Skylar Stecker is a picture of poise as she sits with Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on the “Today” show earlier this month. Chatting with the hosts, she gracefully accepts a sweet compliment – that she reminds them of a young Jennifer Lopez – before singing her new single, a catchy R&B-inflected pop song called “Crazy Beautiful.”
Skylar is a 13-year-old from Irvine but you’d never know it from the calm, cool way she handled this moment, her first network television appearance coming a few weeks before another milestone – a debut album titled “This Is Me” on the Interscope/Cherrytree label – arrives on Friday.
You’d certainly never imagine that just four years ago while living in Wisconsin she’d never sung in public at all, or that the suggestion that she sing instead of play the piano for a school talent show had her in tears when she got home from the third grade that day.
“I was going, ‘Please do not mess up! Please do not mess up!’ in my brain,” Skylar says of what she felt when a teacher asked her to sing “Maybe” from the musical “Annie” instead of play it on the piano.
Skylar’s mom says the family went into the talent show with modest expectations.
“We just put on our brave faces,” Kara Stecker said. “And she ended up getting a standing ovation.”
Notes Skylar: “Yeah, apparently it went pretty well.”
Apparently it did.
But so, too, did her subsequent ventures into YouTube cover songs, national anthems sung everywhere from middle schools to huge sports stadiums, and ultimately the move to Orange County where her new-found dream – to sing her own songs in recording studios and on stage – finally reached fruition.
Never underestimate the determination of a 9-year-old who knows what she wants and has the chops to back it up.
“It sounds so weird and when I tell the story I sound crazy,” Kara Stecker says. “I was so enjoying the normal life and here my daughter, who is 9, is convincing me that she’ll die if she can’t come out here and sing.”
* * *
The Steckers were a sports family, not a performing arts clan. Skylar’s father, Aaron Stecker, met her mother at the University of Wisconsin when they were both 18 and he was a running back on football team.
After college, Aaron Stecker spent a decade as a journeyman in the NFL, moving the family to Tampa, Florida, where he spent four years with the Buccaneers and Skylar was born, to New Orleans and the Saints and Atlanta and the Falcons before he hung up his cleats and the family moved home to Wisconsin.
After the initial success of the talent show, though, Skylar was hooked on performing: “I just loved it so much and I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do forever,” she says.
Her mother figured she could sing in the talent show every year. Skylar had different plans, and set about persuading her parents to help her find ways to get her voice out to the public again and again and again.
“She’s always like, ‘Follow your dreams,’” Skylar says of her mom. “It‘s awesome to have that support around.”
A plan emerged rapidly, intuitive and smart.
Step No. 1: Put a collection of cover songs on YouTube. “We set that up and my dad’s like, ‘Why are you doing YouTube?” And we were like, ‘It’ll pay off, trust me,’” Skylar says.
Step No. 2: Sing the National Anthem whenever and wherever you can. Kara Stecker suggested Skylar learn “The Star-Spangled Banner” and before long she was singing it for middle schools, high schools, the University of Wisconsin Badgers’ hockey, football and basketball games, and finally the crown jewel of Wisconsin sports, the Green Bay Packers.
“I don’t know if it even registered for her that 18,000 people is different than 18 people,” Kara Stecker says.
Step. No. 3: Get in front of talent agents who can take you to the next level. At the urging of a local theater teacher, the Steckers came to Los Angeles for the annual International Modeling & Talent Association convention, a chance for anyone to get in front of representatives from 50 different agencies and show them what you’ve got.
Still just 9 years old, Skylar won Best Singer and Most Sought After, the latter a tribute to the fact that 48 of the 50 agencies at IMTA invited her to callbacks.
“It was just like an indicator (to Kara Stecker) that, like, ‘OK, now she has a real chance,’” Skylar says. “ ‘I’m not just a mom who thinks my daughter’s amazing, be’cause every mom kind of thinks their daughter is amazing.’”
Now came the hardest part, the part where Kara Stecker says people thought she and and her family had lost their minds.
* * *
“I was like, ‘Why don’t ’we just move out to California?’” Skylar says. “I’m about to tell you they said yes, but it wasn’t that easy.”
Kara Stecker says her husband Aaron was against the plan, thinking Skylar was too young, and she thought it might be best to wait a few years.
But Skylar was determined, and her mother admits her timing was perfect: Aaron Stecker wasn’t playing football any more. There wasn’t a job tying them down.
So they decided to give it six months and see how the whole family – mom, dad, Skylar and her little brother Dorsett – liked California. With just a few suitcases and the family pets they rented a furnished apartment in Turtle Rock and headed west.
“It was not just me but everyone loved it so much,” Skylar says. “And the weather definitely helped, so thank you, California!”
She signed with an agency, did more YouTube covers, and eventually wrote her own material,determined to be an artist on her own merit.
“I know all these things (in my songs) even though I’ve never experienced a lot of things that have to do with relationships,” she says. “It’s funny because when I’m writing my mom is like, ‘Who are these secret boyfriends that I don’t know about?’ Is there something going on behind the scenes?’ Which there never is.”
* * *
In November, with Skylar still just 12 years old, her manager and her mom booked the Roxy on the Sunset Strip for a midday Sunday showcase. Among those who caught the performance was Cherrytree founder Martin Kierszenbaum, who loved her and ultimately signed her to his label roster that which also includes artists such as Sting, Ellie Goulding, Feist and Disclosure.
The family is happy in Orange County and the Shady Canyon neighborhood because it feels a little bit “Wisconsin-ish,” Kara Stecker, adding that the schools and neighborhoods feel right for her and Aaron and the kids.
“This Is Me” arrives on Friday with a record-release party at the Lucky Strike bowling alley in Hollywood. Skylar says she co-wrote most of the songs the record that included contributions from big-name producers such as RedOne, the Rock Mafia and Jonas Saeed.
Next up? Hopefully a tour, and then another record.
She mentions throughout conversation how grateful she is for the support of her whole family, and you get the sense of that grounded nature – “I‘ve always been an old soul,” she says at one point – in the thing she points to as her guide star leading the way forward.
“The main thing is staying true to myself and never changing for anyone else,” Skylar says. “Then I’ll be good. Because I’m myself, that’s who I was created to be.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
