Grammy nominee Billy Gilman balances show business and boy business with ease
Billy Gilman is halfway into the kitchen when he hears the front door open behind him. He spins around, smiles broadly and stretches out his hand.
"Hey guys," he says with practiced charm to the visitors who've just come in. "Good to see you."
After a couple of seconds of small talk, he turns and walks across the living room. His white Nikes, still wet with snow, sit on a mat just inside the front door. He plops down on a loveseat in his T-shirt, jeans and gray socks, a 12-year-old relaxing at home.
How does it feel to be nominated for two Grammy Awards, he's asked. But Billy wants to show off the laptop computer he just got for Christmas, to wrestle with Zoe, the cat that stretches its paws over the dining room chair, and to daydream about the motor bikes he and his brother, Colin, got for Christmas.
"Hey guys," he says. "Do you want to see my bike?"
But the bike is in the basement and going downstairs would violate the ground rules for an interview set by Billy's mother. So, for now, a reporter and photographer are confined to the living room.
Billy may be a national star, but his mom wants to protect his privacy. In Billy's house in Hope Valley, Mom still makes the rules.
Just two summers ago, Billy Gilman was singing at such venues as Fall River Celebrates America and the summer music festival at Hope Valley's First Baptist Church. He was a budding star in a state with no national reputation for country music.
But last June, his debut Sony Music album,
One Voice
, hit Billboard's country charts at number four. It's been on the charts for 34 consecutive weeks, going as high as number two, slipping off the top ten just last week. The success for a first album is stunning, both for its longevity and for Billy's age: Sony released the "One Voice" single about a week before his 12th birthday.
Within three weeks of the debut of the "One Voice" video,Billy's first single was Country Music Television's most requested clip. The simplicity of the message in the sweet song -- a child calling for an end to violence -- had instant appeal. Sony Music rushed the album to stores.
Sony executives thought
One Voice
could sell 150,000 albums; 45,000 to 70,000 copies would have been a modest success, enough to warrant a Christmas album.
One Voice
sold 500,000 copies in its first month, a total of 1.25 million albums so far. Billy earned his Christmas album.
Classic Christmas
sold 500,000 copies in less than seven weeks.
Last month, he won an American Music Award for "Favorite New Country Artist." Now he stands a chance at the recording industry's biggest prize of all: "One Voice" has been nominated for Grammy Awards for Best Male Country Vocalist and Best Country Song. Billy will be in the audience at the Staples Center in Los Angeles Wednesday night when the Grammys air at 8 p.m. on CBS.
"IT'S BEEN
a whirlwind," Billy says, as he lounges on the loveseat in his new house, set on a country road lined with pine trees. This is where Billy the country music star can be Billy the kid.
"House rules," reads a sign about twice the size of a postcard in Billy's living room. "If you sleep on it, make it up. If you wear it, hang it up. If it empties, fill it up. If it cries, love it."
"We have a farm here," Billy says, "a funny farm."
There's a gray cat named Oscar, a grouchy yellow cat named Taz, and Zoe, the new cat, black and white with a stubbed tail. Billy lies on his stomach on the living room carpet with his feet propped up on the couch, tossing a rubber reindeer at his dog, Wizzer.
"He's crazy," Billy says, calling the pug he and Colin named after the pup in
101 Dalmatians. "Here, go have Rudolph." He tosses the reindeer across the green carpet again. "That's his favorite toy in the world."
Billy gets up and tries to put Wizzer in a wicker basket. Wizzer's not having it, and wriggles out of his arms. "Usually I can get him in the basket," Billy says. "But he's wild."
In some ways, Billy's life is not much different from that of other 12-year-olds. One day recently, he went to the orthodontist to get his week-old braces adjusted, and then to the store to buy paper for a book report. But there are differences. He's on the road so often, he is privately tutored, four to five hours each day when he is at home. He sometimes does math on the plane or in the limousine; lately, he's been reading
My Side of the Mountain
for the book report.
Perhaps Billy could have written the book, which tells the story of a boy in search of adventure, who walks to the end of his block, then keeps going. Eventually he lives in a tree on a mountainside and makes friends with a weasel and a falcon. A boy who accomplishes his dreams with the determination of an adult.
BILLY'S MOM
remembers when Billy was 3, watching a Sea World special on TV. Instead of looking at the dolphins, Billy was singing along with Pam Tillis.
And she recalls the way Billy would spend hours in his bedroom, signing "autographs" on sheets of paper. Colin would sit in the sandbox. Get Billy, he'd say, I want to play. Billy would be in his room, signing his name.
Look hard enough and you'll see "Billy Gilman" scrawled in small letters near the window ledge in the family's dining room.
