He was wearing red overalls with the left strap off, and a cream turtleneck. He kept trying to catch my eye all night, and eventually just came over to me. We talked schedules—“It’s been crazy” was always the answer—and I wasn’t really listening because not only did I think he was so attractive, I loved his voice and the way he said “Jessica.” He got my number, and I swear I said to my mom, who was also at the party, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” I immediately felt safe.
When he called soon after, Nick told me he had broken up with the makeup artist he had been seeing. We arranged to meet when he was in L.A. for the American Music Awards. It was weird to just meet in a hotel room, so Nick suggested we go up on the roof, where we talked for several hours. Nick was much more than what I’d found researching him. He’d started singing in barbershop quartets, making money in high school doing cheesy a capella songs at a theme park in Ohio. He was incredibly passionate about his work. Whereas I counted on God and destiny to make my dreams come true, he was methodical, making it clear he had a five-year plan for success. We talked about our families and how his parents divorced when he was young but his dad never lived more than two miles away from wherever he lived with his mom. It made him grow up fast, becoming the kind of kid who did his own laundry at eight years old. I may have been the breadwinner of our family, but I couldn’t work a washing machine to save my life.
As we talked, he reached over to put his hand on mine. It was like an electric shock, so I pulled back.
“There’s something I need you to know right away,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m a virgin.”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t want to have sex until it’s with the man I’ve married.”
He paused, taking it in. I thought, Well, Jessica, this dreamboat has sailed. See ya.
“I respect that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”
I didn’t tell him what I already knew in my heart. He was the man I was meant to marry.
Nick went back to touring, and we had three-hour phone calls from his bus or his hotel room after the show. That was it for me, we were totally dating, at least over the phone. I wrote about him in my journal, calling him Nicholas because it made me feel older and closer to his age.
I traveled to see him on tour, so all our first dates were at hotels. I would go to his room to hang out, and he remained respectful of the boundaries I placed on us. We had a first kiss in a car, but that was it—he wasn’t getting anywhere near my body. Still, I was this good girl with a potty mouth, and I would “accidentally” make double entendres but dismiss it as Southern charm or ditziness, which he seemed to love. Just being around him tested my own commitment to virginity for sure. I had always been a sensual person, but I’d never had someone draw it out of me like Nick. One time, he hugged me, and I thought I was just going to burst into flames. I had to push him away, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I was teetering on the edge of just giving in. Suddenly, I completely understood why my mom got married at eighteen. Her mother had at least made it to twenty.
Our seven-year age difference worried my dad. I also thought my father might just be jealous because he heard a lot of “Well, I asked Nick and he said . . .” More and more, I went to Nick with career questions. My mom can be guarded and tough on people, but she liked Nick because Nick seemed like a more sarcastic version of the good old boys she grew up around.
When I was asked to open for 98 Degrees on their North American tour starting in March, I immediately said yes. We asked my dance teacher Beth if she wanted to come be the choreographer for the show, and she agreed. My parents were not going to send me out on the road alone, but what would that mean for Ashlee? She was fourteen and had been studying at the School of American Ballet. Mom asked if she wanted to come be a backup dancer for me.
“It’s not ballet,” my mom said. “It’s more hip-hop.”
“I can dance hip-hop,” she said.
It’s okay to chuckle. We were going for this urban cowgirl direction, which in hindsight is ludicrous, but we just wanted to get onstage. I say “we” because Ashlee is a born performer. As much as she and I are opposites—Ash is more edgy than me and pushes limits while I think out every possible risk and outcome before I do something—each of us thinks of the stage as home, a comfortable place. Back then, I was so focused on doing whatever I was told I was supposed to be doing that I didn’t think about how those actions might affect her. I know now that for every time I say, “I’m glad I got to have a somewhat normal high school life,” she didn’t. I have felt guilty about that for a long time. And as she danced behind me then, I didn’t get to see how well she interacted with audiences. It wouldn’t take long, though, for her to take the microphone herself.
