She’s sold more than 2 million records, but put her on a roller coaster and she’s just another 20-year-old who delights in self-imposed dizziness
Jaci Velasquez is sitting in the front seat of the Mindbender, a green tubular steel snake that loops and dips and turns its riders upside down before slamming them back to earth again.
Characteristically, she takes charge. “Everybody, put your hands up!”
“Hands up, hands up!” she admonishes a cowardly passenger~ behind her.
A bee ride on the Mindbender is a well-earned perk of this Christian rock star’s job, and she takes full advantage, striding from ride to ride with a cell phone glued to her ear. On her way through Six Flags Over Georgia, Jaci behaves both like the kid she is and a seasoned pro, which isn’t far from the truth either.
She takes calls from her cousin Dolly, her cousin Jason, and her agent. At 5 foot 3 inches, she’s a whirlwind with henna hair and cinnamon freckles. She starts to dance as she passes through the Western section’ campily singing along with the blasting honky-tonk.
When Paige, the intern charged with Jaci’s frolic through the park’ hesitates, Jaci steers the marketing major from Winthrup University to the Mindbender’s back door.
Jaci knows her amusement parks. And she’s skilled at discerning where the back door might be. Her work as the nation’s hottest Christian rock act sends her from park to park each summer, singing for the youth who aIready have bought more than 2 million of her albums. For two years in a row, she’s been named Gospel Singer of the Year by her peers in the Gospel Music Association. In the burgeoning worId of Christian pop, where sales last year rose 11.5%, almost twice that of the music industry overall, her slight shoulders carry quite a load.
But as the Mindbender’s black cars begin to move, Jaci hoots. She squeals as the ride spins her upside down. She whoops at the gravity pulling her arms back into her lap. She bounces around to ensure that everyone’s still having fun even as the short but wicked ride glides back to its dock. Enthusiasm unbridled by dizziness, she’s off to her next ride.
“Let’s go, girls,” she says to her 20‑something publicist, Heather, and her friend Melody.
When she’s not working, Jaci is half‑child, half‑mother hen. Amid a silly outburst about boys or nail polish or dothes, she’ll suddenly compose herself and make a startlingly shrewd observation. Two seconds after telling everybody to “think food” (this means she’s hungry), she is huddled over Melody, arm thrown across her friend’s shouIders, providing career advice.
“You should have a manager right now,” she instructs the Christian pop‑star wannabe in a low, confidential tone. “Find the right one. Don’t sign with the first guy that comes along. Make him earn it!” Jaci sounds twice her age. “He’s got to pull for you, all right? That’s his job. And don’t sign the contract until he gets you the deal. Don’t let him take you for a ride….”
In just two decades, Jaci Velasquez has mastered the art of living in the moment. No matter what she’s doing, Jaci does it with all she’s got. She always has.
She was still in diapers when she was “discovered.” Her family went to church anct put her in the nursery. As the congregation broke into song, the pastor hushed the crowd. The piano kept playing, and through the open nursery door came a very big voice. To the astonishment of Diana and Davict Velasquez, Jaci’s parents, it was their daughter. “It was amazing that she even knew the words,” Diana Velasquez says, “because she wasn’t even taiking that well yet. But she was just singing away.”
Jaci doesn’t remember the event, but she doesn’t question it either. “Everybody in the church still comes to me when they get backstage passes and says, Jaci, we still remember that time in the church….”’
“She wasn’t even 2,” Diana says. Not that Jaci’s parents, themseIves veteran gospel musicians, were terribly shocked. “There was something about her even as a baby,” Diana says. “She would cIap her fingers to the music. It was very unusual. It’s in her blood.” No surprise, then, that her professional life was off and running by age 9 when she joined her parents’ act. By age 13, she was singing at the White House.
Jaci jokes about the perks of fame, but she is circumspect about its realities. “When friends invite me to do stuff,” she admits, “I really question who is going to be there and why. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, but….”
For her part, Diana feels trapped between wanting Jaci to have a normal life and wanting to keep her safe. “It can be frightening,” her mother confides. “I see the expectations that people have for her.
