We spent our week doing odd jobs to fix up the place, cooking meals to serve to the kids, and doing lots of babysitting. We all got so attached to the children that we kept walking into town to buy them stuff because we had it to give. There was a new baby who had been found in a dumpster and brought to the orphanage the morning we arrived. I pretty much decided it was my job to hold her. I distinctly remember worrying that I was going to confuse her by speaking English, so I called over to one of the smarter kids in youth group.
“How do you say ‘I love you’ in Spanish?” I asked.
“Te amo, Jessica,” he said with googly eyes, and laughed.
I smiled back and turned my face to the baby. “Te amo,” I said, over and over again, meaning it. I wanted her to know she was loved. I wanted it to be a familiar feeling, so that when unconditional love came into her life, she would recognize it.
A few days into the trip, I was holding her when someone came looking for my dad. There was someone on the line for him, on the one phone in the whole place. When he came back, he told me it was Teresa LaBarbera Whites, a Dallas-based A&R rep for Columbia under Sony. A&R means Artist and Repertoire, so they’re supposed to scout the talent and then match them with the right material.
“How did she get the album?” I asked. The baby was sleeping, so I kept my voice down.
“No,” my dad said, knowing I wouldn’t like the answer. “She heard the demos.”
“What,” I whisper-yelled. “How?” The demos were three secular songs I’d recorded at a studio in Dallas and hated. I only did them because it seemed smart to record “regular” music so I could show the labels I was meeting with what I could do besides gospel. I sang the Céline Dion song “Seduces Me” and Whitney Houston’s “Run to You” and “I Have Nothing.” I had the nerve to be upset that I didn’t sound like Céline or Whitney on the playback. When the sound engineer, Chuck Webster, said they were fine, I said I was a perfectionist and asked him to just trash the tapes. If I was going to do mainstream music, I didn’t want it to sound like okay karaoke.
“Well, Chuck played the demos for Teresa,” my dad said.
“What part of ‘Never play this for anybody under any circumstances’ didn’t he understand?”
Dad shrugged and said Teresa was anxious to meet me in person to see if I could really sing. She was upset that I wasn’t going back to Dallas before New York. “She says she has to see you,” he said. “When we leave here, she’s willing to come down to San Antonio to see us before the flight.”
I looked down at the baby and sighed. Well, I thought, what difference could it make? “Might as well,” I said.
DAD AND I ARRANGED TO MEET TERESA AT A HOTEL IN SAN ANTONIO. THE first thing I noticed was that she was very pregnant. She later told me she was eight months pregnant, and had brought her maternity records with her, just in case she went into labor. This was that important to her.
“You drove all the way down here to see me?” I asked. Now I know that being that pregnant on the four-hour drive down I-35 would mean hitting the bathroom at every single rest stop.
She smiled. “I flew,” she said. “Forty-five minutes in the air. I know we don’t have a lot of time, and I had to get down here,” she said. When she spoke, she was incredibly serene, with long black hair that hung loose around her shoulders. She looked more like a cool art teacher than a music rep. She told me she loved my voice on the tape but wanted to make sure I matched it in real life.
“I’m me,” I said. “We match.”
We made some small talk, which was very small on my end because I was so nervous. Teresa talked with her hands, and I was kind of mesmerized by the languid movement of these long fingers. Her hands seemed to glide and dip with her accent, which was deeper Southern than ours but still Texas. Teresa told me about her history with Sony and Columbia, how she prided herself on being what she called “an artist’s advocate,” nurturing young talent and putting them with the right songwriters and developing them as songwriters themselves. She had signed a Houston girl group, led by a singer she had known since she was nine. “She’s sixteen now, amazingly talented,” she said. “Her name is Beyoncé Knowles.”
I nodded. Dad said, “We’ll have to remember that name.”
Finally, I couldn’t stall any longer. “Should I just sing?” I asked. She nodded, and then seemed surprised when I started singing a capella. I did two songs, “I Will Always Love You” and “Amazing Grace.”
She stayed perfectly still as I sang, only speaking when I stopped.
“Okay, I’m going to New York,” she said. “I will get you a meeting, and you do exactly what you just did. We need to sign you.”
“We’re already meeting with Epic,” my dad said, playing it cool. Epic was also under Sony, and where Céline Dion signed when she came to America. “We have eight meetings lined up actually—”
“I can get you straight to Tommy Mottola,” Teresa said. As green as we were, I definitely knew who Tommy Mottola was. He was the head of Sony, but more important to my mind was that he had just separated from my idol Mariah Carey and had signed her to Columbia in the first place.
“I’m really blown away,” Teresa said, looking right at me, as if she were trying to convince just me. “How old are you again?”
“Seventeen,” I said, getting used to the idea. “Today.”
“Well, happy birthday,” she said.
Dad and I flew to New York that night to start the rounds of auditions. Through the two days in New York, I was fortunate to meet with the heads of many record labels, going into boardrooms and corner offices. There were so few women in the offices, and I’d never felt so Southern, standing there with my long pink nails and hair so high to be nearer my God to thee.
I would sing a capella or listen as they nodded through a song off my tape. Dad talked a lot, getting better and better with each meeting. A preacher hitting a groove. I kept saying the same thing, remembering why God had even put me in those rooms in the first place: “I will only go with you if you believe that I can change the world.”
Sometimes they would cock their heads at that, like they were weighing a sales angle. But other times I felt a real connection, particularly at the Mercury offices. It was such an innocent way of thinking, and I’m sure some of them thought it was a childlike faith. But they couldn’t say it wasn’t real.
When I sang “I Will Always Love You” at Jive, they were direct with me. “We just signed a girl who’s just like you and sang that same song,” someone in a suit said. “This girl Britney Spears.”
“Oh, I know her,” I said, my stomach flipping.
“Small world,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, defeated all over again. Then at RCA I got the same story, as if the girl had just been in the same boardroom and ink was still drying on the contract. She had apparently nailed a song on a Disney soundtrack, and they were going to sign her.
“Christina Aga-something,” said the guy, looking around the room for someone to give him the right name. “Aguilar?”