Girl's song stirs charts

Date: 01 Jul 2003 13:38:59 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.gossip.celebrities
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By Brian Mansfield, special for USA TODAY
Like many other girls her age, Ashley Gearing likes to ski and swim and hang
out with friends. But none of those girls has a hit country single.
When Can You Hear Me When I Talk to You? made its debut on Billboard's country
singles chart June 8, Gearing had been 12 for barely three weeks, which made
her the youngest female singer ever to have a country record on the charts. The
record is at No. 49.
Her record, in which a child sings to her dead father, nearly hit the chart
without a record contract. By the time she signed her deal, stations in a
half-dozen cities, including Nashville and Gearing's hometown of Springfield,
Mass., already were playing the song.
"For a demo to come that close to impacting the chart in that form is totally
unheard of in country," says Wade Jessen, Nashville chart director for
Billboard.
The buzz surrounding the young singer generated a bidding war among five
Nashville labels. Gearing eventually signed with Lyric Street Records, a
country label owned by Disney.
Gearing's biological father died from a brain tumor when she was 9 months old,
so she identified closely with Can You Hear Me When I Talk to You?
"I didn't really know him," Gearing says, "so (singing the song) makes me feel
curious about what he was like."
Can You Hear Me was written by Jimmy Harnen and Rick Manwiller, formerly the
band Synch, which had a top 10 pop hit in 1989 with Where Are You Now? The two
wrote Can You Hear Me after Harnen's father died.
Harnen, the associate producer of Gearing's record, now works as a promotion
director at DreamWorks Records' Nashville division.
"We've been getting two types of calls," says Jay Thomas, interim program
director at WWYZ-FM in Hartford, Conn., one of the first stations to play
Gearing's record. "One from the fact that she's 12 years old and local.
Secondly, and probably more important, we're getting just a ton of phone calls
from people who are reacting to the song who have just lost a father or want to
find the song to play it at a funeral. Obviously, it's a big reaction record."
Says Lyric Street's vice president of national promotion, Kevin Herring: "I
always feel like a dentist, being a promotion guy, because it's like pulling
teeth trying to get radio to play your records. Now I feel like an ice cream
man — they're running to me."
Billboard's Jessen adds: "She has control over her voice that is as good, or in
some places even more impressive, as LeAnn Rimes' first records. She sounds
young, but she sure as hell doesn't sound like she's 12 years old."
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