Music: Raising Her Voice

“It’s an ever-evolving plan,” says Mary.

“You have a master plan,” says Lelia, “but you have a plan for next month, too.”

“We need to do some real thinking,” Mary announces, and looks at Lelia across their dining room table. In the next room is what Lelia jokingly calls “The Shrine” — an alcove whose walls are lined with dozens of framed photographs of Lelia from birth on. Lelia at Christmas. Lelia in a rocking chair. Lelia in color and in black-and-white. Oh, and Lelia and Quinton, a time or two. (“I think when you’re the oldest,” Lelia says, “you get a lot of photos taken, and then the poor second kid never gets any pictures at all.”)

Mary is musing about how to grow Lelia: “You’re getting people to the website.”

“Two thousand, seven hundred hits a day!” Lelia says proudly of leliasmusic.com.

“But what are we doing with that?” Mary asks pointedly.

“We have to keep trying different things to maximize the response.”

“Lelia and I are both avid about marketing,” Mary says.

Lelia knows that a lot of singers have an attitude of, oh, somebody will discover me; somebody special will see me. She doesn’t buy it. She says you have to work to make it happen. Mary believes that, too. Mary says the great thing about the Lelia business, as opposed to the Cajun restaurant business or the landscape business or the barter business, is that it doesn’t seem like work when the product is your daughter.

All of which may make Mary and Lelia sound like headcases. But then, you haven’t heard the Voice.

Pop Lelia’s CD, Louisiana Soul, into your player, and no matter how cynical you are about life coaches and strategic planning, stage mothers and teen girl pop stars, you just shut up. Because Lelia can really, really sing. Can make it damned near impossible, in fact, to reconcile the fresh-faced Apprentice escapee at the dining room table with that soaring, smoky, rocking, rollicking, wailing, whispering Voice.

The Voice compelled Michaela Majoun to “discover” Lelia, and to send those tapes — “before the CD was even made,” Mary says in awe — to Joan of Arcadia. “She reminds me of Joss Stone,” Majoun says of Lelia, “except that Joss doesn’t really write.” It’s because of the Voice that Louisiana Soul is getting airplay on college radio stations here and back down in Louisiana, and that Lelia has sold out every show she ever played. The Voice has made her an idol (at 15!) in Philly’s singer/songwriting community, which is sitting motionless, rapt, at the CD release party as Lelia, in that spaghetti-strap dress (not too revealing; “I have a theory about bein’ classy,” she says, grinning slyly. “You can show one thing at a time, but you have to cover the rest. Stomach or boobs, but not stomach and boobs. There should only be one thing to look at. I don’t want to be Britney Spears, up there half-naked, thrusting … not that there’s anything wrong with that”), lets loose on one of her own songs, “Won’t Bring You Down”:

Life is full of drunken lies and late-night sighs
So rest assured no one can see me from down here
It’s like I’ve fallen so far down and I’m just, well, I’m barely there

And you sit in the darkness, in the crowd of Lelia’s friends and admirers, and you think: Well, if I were her mother, what would I have done about that Voice?