It's not every American Idol who would be excited at landing a Paul Pena song for his CD -- let alone even know who Pena is in a contemporary pop music world more accustomed to names like The Neptunes, Swizz Beatz and Akon.

But Taylor Hicks, 30, who headlines Tuesday's FedEx Orange Bowl halftime show, is not your usual American Idol. The prematurely gray vocalist won the title last spring at an age well advanced by the show's standards, and after having spent a decade slogging it out in bars singing his own songs for a handful of listeners. His dancing style could be likened to a Tourette's tic. Justin Timberlake, he is not.

If all of this wasn't enough to make the Birmingham, Ala.-born Hicks an odd choice to succeed the polished Carrie Underwood, his musical tastes run toward your parents' faves -- vintage soul from the likes of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke.

Pena, the late songwriter who composed Jet Airliner, a hit cover for the Steve Miller Band in the mid-1970s, could have been thinking of a Hicks-like persona when he wrote Gonna Move in 1973.

When I was a little boy, I felt so alone

Quiet country house that I had to call home . . . Came to a school in the big city

Looked around at the lights and I thought they were pretty

They told me and teached me to live by their rules

So I wouldn't be nobody's fool

I found out, not too long

Their rules wouldn't let me sing my song

I knew in order to be a man

I had to pull up my roots once again and move on in this land.

"That was me. I'm a big Paul Pena fan and I thought he was a great songwriter. I think that song sums up what I've been doing," Hicks says in a phone chat from Los Angeles. "I've definitely done my homework, done my musical homework."

It mattered that he cut his album in a studio where Three Dog Night once recorded and in a room housing the organ used on Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild.

He also bumped heads with executives who had particular ideas about what he should record and when.

While Idol finalists Chris Daughtry and Kellie Pickler finished under him on the show, they beat him to the stores with their new CDs by recording during breaks on the road. Hicks refused to record while on the American Idols Live Tour this summer.

When Idol producers handed him the winner's song to perform on the show's finale in May, Hicks balked. Didn't like it. He settled for another choice, Do I Make You Proud, a compromise of sorts. It became his first hit single last summer but the treacly tune is not included on his album Taylor Hicks.

Hicks was much more excited to record The Right Place, a ballad Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance wrote for Ray Charles, who died before he could consider recording it. Hicks makes it the closing track on his CD.

"I was pretty stubborn -- I've always been stubborn when I perform," Hicks says. "I was given some songs people wanted me to sing that I just didn't [feel]. The songs that came in [for Taylor Hicks] I connected with. Toward the end, it was a sprint to the finish, but it worked out. I can connect with and sing these songs and that's a key part for me."

Hicks remains a curio. Onstage he's hyper to the point of distraction and to the delight of his supporters. Out of the spotlight he's quiet, reserved -- polite words for, well, dull. Though pleasant during this conversation, getting him to open up and speak at any length is akin to making oil blend with water. He is, easily, the most polarizing American Idol to date -- the Hillary Clinton of pop music.

Critics who dare criticize his act -- and music critics generally don't like this guy -- are blasted with angry e-mails.

A sample: "I feel so sorry for you that you can't see the talent in Taylor Hicks. He will be a legend and you will have egg on your face. He is what the music world has been searching for, not the plastic molded pop crap that has been forced down our throats for so long . . . He is not only a fantastic musician/vocalist, he has women all over the country falling at his feet. Do I sense a hint of the green-eyed monster in your obviously biased review? Would seem so to me."

And yet, for all the fanatics, Taylor Hicks debuted last week at No. 2 with a respectable but not spectacular 298,000 copies sold and this week tumbles to No. 15. This puts Hicks behind first-week figures for other Idols Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, Carrie Underwood and even Daughtry. (However, he tops entries by Kelly Clarkson and Fantasia).

Hicks attributes the polarization to the "soul brand of music I play," which stands apart from the edgy R&B Fantasia favors, the commercial pop/rock found on Clarkson's CDs or the mainstream country Underwood champions.

Phillis Oeters, Orange Bowl Committee vice president, believes that the passion Hicks inspires is a good fit for the halftime show. (Hicks, who will perform his current single, The Runaround and a duet with Knight, becomes the second American Idol to perform in an Orange Bowl halftime show. Clarkson did so in 2005.)

"It's a big name to a broader population. Where some of the acts in years before had been names college students would know, Taylor traverses all age groups and that's what makes him so wonderful a part of the show," Oeters says. "Soul is his thing and American soul is the theme of the show."

For his part, Hicks says he is "excited and honored" to perform with one of his idols, Knight, and hopes the experience gained on the live American Idol telecasts work to his advantage on a halftime show that costs about $500,000 to mount and must come off without a hitch in a carefully rehearsed, tightly scripted 22 minutes.

Once that's over, Hicks says, with some animation, he's "looking forward to getting out to South Beach and seeing what all the nightlife is like."

Hicks dancing at Mansion? Stranger things have happened. Like winning Idol.

"I believe in getting up every morning and going to work," this ordinary, yet maybe not so ordinary, gentleman says. "Whether it's onstage or in an office, everyone has to do that. I just have to perform music. I love my job."