And which city's auditions will be featured in this season's first two-hour audition show, as the Fox hit returns for a seventh season tomorrow night?
Why, those would be Philadelphia's.
Given the ratio of terrible singers to talented ones on most "Idol" audition shows, this isn't necessarily good news for the city's musical reputation.
Yet the famously blunt Cowell - who, in my experience, is unfailingly polite with reporters, who tend not to sing in his presence - couldn't immediately recall any horrors here.
"I think it was good. I don't think it was an incredible city, but I can't think of one particular highlight at the moment," he said, when I asked him if Philadelphia had been perhaps chosen to go first because it had stood out in a bad way.
"I've got to be honest with you. That applies to most of the cities I go through. You know, it's quite difficult to remember an awful lot weeks after
you've done it, so maybe it's just my old age, I'm not sure," he said. "I like the city, by the way. They were very nice people . . . We got a really big welcome."
Though Philadelphia was the last of this season's "Idol" cities to undergo the preliminary audition process, it was the first to have its call-back contestants heard by Cowell and his fellow judges, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson.
Being the first "is probably a good thing for the contestants because I think that you are naturally kinder to the first couple of cities you go to. Then by the time you've hit the last one, your patience has kind of run out," Cowell said.
Not that he probably had that much patience to start with.
After years of the "Idol" grind, the man so many of us love to hate is sounding more fed up than usual, telling a reporter who'd asked about executive producer Nigel Lythgoe's having described relations among the judges as "childish" and "pitiful" that he considers it neither, though "it can be a little bit acrimonious at times."
