The Importance of Keeping It Movin'

WHEN I WAS twelve, my mom asked me if I wanted to be famous, and I yelled, "Bring it on!" I was ready—when I was still in kindergarten I'd had a taste of what it felt like to do what I love, and after that there was no going back. But by the time I was a teenager, no matter how hard I tried, fame wasn't bringing me a damn thing.

I hadn't booked a role in years, though not for lack of trying. My pattern was to get to the final round of auditions, make the casting directors love me, get my hopes up, and then have them dashed when it amounted to nothing. I was almost in the Bratz movie—but didn't get it and got super upset. Same with The Cheetah Girls.

I also went on more Disney auditions than I can count. A Disney audition meant that you had to sing and dance, so I'd pick my own music, go in there, nail it—and then the part would go to someone else (*cough* Vanessa Hudgens in High School Musical *cough*). At one audition, I sang my ass off and had all the casting directors smiling and clapping after I'd finished. "You just do so great every time you're in here!" one of them told me.

I'd heard it all before, and though I'm sure you can't imagine me ever saying anything inappropriate (right?), I blurted out, "Oh yeah—then how come you never cast me for anything?" The whole room went silent, and everyone stared at me as if I'd just told Minnie Mouse to go eff herself. You do not talk back at a Disney audition. My mom hustled me out of there as fast as she could.

Once we were outside, I pointed at the big green building we'd just exited, the one that I'd been to so many times before, and told her, "I don't care what they are casting in there—I am never coming back." And so I didn't.

At the beginning of the year, I'd convinced my parents to homeschool me for a while, to open up more time for auditions. But by the time the paperwork went through and we'd gotten the go-ahead to proceed, I was over the idea of homeschooling, and I accepted that the acting thing just wasn't happening. It wasn't as if I could go stand on the street corner and deliver monologues until someone offered me a role on Ugly Betty—I literally couldn't do anything unless I had an audition, and those opportunities just weren't coming. I just wanted—gasp—to be normal for a while.

October 20, 2002

I am so upset right now. Because I have to leave school in about a week or so to be homeschooled and I'm really upset. I want to cry. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to be homeschooled because I was having a hard time with my schoolwork, but now I really don't want to go! I won't have any friends, I'll miss out on sooo much! And the worst part is I have to leave because of acting! The one thing that I can't stand! I want to be normal for a while. I'm not even booking right now. It's bullshit!

But my dreams of normalcy didn't last long. I was still determined to keep it moving, so I shifted my focus to music. I'd always loved to sing. We have a home video of me banging the hell out of a Playskool piano and covering Michael Jackson's "Leave Me Alone" when I was only two. I couldn't even say my Ls—so I was really singing "Neave Me Anone"—but I was pouring my heart out in that song. When I was still in elementary school, my dad would bribe a sound engineer friend of his by giving him a hundred dollars to sneak me into the studio on Saturday afternoons so I could work out my vocal cords on something more productive than just screaming on the playground.

I know what you're thinking: if I wanted to sing in high school, why didn't I just join glee club? Well, I frickin' tried. For one quarter of my freshman year, I was a proud member of the school choir, but all the good solos and parts kept going to my arch-nemesis, Nazanin Mandi. If the name sounds familiar, it's because she's an actress and singer who dates Miguel, but when we were teenagers, she was two grades ahead of me at Valencia High. She got to sing at every damn pep rally! C'mon, girl—give a freshman a break! Because I was totally insane at that time (and, let's be honest, probably really hangry), I decided it was a good idea to challenge her to a sing off. "I don't think she's really that good," I told one of her friends, hoping my dis would travel through the grapevine and get back to her. "You tell her I said that, and we'll sing and see who's better!" It was my most real-life Glee moment! Sadly—but probably better for both of us—Nazanin never took me up on it.

Finally, I had enough of playing second soprano and quit. "I don't need to sing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at a basketball game," I told myself. "I'll just go home and try to get a record deal."

