He stars on what's considered, at least by a contingent three decades his junior, the coolest show on television. He plays possibly the coolest dad in TV history. He boasts the coolest eyebrows in showbiz. But in his musical shoes, Peter Gallagher is under no illusion that he himself is cool.

"There's nothing cool about it," the veteran actor and O.C. star says of 7 Days in Memphis, the recently released album of Stax-era soul and R & B covers. "But a lot of times money and heart have been wasted on pursuing cool.

"I did this record because everything is geared to youth - and wouldn't it be interesting if you did a record that would be very uncool, but with really great music?"

The critics, it seems, would agree with the "uncool" part, if not the "really great music." Reviews of 7 Days have generally been murderous, including a rare "F" grade from Entertainment Weekly. But Gallagher purports to be neither surprised nor disheartened.

"Before you go in, you know you're going to get killed, because it's easy pickings," he says, holding court at a Yorkville lounge. "But it's not the first time I've been blown out of the water, and if that had stopped me in the past, I never would have ended up in some of the great movies I've done, or the great plays."

Ordinarily, such bravado would be dismissed as an artist trying to save face. But Gallagher seems sincere that recording 7 Days was about personal fulfillment.

Despite plenty of experience singing on Broadway, on film and at benefits, Gallagher had never planned on recording an album fitted to his own musical tastes. But he had given considerable thought to putting together "an evening of music" - and when Epic approached him after he displayed his musical chops with a cover of Don't Give Up On Me on The O.C., he felt like he had no choice.

"It's the most powerful form of telling a story," he says of music. "I'd done plays, movies and TV, [but] the one thing that I hadn't been brave about, because I'd always been playing characters, is admitting to my own musical taste and singing songs of my choosing the way I would sing them. That was a fear I had to get through."

As it turned out, working with more seasoned musicians in the studio didn't turn out to be as scary as he might've feared. "It's the easiest thing in the world, because these people are great at what they do," he says. "It's the second-rate people that make your life a living hell because they're trying to make everybody pay for a lousy high school experience."

What did scare him was the prospect of missing his opportunity. "What I couldn't abide would be lying on my deathbed thinking I had an opportunity to do what was closest to my heart, and for fear of criticism I said no," he says. "When you get to be 50, you don't really give a f--- what people think - because time is marching on, and we live in such a youth-obsessed culture that you're used to being discounted."

Gallagher is under no illusion that he’s going to sell younger fans on his tastes. But he doesn’t much care.

“I’m not thinking about opening anybody’s eyes and ears,” he says. “I think the most miraculous thing in the world is that I got a record deal, and then I made the record and they didn’t shelve it. That, to me, is unbelievable — it’s like getting pregnant when you’re 85. It’s a completely unlikely but blessed event.”