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It soars, then
gently retreats, swooping gull-like over waves of emotion, rising
to a crystalline high then plunging to a quavering depth. It is
wise beyond its years, the voice of one who has traveled many
paths before finding the road Home. It is arguably one of the
most amazing voices in music today.
So it's somewhat of a shock to find the unlikely owner of
this powerful instrument is a diminutive teenager.
At 15, Rachael Lampa is every inch the typical
American high-schooler: she talks in the halting teen-speak of
likes and you-knows, plays basketball, is on the Monarch High
student council, and listens to pop princesses like Christina
Aguilera and Mariah Carey. Yet, when she opens her
mouth to sing, an amazing transformation takes place, as if this
youngster had somehow tapped into the wisdom and experience of
one three times her age.
"A girl like that comes along once every 20 years—maybe," says
Word Records' Brent Bourgeois, who first saw Lampa perform
at 1999's Christian Artists Seminar in Estes Park and was
immediately sold.
Bourgeois' instincts were correct: Rachael took the music
world by storm that summer, logging a number one hit with
"Live For You," the Latin-tinged title track of her Word
debut. Appearances on such coveted network programs as The
Tonight Show With Jay Leno and The View soon followed. But
while it seems the teen phenom has come out of nowhere, Rachael
is actually something of a seasoned pro.
Now, she has a new release, Kaleidoscope,
which has its first tune, No Greater Love, already
climbing the charts. Presently #2 on Victory 91.5's local Top 40.
(Go to the Atlanta Christian magazine
button, then click on "music" for the complete chart)
"People come up to me and they're like, You're so lucky,
you're so talented," says Lampa on a clear summer morning in
Nashville. "It's just because I found my gifts earlier in life. I
guess they need to realize that everybody has gifts, and their
gifts are what they're good at. My gift is singing, and it might
be more public, but their gifts are just as powerful. And they
need to realize that sometimes you don't find it as early on in
life as I have."
RAISED OUTSIDE Boulder, Colo., Rachael made her performing
debut at the age of five, when she sang a nursery school ditty at
church. "I told her she didn't have to do it ever, ever again
after the first time," notes mom Marianne Lampa. "And she said,
Oh no, Mommy! I want to do it tomorrow!"
That Rachael took to performing like a bird to flight comes
as no surprise to her family. "She was singing in the crib,
before she was talking," says Marianne, herself a former singer
who performed in pop bands in college.
One of four children, Rachael early on impressed her family
with her precocious ability. "My mom noticed it when Rachael was
2," recalls Marianne. "My mother is a mom of eight kids, so she
knows babies, she knows kids. And she said to me, Marianne, this
one—there's something different here!"
Different indeed. Word of Lampa's talent spread around her
home state of Colorado; at a time when most girls her age were
still playing with Barbie dolls, she was regularly singing the
national anthem before crowds of 50,000 at Colorado Rockies
baseball games. When one of the organizers of the Estes Park
Seminar heard her voice on a Columbine tribute album, he
immediately booked her for the 1999 Cafe Estes program, then
called every A&R guy he knew and urged them to attend.
"Cafe Estes is really one of the funnier events around
because you never know what's going to come up next," says
Bourgeois. "They bring up new acts that are already signed, like
Ginny Owens, to play in the midst of really bad karaoke
versions of Point of Grace songs."
While everyone had been tipped off that something big was
coming up, "nobody expected her to be that good. By the middle of
her first song everybody is looking at each other going, Who is
this?"
By the middle of Rachael's second song, Brent had quietly
made his way backstage, where he ambushed the Lampas and, he
jokes, "basically kidnapped them and locked up the next couple of
days with dinners, concerts, more dinners, meeting Point of
Grace, more dinners ... I more or less iced everyone else out!"
"My whole life I always wanted to be a pop singer and a
Christian singer," says Rachael. But when it finally did happen,
she says it was unexpected. "It was weird, because that was kind
of a time that I wasn't even looking for it. I went up there, and
I didn't know those [A&R] guys would be there until like an hour
before I sang. My mom called and said, I'm not supposed to tell
you this, but there will be some important people there. I really
didn't expect it.
"But I had just been to a really big youth conference, and it
really kinda changed my life around," she notes. "I did a concert
there and I just realized how music can pull people up and change
their heart. And so that kind of made me realize that I need to
take this ministry more seriously."
Marianne Lampa observes that Rachael's youth conference
experience took place two days before the Estes Park
performance—as if once Rachael's eyes were opened to the power of
her gift, God wasted no time throwing open the doors.
DESPITE HIS EFFORTS to the contrary, Bourgeois admits that
Rachael Lampa inspired a bidding frenzy in Nashville, the likes
of which hadn't been seen in some time. Word eventually landed
Lampa, causing Bourgeois to break his own personal rule against
signing singers. "I sign singer-songwriters," he explains. "I
think they connect better with the material because it came from
inside of them."
Partly for that reason, Bourgeois took another unprecedented
step when it came time to find material for Lampa's debut.
Instead of the arduous task of listening to demo tape after demo
tape—a process he despises—he rented a horse farm outside
Franklin, Tenn., and enlisted a few of his songwriter friends to
hang out and write songs over a period of five weeks.