I had gotten ahold of Robin Thicke's first album and listened to it so much that I practically played it out. But I also loved Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, and, of course, Brandy. Most of my friends were listening to punk, but I just couldn't get into it. While they were dying over Rise Against, I was like, "I'm sorry, but this is the whitest shit ever."

Dad and I soon started making the rounds, pulling on the connections he had from his days at Universal Music and a few people I'd met through acting. Opportunities started to pop up here and there—we went to Atlanta to record, met with Darkchild, a.k.a. Rodney Jerkins, and with producers who'd worked with Omarion and Jhené Aiko. I'd do writing sessions where I'd work on my own lyrics alongside professional songwriters who'd coach me through it.

"Okay, Naya," they'd say. "What do you want to write a song about?"

Um . . . boys? Duh.

And ah, yes, the songs that came out of these sessions—a little part of me is dying of embarrassment just writing about it, and you haven't even heard them. My mom found a demo tape recently, and when my husband tried to play it in the car, my mom sat in the backseat shouting, "Turn that shit up!" while I tried to rip the CD player out with my bare hands.

One of the demo gems is about my best friend betraying me and trying to pick up my man (er, boy?) at the mall. It has spoken-word interludes where I'm saying things like, "Girl, how could you?! We were like blood!" over some smooth-as-buttah R&B playing in the background.

As atrocious as these songs were, they made my dad super proud, and he was convinced we were on the right track. "Writing's where the money is!" he'd say, practically pumping his fist. "You gotta get in there and get a pub deal!"

The entertainment industry has a reputation for being kind of sleazy, but in my experience it has nothing on the music business. Even though I was barely old enough to drive, I already considered myself a professional. Being an actor meant you had to show up on time and know your lines, so I learned to take my responsibilities seriously at a very young age. Yet none of the "adults" we were working with did the same. It was like a whole bunch of drug-dealing car salesmen got together and decided to start this thing called the music business.

"Meeting's confirmed for 3:00 p.m.," they'd say. Then on the day of: "Can you do 9:30 instead? At night." Mind you, I was fourteen, with school the next day.

People who claimed to know what they were doing always tried to coach me on my "image" whenever I had a meeting with someone from a label. "Wear something hip. This is the music business. Image is everything. You have to walk in that room and look like an artist."

Left to pretty much my own devices, I interpreted "looking like an artist" to mean wearing a lot of leather. Specifically, a cropped jacket and bell-bottom jeans with suede ropes that crisscrossed all up and down the sides. I think I wore those jeans to every single meeting.

The meetings themselves usually just involved me and my dad listening to someone brag about all the amazing projects they'd done, or about how someone else they were working with was about to blow up and make a ton of money. Then, when they finally tired of hearing themselves talk, they'd look at me and say, "Okay, sing something."

And I'm sitting there like, "Um, we're in a Jerry's deli . . ."

A few promising meetings did happen here and there. I landed a small role in a B2K video because we thought it could help me get in good with their manager; but other than earning me a few cool points with the black girls at school, it led nowhere. We also signed a production deal with songwriter Dick Rudolph, and while this seemed like a leap forward at the time, it turned out to be one of many deals that pushed me in directions and genres that sometimes just weren't right and at other times were downright comical. Dick had me do a demo with Al B. Sure!, which had my mom freaking out. "Oh my God, Naya!" she said, fanning herself. "You're doing a song with Al B. Sure!" That's a sign right there that this wasn't going to lead to chart-topping songs—if a singer has the moms swooning, he's probably not the right pairing for a fourteen-year-old girl.

Other deals wanted to push me toward the tween market, but I didn't want my music career to hinge on chewing bubblegum and wearing my hair in pigtails. I wanted to be taken seriously. Couldn't they tell by my bell-bottom jeans?

In the end, nothing seemed right, and by the time I was nearing the end of high school my music career had also ground to a halt. I was officially a regular-ass kid, complete with a lack of direction and affinity for bad decisions.