Interviews from the world of music!

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Alex Amancio – Storyworlds

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

At first blush, Peter Higgs and Alex Amancio have nothing in common. Higgs, the theoretical physicist who, during the 1960s, proposed the existence of the so-called “God Particle,” and later won the 2013 Nobel Prize after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, proved it true, owns neither a TV nor a mobile phone, and was 80 years old before he acquired a computer. Amancio, now the Chief Creative Officer and Founder at Reflector Entertainment, is one of the hottest guys in the entertainment universe, having served as creative director of the two most successful Assassin’s Creed video games, introduced the technology that brought Madonna to life in her groundbreaking, augmented reality performance at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards, and today is at the forefront of a revolution that is bending, stretching, twisting and upending the worlds of entertainment, pop culture, and tech. Common denominators? Is that even possible? Higgs has spent his life in pursuit of answers to some of physics’ most burning questions: Why did some particles acquire a mass just seconds after the Big Bang, allowing them to clump and coalesce into matter, forming things like stars, planets, and people? Why has our universe stuck around for billions of years, when it should have been a fleeting fireball, gone in an instant? Amancio’s universe, on the other hand, exists as an arras of pixels, with whole worlds created by teams of coders and right-brained creatives, all for the enjoyment of a rapidly growing fan base. It would seem that there’s little, if anything, connecting them.

Alex Amancio

And yet the two men are cut from the same cloth, kindred spirits if you will, one identifying the missing particle in the Standard Model, the other reshaping entertainment’s future with something called “Storyworlds” – an ever-expanding universe that tells stories across multiple platforms or media. Both deal in the currency of creation: Higgs for proving the existence of the omnipresent Higgs field, through which all mass is created; Amancio for interweaving narratives and characters across films, video games, novels, podcasts, comics, and beyond. Both, it turns out, are also modest to a fault. In fact, Britain’s most cherished scientist wasn’t home to take the call on the day of the Nobel announcement, and when a former neighbor stopped to congratulate him in the street, his first response was a puzzled, “What prize?” Embarrassed to be singled out from so many other deserving candidates, Higgs set off to Stockholm to receive his award, blinking in polite bewilderment as his admirers demanded a long-overdue knighthood. The Portuguese-born, Montréal-raised Amancio has been twice nominated by the prestigious Writer’s Guild of America, both times for his storytelling, and yet he’s far more comfortable talking about Unknown 9, Reflector’s maiden Storyworld, than anything to do with Alexandre Amancio.

Peter Higgs

“We’ve launched a novel trilogy, a comic book series, and a podcast for Unknown 9,” Amancio says. “We’re also developing a triple A video game, a television series, and loads of digital content. It’s an exciting time at Reflector.”

At some point in the not too distant future, the humble paths of Peter Higgs and Alex Amancio are destined to converge, and in a very real way. Quantum computing remains in its formative stages, but its potential to process data exponentially faster than traditional computers could bring about seismic shifts in everything from pharmaceutical research (Biogen has explored quantum-enabled molecule modeling) to finance (Citi and Goldman Sachs both invest in quantum). Naturally, gamers want to know if that outsize computing muscle will transform games, too.

“Quantum computing could certainly become the next frontier,” Amancio says. “There’s no question it has the potential to reshape the entire gaming experience, which makes it an exciting time to be in this business.”

Alex Amancio

Amancio and his team at Reflector will be well-positioned to leverage these new advances. The Storyworlds they create are each a unique intellectual property, each with unique entry points into the IP’s universe. This means that your favorite character might be the protagonist in the film, while playing a complimentary role in the video game – the stories are independent, but if you experience them all, they tell a broader narrative that expands the overall mythology. It’s up to you to decide the path that you take.

“The concept of transmedia has been around for quite a while,” he says, “but I don’t think anyone has done it quite the way that we do it.”

Take Unknown 9, for example.

