Hicks stays true to his creative soul

AUSTIN, Texas -- The epicenter of cool in Austin is approximately 40 minutes from where Taylor Hicks is currently sitting.

Cries of "whoo!" can be heard in the distance, but they are coming from riders on the attractions at the Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo camped at the Travis County Expo on the outskirts of town, not from the music industry confab South by Southwest taking place downtown on 6th Street.

Inside the tidy interior of Taylor Hicks's tour bus, parked behind the stage amid some distinctly rodeo-esque fragrances, there is nary a "whoo" to be heard, and cool is being emitted solely by the air conditioner.

But killing time before a headlining slot at the fair, the 2006 "American Idol" champ is legitimately unconcerned with industry parameters of cool.

"I'm a happy kid. The phone is ringing. I am like Mary Poppins," he says -- he's doing a job he loves.

Having shed 22 pounds since the "Idol" finale, the prematurely gray Alabama native is also looking closer to his 30 years than he did when he was drawing scorn from judge Simon Cowell and love from viewers by hooting and bending his way through well-sung if occasionally physically distracting renditions of songs by the Doobie Brothers and Ray LaMontagne.

Seeming both more subdued and engaged than he did on television, Hicks reclines on the front bench of the bus with one eye occasionally straying to the basketball game silently playing on the big - screen TV. "It's almost like I reserve my energy for the stage just being a regular guy," he says.

Hicks may not be pumping his fist and nattering on about the "Soul Patrol" -- the legion of protective fans currently packing his tour, which comes to Avalon on Tuesday -- but he is definitely content with how things have gone since his "Idol" journey ended.

"I've been trying to put together this vision for a long time, and it just happened and I got to implement some of my plans," he says.

But unlike Mary Poppins, he wasn't willing to sugarcoat his songs to make them more marketable for his record company. His plans did not include following the blueprint of previous "Idols" who, in a rush between dates on the summer "Idol" tour, made scattershot, trying-to-please-all-the-people-type records that felt engineered by a committee of handlers.

Instead there was, Hicks says, "one producer, one A&R guy, and an artist." That artist dug in his heels about staying true to the blue-eyed soul he'd made his living with since the age of 19 -- the music he has loved since he was a child getting a musical education from "AM Gold" radio and parents who introduced him to his idols Ray Charles and Otis Redding. The recording process, he says, was all about "being stubborn and not putting up with anything that you can't sing for the rest of your life."

Instead, Hicks and producer Matt Serletic, the former chairman of Virgin Records and longtime go-to guy for Matchbox Twenty , wrote, solicited, and recorded a mix of solid, middle-of-the-road pop-soul tunes with fillips of jazz, blues, and contemporary pop.

Songs like the peppy, horn-laced opener "The Runaround" ; the bluesy closing ballad, "The Right Place," originally penned by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance for Ray Charles; and two solid tracks that Hicks wrote himself may not be hip. But they are in the same ballpark as any recent original by artists such as Hall and Oates or Michael McDonald.

Kara DioGuardi , who knows from hit songs, having co-penned Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man" and Gwen Stefani's "Rich Girl," was brought in to polish two tracks on " Taylor Hicks." She says he reminded her a bit of previous "Idol" champ Kelly Clarkson , with whom she co-wrote "Walk Away." "They believe the public voted for them because of who they are, and to go then and be something else doesn't make sense to them."

Of course, the irony of Hicks's sticking to his guns and making a record that creatively fulfilled him is that he isn't selling as many records as some of his carefully groomed forebears. Much has been made of fourth-place finisher Chris Daughtry's debut crossing the 2 million sales threshold, while Hicks is still working toward single platinum status with 661,000 units shifted, according to Nielsen SoundScan .

One factor is that Hicks's target radio market, adult contemporary, is not interested in hopping on new music in general. He is a new act experiencing the problem of the classic MOR artists he evokes.

"Our slogan is 'songs you know by artists you've heard of,' " says Mark Laurence, longtime music director of Magic 106.7 , where airplay for single "Just to Feel That Way" would make the most sense locally. "While people have heard of Taylor Hicks, a new song that he's doing is not a song you know. So you're probably not going to hear it first on Magic."

But as Hicks's trend-averse sound is unlikely to catch fire at Top 40, he's stuck between rock radio and a hard place.

"This album is sort of between the cracks; it's not a blue-eyed soul album, it's not a Kelly Clarkson all-ages contemporary-sounding pop record, it's sort of in that netherworld between," says Sean Ross , VP of music and programming at Edison Media Research , which conducts research for the communications industry. That middle ground is difficult to navigate in a world of pop tarts , hip-hop soul, indie rock, and post-grunge. "Which brings up the question, do you go with the guy you saw on TV, or do you go with what sounds contemporary and try to shoehorn him into it? You don't want to start him out in retiree world right away, and you're also not going to credibly have him make 'Fergalicious.' "

Like many in the industry, DioGuardi, who also worked with last year's runner-up, Katharine McPhee , thinks the built-in record-buying audience for "Idol" contestants is limited. The rest is up to the almighty radio hit. "Radio becomes a huge function," she says, pointing to the crossover success of Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone." "That wasn't just the 'Idol' audience buying, now we're talking about the public at large. So why is Daughtry maybe selling more records? I think it's because for whatever reason the public is interested in that kind of stuff more than it is the blue-eyed soul. . . . That doesn't mean that what Taylor did wasn't great."

But all of that is a concern for others. Hicks is emphatic, without protesting too much, that the Daughtry sales comparisons aren't an issue. "None. At all. I'm a whole different monster."

On his bus in Texas, staring down an itinerary of clubs, many of which are sold out, this particular salt-and-pepper-haired monster has achieved more than he dreamed of as a struggling 19-year-old singer-songwriter who taught himself to play harmonica by blowing along to the hum of air conditioners.

Sure, he'd like to enlist more foot soldiers into the Soul Patrol. And he's been pleased hearing from converts who, like Cowell, initially wrote him off as that wacky wedding reception dad. But he's also not worried about anyone else's definition of who he is supposed to be.

"You gotta be you and not worry about it."

And that is perhaps a lesson some of those "cool" kids jamming at the clubs with their painstakingly sculpted bedhead s and ironic detachment could stand to learn.