So, at the time, to me it just felt like fun to do this as a family. I had been locked in recording studios so long working on my album that I just wanted to see people react to me singing, period. I didn’t care if the dancing didn’t really jibe with the tone of the songs.
Nick and I decided to do a duet for my album, “Where You Are.” It was about loss and feeling someone is always with you even after death. Of course, in my mind, it was all about Sarah. The week before Nick and I recorded the song in New York on March 15, I did my first-ever press interview and talked about losing someone. “I wanted the people close to me who have experienced death to feel encouraged,” I said. “I wanted the song to minister to a lot of people’s hearts.”
This was with a teen magazine, so the guy’s response was, “Oh, cool.” Even so, I knew my words mattered.
When Nick and I sang together, it just fit. I liked how he took the lead in the studio, and how if he decided he needed a break, he just took a break. If I wasn’t already in love with him, I would have decided then. Two days later, I started the tour with 98 in Ottawa.
The girls all booed.
Okay, not all of them, but enough up front that I could see them. They came to see 98 Degrees, each with a sign saying “Marry Me, Nick” or “I love you, Drew!” Every girl in that arena thought they had a chance with their favorite, and who was this girl they’d never heard of? At first, I thought it was my singing, but I had a better sense of what was going on when Nick and I would go on “dates” to the local mall. We’d be at Abercrombie & Fitch and he’d get mobbed, and the girls would roll their eyes at me. Teen assassins in Wet Seal.
While I got used to the girls giving me the dirty looks, Nick had to get used to all of us Baptists being on tour with him. The Texas crew never drank, and the 98 guys were used to having beers at the end of the night. Beth, my old dance teacher, confronted Nick about it. “Oh my gosh, why are you drinking a beer?” she said it just like that: “A beer,” because surely this was an isolated sin, and who would dare have more than one? She let him have it, going on about how I was around, and didn’t he know he was supposed to be a role model for young people?
Poor Nick went to my parents’ hotel room with this hangdog face. “I apologize if I disrespected you or the family,” he said. “For me, drinking a beer isn’t wrong, but I really love Jessica, and, again, I’m sorry if I disrespected the family.”
My mother told me the story and I cringed. We must have seemed so country. Still, I had to ask, “He told you he loved me?”
He did. I’d be on a tour bus leaning back on Nick, watching the world go by as he sang “You Are My Sunshine” in my ear. This is easy, I thought. This is forever. We both thought that. He had a different perspective because he was older and interested in something more real. And at eighteen, I was still such a sheltered baby that it didn’t seem far-fetched to me that I had already found that person.
He stayed patient, and how the relationship progressed physically was always up to me. He was the first guy who ever touched my breasts, and it was such a big deal to me that I made my mom take me bra shopping for the occasion. I spent an hour in a Victoria’s Secret before I settled on a purple one.
“First boob touch,” I said, handing the bra to the girl at the checkout. “Tonight’s the night.” She laughed, thinking I was kidding.
MY CAREER STARTED PICKING UP IN APRIL, WHEN THE DAWSON’S CREEK soundtrack that included my song came out. I played track thirteen over and over again, imagining people all over the world playing it, too. Nick’s 98 album went platinum, so his record company threw them a party after our show at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Someone took my picture, and the next day the photo was in the New York Post.
I screamed when I saw it, focused only on how I looked and hoping I looked skinny enough for Columbia. My mom read the caption. “Jennifer Simpson,” she said. “Hunh.” I didn’t care, it was exciting enough to be in the newspaper.
I booked teen-focused summer tour gigs like Nickelodeon concerts, and Columbia started to get excited about the album. They booked a packed summer tour of radio events—seeming to add new ones every day—to build support for a late-August launch of my first single and a Thanksgiving week release of the album. Britney and Christina had gone with dance singles, so they wanted me to come in contrasting with a power ballad, “I Wanna Love You Forever.”