The result was that all of Live For You was written
specifically for Lampa, unheard of for a new artist. Among the
stellar talents tapped for the assignment: Cindy Morgan, Ginny
Owens, Michelle Tumes, Chris Eaton, and Chris Rodriguez—a
virtual who's who of Christian songwriting.
"At the beginning I spent a week with all the writers and
told them what I wanted to sing about, and about my life and
stuff like that," Rachael recalls. "I told them a lot of my life
experiences, how God had pulled through for me. One of the things
I told them was about when my best friend's mom died; I just told
them how prayer got me through that, and how God was there all
the way through."
Most of the material on Live For You is basic love
songs to and about God, though issues like unity in the Church
are also addressed. But the songs are daring musically, showing
Lampa's breathtaking vocal range and her uncanny ability to bring
to life the words she's singing.
Says Bourgeois, "We had a lot of discussions amongst
ourselves about not getting too heavy lyrically. Especially
concerning lines like, ‘I've been down this road so many times
and as I look back over the years.' We'd catch ourselves: That
was a good line, but was it a good line for a 15-year-old?
"That was another really good thing about having all the
songwriters there, it was a good checks and balances. We had the
opportunity to craft a whole record and look at it every day—what
do we need to do? What are we missing? We could try out the songs
on the singer as it was going along."
WHILE BOURGEOIS SAYS the songwriters' retreat wasn't a huge
expense—"We basically paid this person's mortgage for five weeks
and some catering"—he admits that the rest of what he calls
"Rachael Lampa, Inc." has indeed cost a fortune. The reason that
Word has invested so heavily in this artist is because Lampa's
powerhouse talent, and the artist herself, have targeted the
mainstream market. Already she's generated tremendous media
interest outside the Christian fold—her Leno show appearance, for
example, was booked well before her album's release, a rarity for
any new artist but certainly unheard of for a Christian act
singing Christian songs.
"I realized how music can pull people up and change their
heart. And so that kind of made me realize that I need to take
this ministry more seriously."
Says Lampa, "I want Christians to hear [my music] and love it
and find joy in it, but I want to reach out to people who don't
know God and don't know Christian music at all. 'Cause, like, if
I gave the Plus One album to one of my friends, they
wouldn't know it's Christian, but it's such a positive message. I
hope that's how they see [my record]. Hopefully it will comfort
somebody if they're sad or make somebody happy."
So while she may be going head to head with the Britney
Spears and Jessica Simpsons of the world, don't expect
to see any Britney-like dance moves from Lampa. "My songs are
really hard to sing live," she explains. "Bouncing around on
stage would not help with my vocal ability!"
Instead, she has been compared to a different class of pop
star—Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and Barbra Streisand.
"This is a singer's singer," says Bourgeois. "We don't want
her to be a Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera—her
voice is beyond that already. Stacie Orrico can have the
teen thing; I think they've made a pretty teen record, and she's
13 so that's appropriate for her. But this voice and personality
do not call for a bouncy teen record."
But Lampa is, of course, a teen. Instead of trading her youth
for a life in the spotlight, she has chosen a more difficult
path. She plans to remain in school as much as possible, and play
catch-up on school work when the music career forces her to
travel.
"When I'm older I don't want to look back and say I missed
out," she says. "Just doing as much as I can when I'm home and
doing as much as I can when I'm here [in Nashville] will even it
out."
Whether that approach is realistic or not remains to be seen.
Already some sacrifices have been made: softball and basketball
will have to go, though she hopes to stay on the student council.
While she's not famous yet, Lampa has already seen the downside
of a public life: following a local newspaper article announcing
Lampa's recording contract, school pranksters spray-painted her
name and a rude remark on the walls of her high school. It was an
unpleasant experience, but also quite possibly a small taste of
what may be in store for her down the road.
One who's traveled that road is Jaci Velasquez. At 20,
she is a seasoned veteran of the business, having issued her
first record at 16. "For me to say that you are not going to care
one day what people say about you is a lie," says Velasquez.
"Because I care to this day. You're not going to forget about it,
it's there. The thing you have to know is, look: you get to do
what you love to do!"
In other words, find a way to deal with it. Which begs the
question: is an artist like Lampa too young to be sent out into
the world? Lampa's debut was rushed out with astonishing speed,
at least from an outsider's perspective.
"Her talent is ready now," counters Bourgeois. "There was no
reason to sit around for a year and what, let her ferment? She's
a world-class singer today."
Mom Marianne weighs in on the argument by noting that, "I'm
not sending her [out], I'm going with her. There will be one
parent with her pretty much at all times. The most important
thing, I think, is the team we have around us—we have a lot of
love on our team, a lot of good people. I can see God putting
these people in place on her team."
Velasquez's advice? "Find who you are artistically, find who
you are spiritually. Don't let people make you into a product.
Don't let people tell you what sells, you figure out what sells,
and you figure out who you want to be."
That might be a tall order for someone as new to it all as
Lampa. Right now she's focusing on the positive side of her
new-found visibility. She says, "I've always wanted to, like, sit
my high school down and be like, OK guys, don't ruin your life!
This is probably the closest I can get to that."
Having unleashed her powerful voice on the world, Rachael is
ready to see where it takes her. Considering how far she's come
already, one imagines this is one newcomer who will go very far,
indeed. |