When he was 8, Billy was singing alone at home to a karaoke machine. Billy's grandmother, decided to take him to meet her friend, Angela Bacari, a former professional singer.
"Have you ever sung by yourself without an artist on a karaoke tape?" Bacari asked him.
He said he hadn't.
She asked him to sing a couple of LeAnn Rimes's songs. "His raw voice," Bacari says, "It was beautiful.
"I said, 'Go home and order all the karaoke tapes you want. Let's get to work.' "
Over the next few years, Billy began singing at local restaurants, taverns and fairs.
Then, on the recommendation of former Roomful of Blues saxophonist Greg Piccolo, Bacari sent a tape of Billy's singing to Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. Benson hooked Billy and Bacari up with a Nashville manager, Scott Siman. Siman called Sony producer Blake Chancey, and Siman and Chancey flew to Rhode Island to see Billy at the Warwick Musical Theatre, opening for country legend Alabama.
Chancey flew back to Nashville, showed a videotape of the show to other Sony executives. They gathered songwriters and producers and eventually flew Billy to Nashville to record "One Voice."
Since then, he's been featured in virtually every major publication, from People magazine to USA Today. He's been on
The Tonight Show,
the
Rosie O'Donnell Show
and has sung for President Clinton in Washington.
Bacari has been with Billy all the time. In addition to coaching him musically, she has taught Billy to look people in the eye when he meets them, to listen and stay focused. His attentiveness has helped him gain access to Nashville's inner circle of producers, Sony executives and songwriters.
By turns gracious, modest but not bashful, Billy can work a room with the efficiency of a political candidate.
"His personality is very unique. In person he is just captivating," says Paul Corbin, a vice president in BMI's Nashville publicity department. "I watched him work a crowd in Las Vegas at one of the music events. You could have heard a pin drop with 1,500 people. He just had a command of the audience. They really want to see him succeed."
Bacari, now Billy's personal manager, won't say how much Billy is earning from his music, or what her financial arrangement is with him. She clearly enjoys his company and his success.
"I love it. I love being with Billy," she says. "He's enjoyable. We talk all the time. It's not like being with a kid."
SONY IS MARKETING
its youngest star beyond country music's Tennessee hub to teenage girls -- and their mothers -- across the country, to the "Wal-Mart demographic," an audience that goes beyond country's geographic core.
On "One Voice," Billy's biggest hit, he sings with a slight twang, but its not the standard country-western song that Billy used to sing at the Wood River Inn in Richmond. In those days, he wore a big white cowboy hat that sat low on his ears and a wide belt buckle on his jeans.
When he signed with Sony, the label changed his image from that of a kid dressed as a country star to that of a country star dressed as a regular kid.
The lead photo on his Web site (www.billygilman.com) projects an image of Billy as the stylish pre-teen, more Ricky Martin than Ricky Schroder. He's sitting in a corner, with his back against a wall, wearing a blue-gray sweater, creased black slacks and black shoes.
As Billy's popularity grows, so do the expectations his fans and those in the industry have for him.
The success of his third album, the next step in determining his staying power, will turn largely on how he balances the youthful optimism of "One Voice" with coming of age as a celebrity teen. He, his managers and producers (the
One Voice
crew has already agreed to produce the next album) will choose songs that are likely to follow the model of "One Voice": they will reflect a child's hopefulness, not a jaded country star's tough-luck experience.
Neither late '90s country music nor contemporary teen pop has had a star singer who is as commercially important as Billy, and yet so young. LeAnn Rimes burst on the country market with "Blue" as a 13-year-old; her first album debuted on the top spot of Billboard's country chart. Five years later, Rimes, now 18, has evolved into a pop diva whose latest album is also on the top of the Billboard's country chart.
Billy's
One Voice
didn't match that ascendancy. It debuted at number four and peaked at number two. But his debut came when he was a year and 9 months younger than Rimes when she debuted.
"The bottom line is he's bought a lot of really good positive attention to country music, and that's always welcome," says Wade Jessen, director of country charts for Billboard.
"This is new water, this has not happened before in country. A lot of people are interested, the sales numbers prove that. . . . The future of it remains to be seen."
A PACKAGE
will arrive in Billy's mail in the next few weeks, a CD with songs for him to learn for his next album.
The sales of this and future albums will depend on what happens with Billy's voice when he goes through puberty.
Billy loves to sing but is less fond of his vocal exercises. If Billy does not do his voice lessons, practicing how to sing from the "mask," the cavity area of his head, and not his throat, Billy's voice suffers, Bacari says.
