It’s hard to remember just how big “American Idol” was in its early seasons.

It was among the top rated shows on television in 2003, and the season finale was watched by 38.1 million people to see who would win the fan vote between Ruben Studdard and

Clay Aiken (Studdard won by less than a half percent).

The singers are remembering that experience with a 20th-anniversary tour that started last year and continues into 2024 with a concert Friday at the Robins Theatre.

Instead of singing songs from their post-“Idol” careers, the setlist will feature music they performed on the show and songs that inspired their journey as musicians along with stories about their experiences on the show.

Studdard and Aiken participated in a phone interview Monday in advance of the Warren date. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

TICKET: How has your relationship evolved from competitors on “American Idol” to frequent touring partners?

STUDDARD: I think the most important thing to point out is Clay and I were never competitors to one another. We had a family atmosphere when we were on the show, and it carried over to our actual life. We are family and we have continued, not just us, but with everyone who was on our season.

AIKEN: I cosign all of that. Obviously, all relationships evolve, and ours has as well, but Ruben is right. We never saw each other as competitors. If you want to look at how relationships evolve, obviously after 20 years of friendship and touring together – doing “Idol” and doing the “Idol” tour and then we did a tour together in 2010 and a Broadway show in 2018 and now this 20th-anniversary tour. We’ve worked together enough that our friendship is strong and our working relationship has also grown to the point that we have a nice rhythm to how things work. There are certain tasks, certain decisions, that’s Ruben’s ministry, that’s what he does and I trust that he’ll handle it. And there are certain things in the show that he trusts me to handle. We’ve kind of found the perfect working balance in that way, and I think that’s something that’s grown stronger in 20 years.

TICKET: In addition to doing solo numbers on this tour, you also do a lot of songs together. How early in your relationship did you realize that you have a nice vocal blend?

STUDDARD: I think on the show. We had an opportunity to sing with everybody. Clay and I have similar upbringings – we’re both from the South, we both grew up singing in church, so it’s not foreign to think that our voices would blend well. I have, I think, a more soulful voice and Clay has a more pop-leaning voice, and those two things, even though they might seem different, I really think they complement each other.

AIKEN: And we in this tour create a flashback to “Idol,” so we do sing together in the same way we did on the show. We’re singing medleys of Motown songs and doing songs that pay tribute to people we were on the show with.

We’re not doing a Ruben Studdard concert and a Clay Aiken concert and then singing a song or two together. This is Ruben and Clay together on stage the whole time. We share the stage. This is a Ruben and Clay show, not a co-headlining tour. We do everything together. We sing a lot of medleys together. We sing stuff that we sang on “Idol,” we sing stuff that inspired us. We’re not doing “Invisible” and “Sorry 2004” and Ruben music and Clay music. We’re doing Ruben-and-Clay music.

TICKET: Let’s talk about the Motown medley you do in the set. There are so many great Motown songs. How did you pick which ones to include?

STUDDARD: The songs we chose were mostly written by Lamont Dozier because he was one of the first people we got a chance to work with on the show. He is one of the greatest writers that ever graced Motown studios, along with Smokey Robinson, and we got to work with both of those. Can you imagine us working with two of the pioneers of the Motown sound in one season? That’s how monumentally huge that show is. Smokey Robinson is a giant artist, but most people don’t realize he was one of their first staff writers. To be able to work with both of them in the same season is just amazing.

AIKEN: Every song we do, whether it’s in a medley or on its own, has a story or a connection to “Idol” or our getting to “Idol.” We sat down and just started reminding each other of stories. And Ruben said, “Remember that day we went to the top of the Renaissance hotel?” We were new. It was the first week of the show for us. We went to the top of this hotel overlooking all of Los Angeles with a huge grand piano and sitting there is Lamont Dozer. As we were singing those songs last night, all I could think of was, man, the amount of money that man must have.

TICKET: Lamont Dozer and Smokey Robinson are just two of many famous artists you got to work with during your season. Is there any single lesson you learned from one of them that you still carry with you?

STUDDARD: I think the most important lessons learned by me were from the legends who work behind the scenes on “American Idol.” The one thing they always taught us was timeliness, making sure we were on top of our material. It’s the people whose names you don’t know. You probably saw their names roll on a million credits, and you don’t really know who they are, but for me they were the most impactful.

AIKEN: If I was to try to pull a lesson from the many people we worked with on the show – not just Smokey Robinson and Lamont Dozer, but Lionel Ritchie, Gladys Knight, Olivia Newton-John. Oprah literally came backstage and worked with us on our show. The one thing they all had in common – and Ruben, I’d be surprised if you disagree – they were all approachable and real and none of them put on any airs at all.

Both of us have met people in our careers in this business, plenty of people, that you can’t look them in the eye when they walk down the hall. You can’t talk to them. We’ve met them all, but every single one of the people who became legends, who had careers that lasted forever, every single one of them was so approachable, even the ones who came whose job wasn’t specifically to mentor us. Some were just there as judges.

Talking about it 20 years later it gives me a chill how humbling it was that these people gave their time to us and helped us out. The most successful people we’ve encountered in 20 years have been the ones who are the most approachable. They know who they are and don’t try to be somebody else and put on airs.

STUDDARD: Absolutely.

TICKET: I’m guessing you were pretty sequestered during the taping of the show. How aware were you of how big your season was becoming?

STUDDARD: I think we knew it was big, but we didn’t know how big until we were away from the house. Even when we went to the mall, people were kind of recognizing us, but we had people with us to get us in and out quickly

But when we got to New York for the tour, the Idol Across America tour and we were in the Xcel Center in Minneapolis and there were like 40,000 people in there, none of us could believe they were all there to see us.

AIKEN: They also sent us home. The top three – Ruben, Kimberley Locke and I – we got to go home, and that was the first time for me. I get home, get off the plane at the airport and there were people waiting because they heard our plane was landing. They were lining the streets. Nobody would talk to me before I left. We were pretty sequestered. There were 300 people in the audience and they were energetic, but I honestly thought that they had been hyped up by the audience coordinator. But lo and behold they meant it.

TICKET: Are you happy that you competed when you did, when the reality competition genre was still relatively new, compared to today, when there are multiple shows with similar formats?

STUDDARD: I’m so glad we were on the show when we were because we didn’t have to compete with the reality singing shows that are on now. We had America’s attention fully.

AIKEN: I’m not going to disagree with Ruben at all. I’m happy things turned out the way they did. But I will add in, there are certain benefits contestants have today that we didn’t have. We didn’t have social media. Facebook, Twitter – none of it existed back then. For that reason, I’m clueless when it comes to social media now. They have the opportunity to build a base on social media through the show that we did not have. There are certainly benefits to what they’re going through today.

We ended up at very beginning of “Idol,” obviously, but also at the tail end of American media history where people all watched the same thing together. Media is so fragmented now. You can’t find six people in a big room who all watch the same thing. That didn’t happen when Ruben and I were on “Idol” and for that reason Ruben and myself, Fantasia, Carrie Underwood are some of the last ones who have that universal name recognition that has eluded most people today.

If you go …

WHO: Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Robins Theatre, 160 E. Market St., Warren

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $39 to $89 and are available at the Robins box office and online at robins theatre.com