July 2006
School Of Pop
From
all over
by Skip
Hollandsworth,
IT’S THE LAST WEEK OF APRIL, a few days
before the Septien Entertainment Group’s 2006 Master
Artist Showcase, and the master artists are definitely getting tense. Emily
Holt, a twelve-year-old pop singer with blue eyes normally seen in Siberian
huskies, walks into the Septien studios in the North
Dallas suburb of Addison and announces that she’s changing her name to Emi Holt
because she thinks the judges at the showcase will find her real first name
“like, really boring.” Reed-thin Kimberly Kottwitz, a
twelve-year-old who specializes in Broadway show tunes, walks in and declares
that she’s worried she’s not going to get over her cold in time to perform.
“Someone told me that I should take steroids,” she says. “Or, you know,
something like that.”
Deidre Thornell,
a fourteen-year-old country music singer with bountiful Reba McEntire—like red hair arrives to make sure her pitch is
perfect on a song she’ll be performing called “Good Girl.” “If I miss those
notes in the chorus, I will have a complete breakdown,” she says to no one in
particular, just as Carley Smith, a sixteen-year-old
Debbie Harry look-alike who sings pop-rock herself, shows up with her blond
hair perfectly disheveled and her blue eyes haloed by luminous blue eye shadow.
She is distressed. She missed her previous week’s singing lesson because her
car wasn’t working. “I feel really irresponsible right now,” she says. “Well,
on the other hand, that’s what artists are supposed to be. Isn’t that right?”
Then, into the studio comes Annie Dingwall, an impossibly long-legged fifteen-year-old pop
singer. Her task for the day is to work on “Survive,” a song she’s written
about a young woman haunted by the end of a relationship.
“ How do
I surviiiiive? ” Annie wails, standing in
a little glass-walled recording booth, her mouth pressed against the
microphone.
Linda Septien,
the founder and chief executive of the Septien
Entertainment Group, leans back in her chair on the other side of the glass
wall.
“Annie,” she says, “you still need to
give the line more emotion. A lot of emotion. Tell me,
what’s your song really about?”
“It’s about a guy and a girl, and the
guy was cheating on her, and the girl still wants him
even though she knows she shouldn’t stay with him, but she still wants him.”
“Wow,” Septien
says. “Where did you get that idea? From something that
happened to you?”
“Well, actually, from a movie. I
haven’t exactly been through a breakup yet.” Annie pauses and sheepishly adds,
“I haven’t even been on a real date.”
Soon, Annie is out of the recording
booth, only to be replaced by some of the other master artists: Jason Moody, a
college freshman who plans to perform a soulful Paul Simon—ish
ballad at the showcase about a girl obsessed with herself; Hunter Pecunia, an
easygoing eleven-year-old from Highland Village who sings and acts (she’s a
regular on Barney & Friends, which is filmed in the Dallas area); and Maddie Smith (no relation to Carley),
a ten-year-old rock singer from McKinney who throws around her strawberry-blond
hair just like Janis Joplin once did. Maddie tells Septien that she plans to play her own full-size electric
guitar during her performance at the showcase, where she’s going to sing a song
she’s written about girls playing spin the bottle.
“I bet your guitar weighs twenty
pounds,” Septien says to her 64-pound student. “Are
you sure you can hold it through the whole song?”
“I’ve got to,” Maddie
replies, giving her teacher a determined stare. “It’s the showcase. Everyone
will be there. I’ve got to show them what I can do.”
EVERY SPRING, THE MASTER ARTIST
SHOWCASE receives absolutely no attention in the daily papers or on local TV
stations. Most people in
But among top record executives, music
producers, and talent scouts in
At the moment, there are at least a
dozen other Septien singers who are not well-known
but have development deals of their own with other producers, managers, or
record labels.
And there are definitely more to come.