"Once I go to hit that high note in 'One Voice,' that waaa," Billy says at his house, escalating his voice as he sustains a note, "it won't come out."
Billy also has to learn when to rest his voice, when to stop chatting in a roomful of fans or friends.
"I hear it immediately when his voice gets hoarse," Bacari says. "Sometimes my ears are super sensitive."
"That's good," Billy says.
"Billy's a great, great singer," Bacari says. "I'm going to work as hard as I can to help him keep that voice.
"I don't know what happens when it gets older and deeper. It will have all those qualities. We don't know when it will change."
FOR NOW,
Billy is enjoying his time home in Hope Valley. He likes playing with his brother and his neighborhood friends in the bog behind his house, or heading to the basement where fishing rods lean against the wall at the bottom of the steps. He and Colin will ice fish at the lake at the end of his street. At such times, Nashville seems far away.
Billy's mom, quit her job last year at her father's plumbing and heating company. Billy's dad still works full time, doing maintenance work for the company.
Mrs. Gilman wanted to be home when Colin gets out of school and when Billy is home from the road. His schedule varies, depending on what appearances and tours he's booked for. He is heading to Los Angeles tomorrow for the Grammys and will return on Thursday.
"I'm not a stage mother, by any means," Mrs. Gilman says.
"Billy's not paying our lights, or our mortgage. I took out another loan at People's Credit to pay for the Christmas gifts this year.
"I'll probably never have to buy him his own car, never have to pay his college, because Billy will do that. But the money is not the deal. This isn't what it's all about."
Billy's family did move into a new house a year ago, on the same 60 acres where the house where Billy and Colin grew up sits.
The new house is larger than their first house, but it's not a mansion. It's still unfinished; a sliding glass back door opens to a three-foot drop.
There are things Billy gives up when he's on the road. He misses birthday parties, pillow fights and late-night video games at sleep-overs.
"When it comes to work," Billy says, his legs folded beneath him on the loveseat, "if you want to do something and you want to do it for the rest of your life, you can't get off track."
Last month Billy and Bacari took a limousine to New York, where Billy announced the Grammy Award nominees for Best Musical Show Album. They were up before 7, and Billy slept on the way. He didn't push every button in the limo like he used to. "He's growing up," Bacari says. "He's mellowing. I can see it."
When his family travels with him, work comes first. Last June, at the Fan Fair country music festival in Nashville, their first time on the road with him, they thought they'd have a nice little vacation. Instead, Billy did seven media interviews in two days.
"We're lucky if we had a hamburger with him," Mrs. Gilman recalls.
Even his time at home over the last few months was arranged by Sony, which wanted him to have a family vacation, get his braces on and to catch up on school work.
Reminders of Nashville are always nearby.
Billy grabs a glass pyramid off the mantel across the room from the TV stand and carries it with two hands to the loveseat. It's Billy's American Music Award, smudged with fingerprints; the bronze plaque reads: "Favorite New Country Artist: Billy Gilman."
"Thank you so much. This is so overwhelming," Billy said that night in his acceptance speech to a TV audience. "Thank you. Never in a million trillion years would I ever imagine I'd be winning an award like this."
Billy walked off the stage and hugged Britney Spears, an emcee for the show, before he left.
He puts the glass pyramid back on the mantel, next to the Billboard Music Video Award for Best Country New Artist, one of four Billy won in one night.
The platinum record Billy earned for selling a million copies of
One Voice
is set in a framed poster on the wall behind the couch.
"I'm privileged to be nominated," Billy says of the Grammy Award. No solo artist younger than Billy has ever been nominated; his competition for Best Male Country Vocal Performance is fierce: Johnny Cash, Vince Gill, Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakam.
Billy's best chance for winning is Best Country Song, a songwriters award. "One Voice" is up against "Breathe" and "The Way You Love Me," both performed by Faith Hill, Vince Gill's "Feels Like Love," and Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance".
"I'm not expecting much, but I'm privileged to be among the nominees."
"DO YOU
want to see my bike?"
Billy is asking again, though he knows that going to the basement would break the ground rules. But he can't resist, so he asks his mom and Bacari if he and his guests can go to the basement. Finally they relent.
Billy leads the way, past the shoes at the bottom of the steps lined up for working in the yard, past the fishing rods.
Colin's motor bike is closest to the steps, a blue-and-white 90cc Yamaha with a silver stripe. Then Billy's, sleek, golden yellow four-wheeler.
He has signed his name with a silver marker on the handlebars, "Billy" on one side, "Gilman" on the other.
Billy's bike has a 50cc motor, smaller than his little brother's. "Sony will kill me if I get him anything bigger than that," Mrs. Gilman says.