“People look at her and want to touch her as a star. It’s a littIe strange to us, because to us she’s just Jaci.
“I am proud of her,” Diana admits. “But I think I’m more proud of her because she’s the same person ah the time, whether she’s on the stage or in real life. Her heart is always the same heart.”
Offstage, Jaci’s favorite “normal” thing to do is visit coffee shops. Caffeine is the only vice her faith allows. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t swear,” she says. “Holy cow! We Christians do some very clean living!”
Clean living aside, Jaci’s style is fairly unfettered. Fashion is a favorite hobby, along with shopping. Makeup sits around her tour bus in suitcases. She enjoys dancing when she sings, and so she does.
The dancing, however, is a proclivity that doesn’t sit wed with a segment of her evangelical audience. Jaci herself is something of a religious hybrid. Her mom was raised Catholic and virtually all of Jaci’s maternal relatives are Catholic. Her father was an evangelical minister, and her paternal relatives are mostly born-again.
Sometimes, Jaci receives letters critical of her dancing. “Suddenly, the fact that I dance onstage [makes people] question my faith in God,” she says with exasperation. Jaci’s mom is particularly wounded. “You can’t help it when the music is in you,” Diana says, sounding very much like a mother who blames herself. “She gets it from me. The kids grew up with me dancing in the living room.”
More and more, Jaci distances herself from the outside world. “She doesn’t react the things people write about her anymore,’’ Diana says of profiles in newspapers and magazines. “I toId her not to. It hurt her feelings too much. I told her, Be who you are, Jaci, because you can only hold up pretense for so long. In the long term, it works. People really do accept you for who you are.”
‘‘One of the things I struggle with,” Jaci says, “is finding out who I am outside of music. I always have somewhere to go and somewhere to be, but it’s never really where I choose to be. So when I 
have nowhere to go [because she’s not on tour], I get in my car and drive and put the music on full blast. I love doing that because I get in touch with something about me. I know it’s a loneliness. In my mind, I feel I have nowhere to go and nowhere to be….”
At such times, Bonnie Raitt’s bluesy lyrics offer solace to Jaci the Rootless Waif. “That chick rocks,” she says. “I really wish I could play guitar like she does.”
Suddenly, Jaci laughs. “I tend to be — what’s that phrase my brother uses for me? — I’m tragically dramatic and dramatically tragic. You know,” she says, “given what I do, I constantly have so many people around me that there are times when I just get lonely anyway.”
That’s when Jaci turns to music, or to Goc3. Alone, she reads Scripture daily and prays. “Sometimes I’ll be sitting on the [tour] bus. I have nothing to do, so, OK . . . I’D study my Bible for a while and see what I can learn today.” When she prays, she prays for her family. “We’ve had prayer requests that have come, you know, to pass….”
She was raised in a family that prayed together often — and still does. “There’s always something to pray about,” Diana Velasquez says with more than a hint of conviction.
Besides Jaci, their youngest, David and Diana raised four children. “I’m really blessed with my kids,” Diana says. “I can really say, Thank God for my children.”
What works in raising kids like Jaci? “Listen to your children,” Diana says. “Pay attention to them. If we make them think we never made the mistakes they’re making, we alienate them. I’ve made as many mistakes as they have, maybe more. Children should never feel that you’re perfect,” Diana counsels. “Parents sometimes are tempted to do that.”
Diana’s words help to explain Jaci’s remarkably unselfconscious comportment. If Jaci doesn’t know the answer to an interviewer’s question, she thoughtfully offers: “But you could probably go on the Internet and get that.” She is disarmingly unaffected.
As Jaci and her friends grow bored with the topic of how many records she’s sold (she’s not sure and doesn’t seem to care all that much), Jaci begins talking about her favorite foods. She notes that fresh tortillas in the refrigerator are a key to personal happiness.
Interviewer: How do you make tortillas?
Jaci: She (Diana) makes them the old way, you know, from scratch. I have found this dough. All you do is add water. And I make them.
Interviewer: Are they as good as your mom’s?