Every year, in spare practice rooms, more than two hundred children and
teenagers take lessons two or three times a week to learn “commercial voice
style,” “instrumental performance,” “songwriting,” “stage presentation,” “dance
movements for songs,” or “the use of the microphone to enhance the voice.”
They spend more hours in a recording studio, where they record one song after
another, all of them professionally produced with a band and backup singers.
And then they put together CDs of their best songs, which they send off (along
with head shots and short bios) to music industry insiders in hopes of being
discovered.
“It isn’t exactly like I planned on any
of this happening,” says Septien, a congenial
52-year-old blonde who easily looks a decade younger. “I’m an opera singer by
training. When I began teaching voice lessons back in the eighties, there were
just a couple of younger kids coming to see me, and they were asking for pure
classical training, which is all I knew how to teach. I don’t think the idea of
becoming pop stars ever occurred to them—or to me, either.”
As she tells me this, executives from
ABC are settling into one of the larger practice rooms so they can listen to
some of her students audition for a new TV show that would compete with
American Idol. Meanwhile, Septien’s assistant is on
the phone with a representative of Dallas-based Radio Disney; the national pop
music radio network wants to know who will be performing at the Master Artist
Showcase. Only minutes earlier, a music producer in
Septien
sighs, then breaks into a soft chuckle. “I guess you
could say that the landscape has sort of changed.”
INDEED IT HAS. More than ever, inside
the headquarters of major labels in
“You simply wouldn’t believe how many
reps from major labels are out there, scouring the country, looking for the
next big thing,” says
“There’s really no other place I know
in the country that’s like it,” says songwriter Trina Harmon, who has written
and produced songs for Hilary Duff, Jesse McCartney, Nick Lachey,
and Jessica Simpson. “You can find plenty of places that offer vocal coaching.
But what Linda has done is create a full-fledged school that can turn a kid
with raw musical talent into a genuine commercial artist.”
Becoming that commercial artist is not
exactly an inexpensive extracurricular activity. Group lessons at the Septien studios cost $368 for a four-week class. If you
want private lessons, you first have to pay a $100 fee to audition; if you’re
good enough to be accepted, you can pay $75 to $95 an hour to work with one of
the staff teachers or a fee of $250 to be evaluated by Septien
herself and then, on the off chance she selects you, $200 an hour to study with
her. A kid who is talented enough to be picked for the master artists program—a
nine-month course involving more-intensive lessons and the chance to perform in
the spring showcase before music industry insiders—must pay between $700 and
$1,000 a month, not including the cost of making a demo CD, which can run from
$500 to $3,000 a song. All in all, a parent can easily lay
out upward of $10,000 for those nine months, the equivalent of a year’s tuition
at a good public university.
And those kids who are lucky enough to
get that education are guaranteed absolutely nothing. “I always tell all of my
students that no matter how great they are, they still might be completely
passed over,” Septien says. “Actually, that there’s a
really good chance that they will be passed over. There are so many thousands
of kids out there with great voices and great dreams, all of them working hard
to make it. When a Disney vice president called and asked me to send him three
or four candidates to try out for the new Hannah Montana role, there were already at
least a thousand girls who had been asked to audition. A
thousand!”
School Of Pop
(page 2)
Yet no matter what she says, all her
kids, and all their parents, just look at her and shrug. “This is my dream,”
says Carley Smith, the sixteen-year-old rocker. “I
know my friends think I’m a little twisted. But I just say, ‘Hey, at least I
have a dream!’ And what if something amazing does happen? What if I get a big
break? Isn’t it worth it? Just to have that one chance?”
Almost all of this year’s master
artists began to work for that one chance before age six. “We actually realized
something was different when our daughter was only two,” says Melissa Pecunia,
Hunter’s mother. “She’d sing in her car seat whenever we drove anywhere. A
neighbor was listening to her one day and said, ‘She’s got it.’ My husband and
I said, ‘She’s got what?’”