It’s an amazing song—the very first time I heard it, I knew it was a hit—but it is a punishing song to sing live. It just asks a lot of you physically and emotionally. And I had to go to as many radio stations as there were in the country to sing it over and over. Back then, radio was the way to get heard. Now we stream any song we want, but back then DJs and promoters had all the power. You had to go to every single one, do a showcase, show them your talent, and make them like you. You waited to hear, “We’re going to put you in rotation.” Columbia’s vice president for promotion was Charlie Walk, a Boston guy who’d become a label wiz at thirty. It meant a lot that he believed in me. He didn’t seem to sleep, so why should anybody else? I went wherever Charlie told me to go.
The schedule was so packed it just didn’t seem manageable, but my dad and I never said no. I wasn’t looking at the schedule and saying, “That’s a lot.” It was Nick who would question how things were being set up. My dad would then get annoyed, because he wanted me out there working and meeting people.
There was so much pressure, and much of the focus was on how I looked. The label was constantly telling me, “Let’s show more skin, Jessica. Let’s get comfortable with this.” It was so strange for me, because I was still shy about my body, so used to being covered up at church. The orders that I show my stomach while singing a ballad at showcases just seemed off to me, especially since the proper technique my vocal coach had taught me meant that I actually stuck out my stomach during the big notes. And “I Wanna Love You Forever” was full of them.
But I tried to do both things. I did events for radio stations all over the country, going into clubs where I was too young to drink even if I had wanted to. Detroit, Boston, New York, back to Dallas . . . wherever they needed me. The audiences were mostly men, some obviously there for the free food and open bar. I remember they always had to announce that the open bar was closed while I sang so the guys would pay attention to me. There were usually Sony staffers in the crowd, always cheering the high notes. As I hit them, I fluttered my hand around my stomach to hide it sticking out. My dad and I would stay to shake every hand, knowing each person might have the power to make my dreams come true.
In August I started feeling pain in my abdomen. I ignored the cramps in the beginning. There was too much to do. When I was briefly back in L.A., the cramping started to become excruciating, and I couldn’t mask it with aspirin anymore. My mom took me to a hospital in Encino, where they told me I just had an enlarged bladder, a misdiagnosis. They pumped me full of fluids to flush me out and sent me home. My mom commented that I was so swollen I looked like the Michelin man.
The pain remained, but we had to fly to Boston to do a showcase for people who worked in radio. I writhed on the plane, but a deal’s a deal. Backstage, behind a black curtain, I was in such pain I started throwing up. I made it to the bathroom, and I continued throwing up, even peeing myself, delirious from the cramping.
We had been trained to go to the label with everything. Charlie Walk from Sony had a friend, a girl from Boston, who gave us the number of her OB/GYN. We called, and they said to come right over. Mom got me in some borrowed blue Adidas track pants, and we took a taxi. I had my head out the window puking the whole ride over, my dad holding me to keep me from falling out.
The doctor opened the clinic just for me, and immediately placed a catheter in me and set up an ultrasound. There was no fluid coming out of me, so he panicked.
“The bad news is that I think you are going to need surgery,” he said. “The good news is that I am probably one of the best surgeons for this in Boston. You’re going to be okay.”
Through heaves of pain, I said this: “Please don’t give me a scar.” I felt like I was going to die, but I was still worried that the label needed me to show my stomach.
He put me in his Mercedes, and we drove right to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Right before the surgery, he explained that I had a cyst in my right fallopian tube. They would have to remove that fallopian tube.
“I want to have babies,” I said. “Please don’t take them from me.”
He gently explained that this would mean that from then on, I could likely only get pregnant every other month. Because he was so experienced, he could do the emergency surgery laparoscopically, going through my belly button. They removed the tube and the cyst, first draining it of two and a half liters of fluid. I think if I had been at any other hospital, at the stage I was at, there would have been no time, and they just would have cut me open.