Jaci: No. I can’t even make them into round shapes. I have to make them into states. They look like Tennessee, Texas, California…”
Jaci realizes she’s a role model, even if she’d rather not be one. “I don’t enjoy being a role model,” she says, “because I feel like I’m going to fail and people are going to crucify me when I do. So, yeah, I do feel responsible to live my life beyond reproach.”
To others her age, she offers some level-headed affirmation. “You know,” says Jaci the Philosopher, “in life you’re gonna get tempted to do anything and everything. I mean, that’s just life It’s there in front of you, so why not try it? But you have to realize that everything you do is gonna have an effect on what your future is, whether you have a future.
“Why do you have to search through something to find out who you are? Why don’t you just search for who you are? Find out who you are in God, who you are as a child to your family. It sounds, I guess, easier said than done. But it’s something we have to do in life.”
Spirituality, Jaci says, is no easier. But she laughingly allows that it’s an adventure. “We all have dry spells, but we have really hard-core, [fruitful] times, too. They balance each other out. It would be great if it always stayed balanced, but with God it doesn’t work that way all the time.”
Most of her concerns, though, are more immediate. Jaci is 20, after all. Boys, in particular, make her and her friends roar.
“She’s so funny,” her mom says. “One minute she’s acting like a kid, and then she walks right into her role of adult and then she goes right back to being a kid again.”
Interviewer: Do you have a boyfriend?
[Her friends dissolve into giggles.]
Jaci: I like to talk to boys on the telephone. I talk on the phone a lot. It’s the only way I can communicate with the world. I definitely have continued to have friends, guy friends….
Interviewer: What kind of person do you want to marry?
Jaci: Oh, a really good-looking one. Tall, over 6 feet. Under 7 feet. Yeah . . . 6 foot 3, light eyes, dark hair. OK, dudes, I can take the blondes….
“Guys are often afraid to approach her,” Diana says later with a laugh. “As teenagers, we always think something is wrong with us when that happens. Am I thin enough? Pretty enough? I just tell her, Baby, God made you the way you are. Be grateful for it. She can’t understand why they’d be intimidated. But, of course, they are.”
Back at Six Flags, having looped herself silly on the roller coasters, Jaci now gets to do what she does best – and what she most enjoys. She puts on her makeup, a sharp contrast to the fresh-scrubbed look she’s worn all day. She changes into “show” clothes: a black knit top and black leather pants.
For the first time all clay, she looks more like a star than the girl next door. Smiling, she grabs the mike from her manager, Cliff, and dances onto a stage located on the outskirts of the amusement park. Fans roar at the sight of her silhouette bobbing toward them from the backstage shadows. Her voice precedes her.
“Please forgive me if I come on too strong. I get a little anxious when I talk about God’s love….”
Jaci glides slowly from one wing, just as pleased as the crowd that greets her. “Wow!” she says between verses, “Oh wow! This is so fun!” They scream louder.
“The way to give love is how you live love… Don’t wanna put the pressure on. Don’t wanna make you run away. Just wanna show you love. just wanna show you love…”
Jaci finishes the song, leans over the stage, and waves to some littIe children, who wave back. She sings two more songs, then asks whether the predominantly Anglo crowd minds if she sings a Spanish song. A murmur of assent greets the question, but, as she begins, a few bodies head for the exit gate in the cyclone fencing that surrounds the stage.
“Asi como Iluvia en el desierto, estas aqui…” she begins, “like the rain in the desert, you are here…”
She’s quick. She’s clever. And, perhaps, a step ahead of these fans. Jaci loves doing Latin tunes.
In today’s exploding Latin music market, such Top-40 breakthrough artists as Julio Iglesias and GIoria Estefan have paved the way for a host of new names: Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez. Last year, Latin-niche sales were up 12%, a growth spurt slightly higher, even, than Christian pop. Though the Christian market is considerably larger, Jaci is in the enviable position of picking and choosing career paths. Celine and Selena, people say: Celine Dion and the Latin icon Selena are the voices by which she is measured.