“For our daughter, singing was her
soccer,” says Kimberly Kottwitz’s mother, Susan. “It
was the only thing she cared about. She turned a corner of the playroom into a
studio. She asked us to put in an electronic keyboard, a stand-up microphone,
and a karaoke machine. My husband and I would sit in another room and just look
at one another while she practiced. I’m serious. Kimberly practiced so much
that she wore out three karaoke machines.”
Another one of the master artists,
Paige Velasquez, a startlingly beautiful thirteen-year-old from
“We said, ‘Well, um, okay,’” recalls
Cristina. “So we entered her in an Easter Seals telethon that was televised on
stations in
What they did was start driving Paige
to
AN OUTSIDER WHO first comes to the Septien studios might find the passion of the master
artists a bit baffling. Sitting in the lobby, waiting for their lessons, the
kids fervently discuss such subjects as their ability to scat (taking one
syllable of a lyric and stretching it over several notes) and their use of
their “belts” (particular vocal techniques that help project the voice). They
talk about the pros and cons of wearing clothes from the hip, youth-oriented clothier
Urban Outfitters (“They’re so cool, but then again, everyone is going there
now,” says Carley). They warn one another about the
dangers at the
Septien
says she implores her students, regardless of how young they are, to find their
own musical niche. “The minute I met Maddie, I knew
she was born to rock. And when I first listened to Hunter Pecunia, I thought,
‘This darling little girl has pop star written all over her.’ I wouldn’t last
ten minutes in this industry if I tried to make everyone look and sing the very
same way.”
Raised in Louisiana—her mother played
the keyboards and the accordion, and her older sister was a concert pianist—Septien graduated with a music degree from Southwestern
Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), did indeed
work as an opera singer, and, in 1979, married her college boyfriend, Rafael Septien, who was then the kicker for the Dallas Cowboys.
She continued to perform sporadically—she sang at
Septien
studied the performances of various pop singers and took voluminous notes,
which she kept in binders. But she never got her singing career off the ground,
in large part because her personal life was falling apart. In 1986, soon after
she gave birth to her first son, she split up with her husband, whom she says
was pathologically unfaithful; the next year, Rafael was indicted on a charge
of aggravated sexual abuse of a child. Although he publicly claimed the episode
was a misunderstanding (Linda also says the indictment “wasn’t fair”), he agreed
in a plea bargain to a ten-year probated sentence, saying he did not want to go
through the publicity of a trial, and he eventually moved to Mexico City, where
he is now remarried and successfully working in the real estate and oil
businesses.
After the divorce, Septien
devoted herself to raising her son and teaching voice lessons in her home.
Then, in the early nineties, after the success of young pop singers like Debbie
Gibson and Tiffany, Septien began to hear from the
parents of teenagers who also wanted to be stars. “It wasn’t like anyone knew
anything about me,” she says. “The reason they called was because I was the
only voice teacher in town who had taken out an ad in the Yellow Pages.”
One of those calls came from Joe
Simpson, who said he had a very talented eleven-year-old daughter in need of
advanced training. She had just gone to
Septien’s
binders full of notes were about to come in handy. She began working with young
Jessica Simpson on tightening her vibrato. She taught her to put more breath in
her voice so her vocal tone was not so pinched. She gave her exercises to help
expand her range so she didn’t sound too strained when she hit notes an octave
above middle C. She also worked on her stage presence. “Jessica, believe it or
not, was painfully, painfully shy,” Septien says.
In 1994 Septien
decided for the first time to feature her best students in a showcase, and she
begged local radio deejays and talent scouts to act as judges and vote for the
best overall performer. When Jessica appeared in the show the next year, at the
age of fourteen, she was hardly the star. The judges were far more taken with a
twelve-year-old who sang country songs and another girl who sang show tunes.
