ShareThisBy RICK MASSIMO
The Providence Journal
Friday, May 11, 2007
Billy Gilman still lives in Hope Valley, R.I. "I could've moved to Nashville many times, but I want to keep my sanity," he says.
At 18, Gilman does interviews on his own these days. His agent-manager, Angela Bacari, doesn't hover over the questions and finish his answers. But she's still very much on Gilman's team, if not as visible. And the singer who burst onto the country scene at age 11 with "One Voice" is being interviewed in his grandparents' house in Hope Valley, where he still lives (across the street from his parents), with his mother in the next room.
That's how it's gone for Gilman since sliding into majority (he turns 19 May 24): A few things have changed, but nothing too drastic.
The most important change is that Gilman is currently without a record contract, having fulfilled a two-record deal with the Nashville-based independent Image Music Group. And while that can be scary ("It's like I'm just starting out again"), he seems confident at the same time.
"I'm in the last of the teen years, and I want to (go) slowly," says Gilman. "And if I don't do as many concerts as I did before, that's OK. ...
"Now, it's up to me. Now I'm almost 19 and have been in the business for almost 10 years. It's my choice. Instead of my parents writing the signature on the contract, it's me. And slowly I'm getting to that point where I'm saying, 'I'm going to do this.' "
After bursting onto the national scene with the "One Voice" album in 2000, which sold more than 1 million copies and got him a Grammy nomination, and following it up with the gold-selling "Dare to Dream" the next year, Gilman dropped nearly out of sight for more than two years while his voice changed. It was an unusually difficult transition, and it took a toll on Gilman. But he says he's come out the other side. And he's got a different perspective.
"I had to take time to grow up. Because if you look at the pattern of a lot of young stars, not that it's a bad thing, but a lot of them burn out."
Passing the age-18 milestone was significant for Gilman, but not nearly as big as the move from the giant Sony Nashville record label.
While Image, who put out 2005's "Everything and More" and last year's "Billy Gilman," didn't have the same kind of promotional muscle to back Gilman's records, what the company gave him was freedom.
"When I was with Sony, it was like, 'OK, you show up, you learn this song and you sing it.' If I really didn't want to sing it -- 'No, I'm really not singing that song' -- they'd listen. But if I said, 'Put this fiddle up here,' or 'Put the steel guitar up here,' they wouldn't listen. ... Now I can choose what I want to sing, who I want in my team."
Without "the kid factor," Gilman wondered whether his appeal would fall in the cracks, as young-adult listeners so often tune out former child stars. But he says he recently did an arena show for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, with whom he's been affiliated for years, that set his mind at ease.
"That's a tough crowd for me. ... (But) I went out there with a new sense of 'I'm ready.' Because I have songs for them now that they can relate to. And I got a standing ovation, and I thought, 'Now, that says something.' Because they listen to, I'm sure, rap and rock and pop. So for me to get the reaction I did from them said that it spoke something to them."
He says Rhode Island is where he wants to stay, but he also might throw a career curveball soon: He's auditioned for a production of "Grease" in New York and is waiting to hear the results. It's not exactly country music, but Gilman said the experience was fun.
Where once Gilman caused a stir because he was a kid, now the stir is because he's no longer a kid. Does he look forward to the day when no one will give a hoot how old he is?
"Yes!"
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)