Unknown 9
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment

Your entry point might be Unknown 9: Chapters, an immersive set of website puzzles in which players go through The Leap Year Society’s recruitment protocol to become Quaestors. Or you might decide to start with Unknown 9: Genesis, the first book in a novel trilogy by bestselling author Layton Green. Or you could opt for the comic book series, Unknown 9: Torment, following Jaden Crowe as he is inducted into a mysterious society and discovers his unbelievable destiny. Other entry points include podcasts, the upcoming video game, a feature film…all of it designed to be consumed in any order, a la carte with you deciding how far you want to go.

“That’s the beauty of IP,” Amancio says. “Every entry point brings with it a different perspective, enriching the overall story. If you consume only one platform – let’s say you just watch the film or you play the console game – you feel satisfied, because each is a closed loop. You have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. You experience it, and you complete the whole narrative. But for those who want more, how do you create narratives that enrich the fan experience? The idea of Storyworlds is to craft narratives where each one gives you a peek into a completely different perspective.”

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If anyone is going to deliver on challenging the status quo, it’s Alexandre Amancio.

Just as Peter Higgs challenged the Standard Model with the discovery of the Higgs boson, Amancio is challenging traditional channels for consuming content. Instead of big companies pushing the content that people consume, such as on TV or in the theatre, for example, Storyworlds interweave a myriad of different producers around a single IP. The result is a democratized platform that is anything but cookie cutter.

“The world has shifted, right?” Amancio asks rhetorically. “Look at the movie industry, even before COVID hit. They were already looking back and asking, ‘Where are the fans? Where are the lines at theaters?’ People aren’t consuming film anymore, at least not in the traditional sense.”

Amancio’s Storyworld epiphany has its genesis in his work at Ubisoft, where he helmed two of the most successful titles in the Assassin’s Creed universe: Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, and Assassin’s Creed Unity. Those experiences convinced him that developing an IP and delivering its content across multiple platforms was the way to go.

Courtesy Ubisoft

Consider Unity.

You play as Arno, a native Frenchman who was born in Versailles to an Assassin father. You’re dropped into Paris, circa 1798, during the French Revolution. The streets are filthy with mud and blood, the air thick with gunpowder smoke. The citizens are starving. The guillotines are doing a brisk business. You play to expose the true powers behind the Revolution. You explore the city, and scale towers to unlock missions. There’s plenty of jumping and stabbing to be had.

When you have a game this rich, it begs for other story streams. Amancio took this with him to Reflector, hell-bent on creating ubiquitous IPs that run the gamut, from social media to gaming consoles to streaming services and back again. Books. Graphic novels. Podcasts. RPG’s. Anime.

Unknown 9 is just the beginning.

Amancio and his Reflector team have other Storyworlds in the works.

Like Peter Higgs, Godfather of the God Particle, it’s all about the creation.

Let’s walk it back to the beginning. Please tell me a little about your childhood – where did you get your insatiable curiosity?

I was actually born in Portugal, which is a southern European country on the Iberian Peninsula, bordering Spain. I didn’t live there long, because my parents moved to Montréal, Canada, when I was a little over three years old. I grew up in a French-speaking city, but my first language is Portuguese. I had to learn French for the first time when I was introduced to school – I actually still remember being 5 years old and not understanding a word that the people were saying, so I had to pick it up as I went. My dad was always of the mindset that we would speak Portuguese at home. That way I would be able to keep that language. He knew that I would be learning French at school, so the other decision that he made was that we would watch TV and movies in English. I think that having been plunged into a lot of different languages and a lot of different cultures at a very early age is probably what formatted my brain the way that it is now. I feel like it helped to develop my creative side. I like solving problems, I like coming up with stuff, and I like to learn. So a very healthy curiosity is part of my DNA. I can’t even imagine not learning. So yes, I really think that being plunged into the unknown from a very young age is what probably what drove me to become this way.