But Jessica kept coming back, week after week, and was an extremely hard
worker, and by the 1997 show, the buzz had begun. “I listened to her and
thought, ‘This is the best teenage voice I’ve ever heard,’” says Kidd Kraddick, the
Soon Jessica was on her way to New York
(with Septien at her side) to perform for Tommy Mottola, then the head of Columbia Records, who was looking
for a teenage star to compete with her old rivals, Britney Spears and Christina
Aguilera. Mottola signed her to a contract and
released her debut album, Sweet Kisses, in 1999, at which point she
referred to Septien in interviews as “my second mom.”
The floodgates opened. “We suddenly had a waiting list of kids wanting to get in
for lessons,” Septien says. What’s more, the students
who were already with her wanted even more lessons,
because they believed they were a step away from the kind of fame Jessica was
experiencing.
But as almost all of them have learned,
musical fame is impossible to predict. The twelve-year-old country singer who
was the 1995 sensation has quit singing (Septien has
no idea where she is today), and the girl who sang show tunes is now studying
to be a doctor. One former Septien girl who was
considered to be just as good as Jessica in the mid-nineties is now a topless
dancer in Houston; a boy who received enormous attention at the showcases
during that same period is now a Christian missionary in the Amazon.
“Waking up and singing is the easy
part,” says 25-year-old Jolie Holliday, one of the
stars of the 1998 showcase, who is still struggling to become an A-list country
music singer (her greatest visibility comes by way of a Chevrolet promotion,
when she performs with her band in the infield at some of the biggest events in
motor sports, such as this year’s Indianapolis 500). “The reality is that
unless you are very lucky, making a name for yourself requires enormous work
and marketing. I’m on the road one hundred and fifty days a year. I can
guarantee you that ninety-five percent of the kids who dream the big dreams
over at the Septien studios have no idea what it
takes.” But their chances are much greater, Jolie
says, with Septien as their teacher. “Even today,” Jolie says, “whenever I feel like I’m in a singing rut, I
go back and take a few lessons from her. She is a master of technique.”
When Septien
teaches, she’s no diva. She loves to laugh with her young charges even as she
fires out specific advice (“Put your tongue down on that note!” “Don’t hit
every word so hard!” “Chew your scats!” “Add a couple of licks”—guttural
sounds—“at the end of that line”), and she cheerfully teases them if they
wobble a bit on their “money notes” (the big soaring notes that make audiences
applaud) during a song. But she can be strict, especially with the older
teenagers who are starting to hit the age where they’ve, as she puts it, “got
to be ready to make their mark.” When one of her best students joined the high
school cheerleading squad, for instance, Septien cut
her from the master artists program, believing her cheering would hurt her
singing voice. When another teenager did not lose weight, Septien
cut her too. “I hated doing it,” she says, “but I couldn’t ignore what our
program is all about, which is to create the next star. I’m sorry, but heavier
girls are not going to get much of a chance with record labels.”
What’s more, Septien
has begun to make all but the youngest of her master artists write and perform
their own songs. “In this day and age, when American Idol is maybe
the most popular TV show going, it’s the one guaranteed way of breaking out of
the pack,” she says. “Otherwise, you will always be known as just another
teenager singing someone else’s hit songs.”
Predictably, many of her master
artists’ songs consist of three or four simple chords and a routine melody. But
often, the lyrics are surprisingly insightful: little windows into the quirks,
conflicts, and insistent longings of tweens and
teens. In the week before the 2006 showcase, Carley
Smith gives me a sneak preview of her new song, “Liar,” which is about a girl
trying to find herself. When I compliment her on a couple of lines in the first
verse—“I smile like I mean it, but I get sick inside my head/I hate the way
life is, but I love the way I live”—Carley says,
almost dismissively, “Oh, thanks. It’s about me, you know.”
School Of Pop
(page 3)
Later, Paige from Odessa, who drove in
with her mother and grandmother earlier that day, steps into the recording
booth to work on her new song, “Listen to Me,” which she plans to debut at the
showcase. “Listen to me right now, so I won’t have to scream and shout,” she
sings. “I’m independent, strong, and free/I don’t need your permission or
authority.”
