We expected to be charmed by Taylor Hicks.

After all, it was partly – some might say largely – his personality, all whoops and hollers and cat-who-ate-the-canary grins, that helped him to victory on "American Idol" last year.

Hicks plays The Grove of Anaheim on Wednesday night. A few weeks earlier, his people talked to our people and set up a phone interview from a tour bus parked somewhere outside Philadelphia.

And no, we weren't really expecting him to come on the line shouting, "Soul patrol, whoooooo!" – although that would have been sweet. But neither did we expect the bored-and-jaded-superstar act from a guy whose debut album made a splash but very few ripples on the charts.

Because, you know, you actually need to be a superstar before trying to get away with that kind of shtick.

Bit of spleen now vented, we'll get on to the business of sharing with you what Taylor had to say, starting with a few softballs to warm up. Questions like this one:

Q: How's the tour going so far?

A: "It's been great. I've been very fortunate to have the fans, and the Soul Patrol, out in force. It's, like, (ages) 7 to 85."

Let's note here that we did consider that maybe it was our bad day that led to the interview crashing and burning like Paula Abdul's syntax at show time. But after checking the wires for other Hicks interviews, we found that everyone else got pretty much the same stuff, right down to the 7- to 85-year-olds who were turning out at every stop on tour.

We moved on to another easy one:

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