Taylor Hicks won American Idol in May 2006. A few weeks later, People put him on its cover and called him the country’s most eligible bachelor. He was 29, gray since his teenage years, and single.
Twenty years on, he still is. Hicks has never married. In that entire stretch, exactly one relationship ever made the papers, back in 2007, and even that one was never confirmed by either person involved.
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What usually happens to people this famous
Winning that kind of “most eligible” title tends to start a clock. A few years pass, and the same magazines that crowned you end up covering the wedding. That’s what happened to nearly everyone connected to Hicks’ own season of American Idol. Runner-up Katharine McPhee married music producer David Foster in 2019, and outlets tracked the engagement, the wedding, and the honeymoon as it happened. Kelly Clarkson, who won the show’s first season, has been married and divorced, with two kids and a custody arrangement that still gets written about.
Hicks went through the identical cycle: magazine profiles, morning show bookings, fans wondering who he’d bring home. TV Insider and other outlets have concluded the same thing for years: there’s never been a marriage, or even a relationship anyone could confirm.
The one time it almost turned into something
In 2007, Hicks was photographed on a beach in Hawaii with Caroline Lyders, a morning news anchor at WISN in Milwaukee. Local writers picked it up fast, and the two were reportedly seen around Milwaukee together more than once over the following months. When a reporter asked Lyders whether the two were together, her answer ended the story about as quickly as it had started. She told OnMilwaukee, “Taylor and I are friends,” and said she’d rather not talk about her personal life beyond that.
Neither of them ever said more. Coverage thinned out within months, and it hasn’t come back since, except when an old blog post gets recycled with the date left off, so a nineteen-year-old maybe-romance reads like fresh news.
A joke about a missing Mustang
Part of this renewed interest traces to March, when Clarkson mentioned on her own show that she never got the car American Idol promises its winners, something owed to her since she won the very first season in 2002. Hicks, who has stayed friendly with her since their overlapping years on the show, told Page Six he’d be glad to help her find a new Mustang. It read as flirty because of how it was phrased, but it was two former competitors joking around, nothing more, and Page Six’s own coverage never treated it as anything else. Clarkson had also lost her ex-husband, Brandon Blackstock, to cancer only seven months earlier, which makes the exchange land more like two old colleagues being kind to each other than anything close to a real overture.
What he told a reporter this spring, without being asked
Two months after the Clarkson exchange, in a May interview tied to American Idol’s twentieth anniversary reunion, Hicks talked to AL.com about where his new single, “The Mirror,” came from. Nobody asked him about dating. He brought it up on his own, describing a relationship he had come to see as “a selfish relationship with a narcissistic person,” one where, in his telling, the other person never really looked past themselves.
It’s a small piece of a much longer interview, mostly about music and touring, but it’s the first time in twenty years of interviews that Hicks has said anything this direct about his own love life, rather than turning the question into a joke. He didn’t name the person, and he didn’t turn this into a bit either, the way he handles almost everything else this year, from the Mustang line to his Fox and Friends performances this summer. For one answer, something in how he talked just changed.
A note on the fake names still floating around
If you’ve searched this question before, you’ve probably run into a few different answers claiming to know who Hicks secretly married, names like Leah Gray or LeAnn Phelan. Neither name traces back to an outlet with a real byline, and the two versions don’t even agree with each other, which is usually a sign that nothing behind them is real. Some of the confusion also comes from unrelated people online who happen to share his name, wedding pages and social accounts included, which makes it easy for a fast-moving site with no editor to mix up a stranger with the singer.
Quick timeline
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2006 | Wins American Idol Season 5; named People’s most eligible bachelor |
| 2007 | Linked to Milwaukee anchor Caroline Lyders; she calls it a friendship, coverage fades within months |
| 2026, March | Jokes with Kelly Clarkson about a missing Ford Mustang; neither side treats it as real |
| 2026, May | Tells AL.com his new single grew out of a relationship he calls narcissistic |
| Today | Still not married, no children, nothing in the record says otherwise |
Twenty years of magazine covers and morning shows never turned up a wife for Taylor Hicks, because there wasn’t one to find. What changed this year isn’t his marital status. It’s that for four sentences in an interview about a song, he sounded like he meant it instead of like he was performing.