Septien and
I stare at each other. It’s an amazing show of adolescent defiance, complete
with one slamming guitar riff after another and all of it created from scratch
by . . . a seventh grader. “I know how much her parents have sacrificed to get
her here, month after month for the last couple of years,” Septien
tells me later. “I know what this has done to them financially. But this is
what is so rewarding about this job. You can see Paige moving fast, her voice
getting stronger and stronger. And now she’s writing these incredible songs
from the heart. It’s a gift, a true gift. I simply can’t wait to see what
happens to her next.”
THE MASTER ARTISTS start arriving at
In the dressing room, many of the girls
are checking one another out. Almost everyone is wearing, predictably, at least
one item from Urban Outfitters. In a sudden moment of inspiration, Annie Dingwall, the dateless fifteen-year-old who wrote the song
about surviving a relationship, has clipped pink extensions into her hair; her
younger sister, Caroline, another of the master artists, has taken all her hair
and put it into one giant ponytail. Anne DeFilippo, a
junior at a Catholic high school in
“Oh, babe, no way,” says Carley Smith, who is dressed like a female version of Billy
Idol, with rings on every finger, pants that barely get above her hips, a tiny
T-shirt, and her blond hair shooting out like fireworks.
Surprisingly, for all her experience on
Barney, Hunter Pecunia is getting nervous. She puts her hands in a bowl
of ice—“my personal trick to keep from crying,” she says with a giggle, but
tears fill her eyes anyway. Hunter’s mother, Melissa, standing a few feet away,
is unfazed. “This is her first showcase, so who knows what’s going to happen? It’s
not like she isn’t ready. She practices her singing for thirty minutes every
morning, a few more times in the afternoon, and right before she goes to bed.”
Maddie
Smith, meanwhile, is raring to go. She sings a couple of scales and straps on
her guitar, at which point she immediately begins leaning to one side, her left
shoulder sagging. “I’m only going to hold the guitar for half of my
spin-the-bottle song,” she confides. “I think that will be enough to get my
message across.”
The auditorium is packed with friends
and family. The judges, who will pick the best overall performer, are on the
front row: talent scouts, executives from Radio Disney, a rep from a record
label, and, as always, deejay Kidd Kraddick, who
says, “This is not only one of the best shows in town, it’s almost always far
better than any showcase of new talent I’ve seen that is put on by a major
record label.”
To get the crowd revved up, two
handsome protégés of Septien’s in their early
twenties who are not in the master artists program—her own son Remington and a
former Guess model named Erik Neff—come out and play a few songs, followed by
the winner of the best overall performer award from the 2005 showcase, a
sixteen-year-old R&B singer named Alysha Deslorieux, who attends the city’s prestigious high school
for the performing arts. (Septien is so convinced
that Erik and Remington and Alysha are on their way
to commercial success that she has agreed to back them financially for a couple
of years in return for a cut of any future album deal.)
Then it’s time for the first master
artist of 2006. Out walks Paige Velasquez, holding her own
electric guitar. “I want everyone to know that girls can rock,” she says
confidently into the microphone, before letting loose with “Listen to Me.”
Backing her up is a professional band composed of other guitarists, a
keyboardist, and a drummer. As Paige whips her hair from side to side, singing
at the top of her lungs, middle-aged men in the audience lean back in their
chairs, their mouths open. “Thank you!” Paige shouts when she is finished.
“Let’s give it up for the band!”
Paige is followed by Emi Holt, whose
rendition of Kelly Clarkson’s “Beautiful Disaster” is so dead-on that several
people in the audience give her a standing ovation. Carley
Smith—who is going by her middle name, Roxann, for
the showcase because “it really sounds more artistic and more complicated, just
like the real me”—gets a huge burst of applause when she sings “Liar.” Her
stage presence is hypnotic; she moves around like a seductive spider, dipping
her shoulders and throwing out her arms.
