home) added a dimension that had viewers rocking out.

The American Idol Season 18 finale is slated for May 17. All contestants' performances will again be coming from home.

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