I had to do a showcase the next day. But I wouldn’t trade it, because all that work paid off with this moment: a few days later I was with my parents in a cab in Times Square when I heard “I Wanna Love You Forever” on the radio for the first time. We went nuts, there is no other word for it. Even the driver was going nuts—he had no idea who I was and then, all of a sudden, he was blasting the song with all the windows down. We started screaming to people in other cars, telling them to turn on Z-100. I looked so frantic, one old guy driving by put his window up.
“These poor people think I’m crazy, Mom,” I said, laughing. “They’re all worried they have flat tires or something.”
All those years I had waited to hear my voice on the radio. I remember exhaling, like I had finally done it. It was, without question, one of the greatest moments of my professional life. When the single came out, it slowly moved up the Billboard Hot 100 chart until it stayed at number three for weeks. When we showed the video for “I Wanna Love You Forever” to Tommy Mottola, I couldn’t wait to hear what he’d have to say. The setup was me singing at a photo shoot, dressed in what the audience would relate to, a series of jean jackets and tank tops. We shot behind-the-scenes footage of me and Ashlee hanging out with my friends in my trailer on the set. I was continually asked to hike up my shirts higher throughout the shoot to show my belly button, but the video ended with me on a stage, and I felt like the whole thing established me as a real singer.
“This video is great,” he said. “but you can do better.”
Immediately, I went over a mental checklist of possible flaws. Did I look awkward singing? Had I just not sold it?
“I want a six-pack for the next video,” he said. “Janet Jackson abs.”
8
Eyeshadow Abs
October 1999
“Hello, New York!” I yelled to the crowd, one of the biggest I’d ever sung for. I was at Madison Square Garden, opening for Ricky Martin on the North American leg of his world tour. I’d already been learning so much watching Ricky perform and connect with his fans. There were twenty thousand people coming, night after night. His movements were so big, like he wanted the very last row to see him without the JumboTron.
That night I was inspired by Ricky to really go for it, too. I went out there dancing and singing “I T
hink I’m in Love with You.” It was a dance-pop song with the John Mellencamp riff from “Jack and Diane,” but there were still big notes for me to hit. So, center stage at MSG, I went to nail a high note, crouching down in a squat so I could really deliver.
My pants split. Right in front of all those people. When I stood and walked, they started falling off me. I froze as the musicians tried to keep the song going, and then I just slowly walked backwards until I was backstage.
I started crying, and my mom ran over to me, frantic.
“What am I gonna do?” I said. My mom stood there a second, nodded her head, and kicked off her shoes. She stepped back and pulled off her jeans right there.
“You’re putting these on and getting back out there is what you’re gonna do,” she said.
I put them on, and she leaned back to get a good look. “Take my shoes,” she said. “You need a higher heel with that jean.”
The absurdity of it came over me, and I laughed as I marched out, literally in mom jeans. I smiled a real, genuine smile as the crowd welcomed me, the girl who split her pants and got back up.
“Alright,” I said into the mic. “I don’t know who saw my booty, but I’m still gonna sing it off. So, here’s my next song.”
I got one of the biggest cheers of the tour. When people saw the real me, they wanted me to succeed. It was a fleeting thought, and I wish I had caught it and internalized it. I still thought people expected perfection.
I certainly wasn’t hearing otherwise from my label. After all, Tommy wanted those Janet Jackson abs. Columbia got me a trainer, one who made me run on the treadmill and sing my scales or my songs. It was helpful, because I learned how to maintain my breath throughout an entire song while doing heavy-duty choreography.
I just wasn’t getting that cut stomach. But I will tell you a secret: I faked them. Right before a concert, I would draw a six-pack on myself with my eyeshadow pencil. I thought, I’m on stage, it’s dark. People will be like, “Oh, wow, she’s ripped.” Then I saw any picture taken with a flash and it would be like, “Oh, girl.”
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