Last month, Chris Daughtry made his first concert stop in Canada. A newspaper up north caught up with this American Idol finalist for the following interview...

Q: Your album has been a phenomenal seller. Were you prepared for this?
Daughtry: No, not at all. We hoped it would do well considering the exposure I already had on TV. It's definitely far surpassed anything we hoped it would do.

Q: I understand it was the largest-selling rock debut CD in Soundscan history.
Daughtry: That's what they tell me.

Q: That's pretty impressive.
Daughtry: You can't really prepare for it. It's definitely not something that I ever thought was a possibility.

Q: Your song "Home" has kind of become an anthem. When you perform it, you must have people sing along.
Daughtry: It's crazy. When I wrote that song, I never thought it was anything special. It was one of the songs that came out really fast. I wrote it in like five or 10 minutes. A year and a half or two years later, it's one of the most over-played songs ... in a good way. When we played it live at first, the album was out but the song hadn't really broken big on radio. Now when we play that song, the place just lights up like a Christmas tree. It's amazing. Everybody's singing and you can hear them and it's a pretty good feeling.

Q: The world came to know you through a little show called American Idol. You're from Lasker, N.C., and I'm guessing it's a smaller type of town.
Daughtry: It's a population of like a 100 people.

Q: What was Lasker like while you were on the show?
Daughtry: Oh, my gosh! It's one of those towns where everybody knows everybody and we couldn't keep my grandmother off the radio. That's a big no-no when you're on the show and she kept going to the newspaper and going to the radio station and it was like, if I ever told them anything that was going on, it was in the public the next day. We got called out on that a few times from the show and I'd be like, "Look, if I tell you something, you can't go telling everybody because you're family." She got the whole town kind of in a frenzy.

When I got off the show, it was supposed to be a little private thing for family, and I was going to do a little private acoustic show. But my Grandma goes to the paper and it ends up being a five- state draw and we had to take it down the street at the private school football field and it was probably like three or four thousand people showed up. It was supposed to be about 50.

Q: Your time on American Idol came to a surprising end. Were you impressed and surprised by the outpouring of shock and support that you had at the time?
Daughtry: Oh yeah. Initially, I thought that my style wouldn't be accepted very well on the show. I thought it would at least get me some exposure and I could get some more gigs but it ended up taking a total different direction than I expected.

Matt Richenthal is the Editor in Chief of TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter and on Google+.