Music: Raising Her Voice

And yeah, it’s crazy, a crazy way to go about it, a crazy family, with little brother Quinton, who’s pretty jealous of Lelia getting all the attention but still takes his sis’s CD to show-and-tell at the homeschooling center, and those e-mails (2,700 hits a day!) to answer, pralines and spice bags to make up, and plans for Lelia’s next CD, and the media starting to pay attention, and the radio stations signing her up for live shows, and the smaller venues wanting to book her, and the bigger venues holding out because, Mary explains, “They want you to have a record deal. But we’re in a good place right now. We don’t have to sign with anybody.” That’s important to Mary, because once they sign, it won’t be she and Lelia making pralines; it will be some suit at Sony or Columbia or MCA calling the shots. One industry insider, she says, warned her not to let Lelia launch her career until she was 19.

“Or else I’d blow out like a match,” Lelia says with disdain. “But I’m not gonna let myself be a burned-out teen star. It’s not that I’m naïve. I just have a belief about myself and what I can do with the right marketing.”

The right marketing, and the right mothering. “I was telling my mom,” Mary offers. “She’s in a mental hospital, and I was trying to cheer her up by telling her what Lelia’s doing, and she kept saying, ‘Is that what Lelia wants, or is that what Mary wants?’” Every parent knows, though, that it’s impossible to tease the id out of “kid.” What Mary wants, like any mother, is what’s best for Lelia. And Lelia knows what Lelia wants. Lelia always has.

She wants the fans running up to her and saying, “Omigod, that’s the best concert I ever went to.” She wants the girls in the audience who sing along and know all the words. She wants the e-mails that say, “Oh, I love you so much!” “It’s touching people’s lives,” Lelia says.

“I got choked up at the CD release party,” Mary admits. “She was so on. So stunning. I saw in that moment how many lives she’s going to touch.”

For an instant, Mary sounds just like any proud mom, and less like a woman navigating precariously between the rock of tossing her daughter to Sony and the hard place of a life spent regretting what might have been. If you’ve got doubts, listen to Lelia’s CD. Then ask yourself: If you were Mrs. Mozart, wouldn’t you have done anything to make sure little Wolfgang got to play for the king?