Then Maddie
Smith comes out with her guitar, which she does indeed hold through only half
of her spin-the-bottle song, handing it to a stagehand just as she gets to the
lines:
All my girlies, let’s go party
Meet me there and don’t be tardy
I just want to get this started
Guess what, ladies, there’ll be boys there
Do that makeup and do your hair
We’ll play spin the bottle all night long.
The crowd roars. “Thank you so much,” Maddie says before walking off. “Everyone at Septien calls me the Little Bohemian, and I guess I am!”
On and on they come. The
fourteen-year-old country music singer Deidre Thornell
is pitch-perfect on her songs, and Kimberly Kottwitz,
who has gotten over her cold, does a dance act with two sinewy male backup
dancers as she sings “Princess in Pink,” about a girl who wants to be a famous
singer (“All she wants is to sing/Dreams of the fun that fame would bring/She’s
the princess in pink!”). Instead of going with “Survive,” Annie Dingwall performs another of her compositions, “A Girl’s Gotta Do What a Girl’s Gotta Do,”
about teen empowerment, and the Catholic high school girl, Anne DeFilippo, who also has changed her name for the
showcase—she is going by Shardon—sings a rather shocking
song about the ways that poetry is like good sex.
Finally, pint-size Hunter Pecunia comes
out onstage, her brown hair falling in her eyes. She is dressed simply, wearing blue jean shorts that come down to her
knees, a brown shirt from Target, a cream-colored jacket, and brown wedges that
she got at Limited Too. If there are still tears in her eyes, no one can see
them. She flashes a slightly embarrassed grin at the audience and grabs the
microphone, which is as big as her head.
“Okay, well, here goes,” she says, and
she begins to sing “Impossible,” a song made famous by Christina Aguilera. It’s
a very demanding piece of music, requiring enormous range and constant
scatting. There’s no way to hide a missed note in the song: One little wobble
and everyone knows you are off. Hunter bends her knees, throws back her head,
lifts the mike to her mouth, and begins wailing, belting out a series of notes
that are more than an octave above middle C. The notes seem to hang in the air.
Kidd Kraddick
grabs his evaluation form. “Stop the contest,” he writes. “Game over.” He turns
to the person next to him and asks, “Is this really an eleven-year-old girl
we’re listening to?”
When Hunter finishes singing, there is
no question that she will be named the best overall performer by the judges. Septien gets onstage and says, “Aretha Franklin, move
over.” People in the audience—even the other master artists—try to get close to
her after the showcase is over. Some want to have their photos taken with her
so they can say they were at the 2006 showcase when Hunter Pecunia sang
“Impossible.”
“Hunter, you’re a star!” one of her
friends cries out.
“Actually, I’d just like to go get
something to eat,” she says, holding her wedges in her hand. “My feet hurt. And
I’m ready for a good night’s sleep.” She smiles at everyone, then heads out the
door with her family.
WITHIN A WEEK, the phones are ringing.
The
But what will really happen to Hunter?
Is stardom truly around the corner? A decade from now, when she is 21 years
old, will all of
“It’s the great mystery,” Septien tells me as we sit in her office. “Will Hunter be
the star? Will it be Paige? Will it be Carley or Maddie or Annie or Deidre or someone else? Or will it be
none of them? Will they all move on to other things? Will the moment they had
at the showcase be the big shining moment of their singing careers?” She sighs.
“In this business, you just don’t know.”
There’s a knock at the door, and
standing in the doorway is a gorgeous teenager in a short skirt, her long hair
cascading down her back. She is one of the eight new master artists for the
autumn 2006 class.
“Good Lord,” Septien
says.
“Linda, I was hoping I could get a
chance to ask you something,” the girl says.
“Well, you just sit right down.”
Septien
starts smiling. Then she starts chuckling. 
July 2006