Asked if she’s going to do more Spanish recordings, Jaci laughs. “I have a contract to do five more for Sony,” she says, “so I’d better do them.”
But will the white-bread fans of the Christian pop world take Jaci’s Spanish roots in stride? Can they accept her for who she is?
Probably. Christian pop, surprisingly, is alive and well outside the Bible Belt. According to religious music producer Integrity Inc., of Mobile, Alabama, Christian pop’s biggest markets lie in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.
Like it or not, who she is — bottom line — is a musical prodigy. “Sometimes when I get really frustrated and I get really tired,” Jaci says, “I wish I would have waited till I was older to do this. There are even times that I go, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
The pretty facade the fans take for granted seems hardly to exist for folks who trudge from gig to gig. The back door is a shortcut, to be sure, but it offers an under-whelming view of the world. Free roller coaster rides notwithstanding, fame can be a grind. “People think that I ride in Iimos all day and go from a show to a hotel to a show to a hotel,” Jaci says with a rueful chuckle. “I see a bus, a dressing room, the backstage area, then I do a show. Then I sign autographs for an hour-and-a-half, two hours. And then I go back into the bus, ride all night…. But, you know, the show is always fun because you connect with people in ways that you [couldn’t otherwise].”
For 40 minutes or so here at Six Flags, Jaci does indeed connect, as she would say. Confidently, she mixes her music with her faith. In the end, at the fans’ insistence, she prances back for two encores.
Jaci has had a fairly light workday. Earlier, she’d said: “If I do five interviews in a day, which sometimes they’ll have me do, by the fourth one I start not making sense anymore. My mind turns to 
mush. I love it, I love it, but I get tired…”
Yet the energy that drives her to take charge on stage this evening evaporates as soon as she hits the wings. Barely acknowledging her entourage, she moves — silent and depleted — across the dark expanse of asphalt, toward her bus. She disappears into the black hole.
As Jaci walks to her bus, her fans on the other side of the fence walk to their cars.
Her tour bus sits in the shadows like a large metal bin beneath the blinking Ninja, a rising red roller coaster whose scaffolding, covered in lights, angles brightly into the night sky. Betty, who works the backstage gate, wants to know if Jaci is signing autographs tonight.
“There’s one little girl out there,” she says. “I just hate to send her away….” Betty nervously looks at Cliff, Jaci’s manager, eyeing his face for clues.
“You’ve been tough,” Cliff says reassuringly to Betty.
Betty smiles. God knows, she has to be. Gate-crashers come in all shapes and sizes. Two small boys attempted to slide by her tonight, right behind two teens with backstage passes. Betty trundles her arms to give us an idea of what she endures. “…And here come two little boys,” she is saying, “and their little legs were going just like that!”
Jaci comes by on her way from the stage and tells Cliff she needs ten minutes to unwind, “or I’11 be rude.”
Betty ushers in a local DJ who needs promotional sound bites for Joy 93, a Christian radio station here in Atlanta. Behind the clean-cut radio man and his clean-cut family, gumchewing roadies wheel sound equipment up squeaking metal ramps, into trailers. A roller coaster rumbles in the distance, making final rounds.
It’s late, and the band members’ wives are getting punchy. One entertains the waiting fans and crew by blowing out her cheeks and talking with her mouth closed. “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” gets a big roar. As do the verses of “Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater.” The woman hoped to become a ventriloquist, but it wasn’t to be. “I could only talk with my cheeks puffed out, and they wouldn’t pass me,” she says with a shrug.
Jaci, who rejoins the crowd, joins the antics. As a matter of fact, Jaci is back, beaming, joking, insisting that the woman repeat the ditties. Her nose wrinkles and her freckles dance. Offstage, Jaci has a knack for sharing the limelight.
But a few minutes later, she’s all business again. The nice folks from Joy 93 are waiting. She sits on the plank bench of a picnic table and picks up a top-heavy microphone and a script. It’s 11:30 p.m.
“Hi, this is Jaci Velasquez,” she says brightly. “Thanks for listening to J 93.3….”