Alex Amancio

You are an awarding-winning writer and director of the iconic Assassin’s Creed video game series. Please tell me about your first major effort, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

Both of these projects were extremely important in my creative path. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations was my first project as Creative Director, and it was released in November, 2011. This title was the first where I was really helming the creative vision on the project. It was quite a tough one because I had two major challenges: First, we had to create a brand-new Assassin’s Creed team. That was very challenging in itself. Then, we had to deliver this game in a record amount of time. I think we delivered it in 10 months. What I learned from that experience are three things: You need to have a clear vision from the start; you need to believe in that vision enough to be able to hold onto it no matter what the obstacles in your path; and you need to be smart enough to be flexible in the sense that, there may be times where adapting the vision might get you closer to the final vision than if you had held onto every detail. So, by having that sort of rigidity for certain things, and as well as having the flexibility to deal with problems as they arise, we were able to move forward with belief that what we had from seed was good. All of that stuff I absorbed in that project on the fly. It was really a trial by fire.

From a storytelling standpoint, Revelations was about an aging hero who, for the first time in his life, had to take a step back and look at his life. What was he actually fighting for? What does he want his life to be about? Should he continue on this course, or should he just live for himself? It was also an amazing opportunity to connect two of the most iconic heroes of the franchise –Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, who is the protagonist in the first game, and Ezio, who ended up becoming the star of the franchise. It was exciting to have them both in the same game, and to be able to create a parallel or a mirror with both of their lives, with two ways that a hero’s life could potentially go. So, Revelations was a very cool project for all of those reasons. I’m very proud of how we were able to overcome all of the challenges, and also proud of the depth of the narrative that we were able to craft.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
Courtesy Ubisoft

Let’s fast-forward to the fall of 2014, and the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity.

Assassins Creed Unity represented another significant challenge, but we had one big advantage that we didn’t have with Revelations, and that was a lot of time. We also had the biggest team that we had ever assembled for a project. It was about 1,000 people in total. We had 10 studios collaborating together on one single project across several different countries and three continents, from Asia to Europe to America, so it was a very ambitious game.

Unity represented a quantum leap in gaming.

Unity was also based on the AnvilNext 2.0 game engine. Because Unity was the first next-generation title that we were going to deliver using this engine, it was all about how much could we push this new technology – and not just the visuals. We wanted to see what kind of storytelling mechanisms we could push, using the raw power that was suddenly available to us. So we created the biggest city that we had ever created for an Assassin’s Creed game. It was actually to scale; in the previous Assassin’s Creed titles, the houses were actually smaller than in reality. So, if you were able to go into a house, you would immediately realize that things like doorways would be much smaller. For Unity, almost all of the houses could be entered, so they had to be full-scale. We essentially recreated Paris, not as it is today, but as it was in the Middle Ages, and we did it to scale.

The characters were the next logical step in our development process. The thought being, if we create a city that looks and feels more realistic than ever, then that city is going to have a jarring effect if it feels empty. Up until that point, we couldn’t typically have any more than 10-20 characters in a game. We developed a tech that allowed us to have more than 10,000 people, which, for the first time, really allowed us to populate a city as it should be populated. The beauty of these characters is that, if you interact with them, they react like real characters. That advancement really contributed to making the city feel alive and real.

You’ve been twice nominated by the prestigious Writer’s Guild of America.

When I look at the other people that were nominated in that category, these are people that I admire greatly, and whose work I also admire. Just being nominated, and being in the same category as them, is a tremendous honor for me. I’m quite humbled by it, actually.

Genesis – One of many entry points into the Unknown 9 universe
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment

You’re a born storyteller.

Storytelling is something that I’ve been passionate about my entire life. I talk about technology and all of that stuff, but in reality, these are all just levers. They are devices that allow us to tell stories. Finding new and innovative ways of telling stories is what I’m in this for, and gaming is the perfect marriage of technology and storytelling. It’s what stimulates me. It’s what motivates me.

It’s an exciting time, because I think that video games open the door to a completely new kind of storytelling. When the film industry was in its nascent stages, it used a lot of the language and mechanics of theater. Then, we started understanding how film could be editing, allowing us to jump cut, flashback, and change locations very quickly. That sort of vernacular was born of experience with the medium. It took years and decades to master. In the video game world, we’re still in that nascent stage. We’re still discovering, every day, every year, new ways to push the boundaries of storytelling within those interactive universes that we create.

From what I’ve read, you’re into theoretical physics.

Yes [laughs]. My initial path was science. Physics has always been my passion, and I think theoretical physics is as close to creation as science can get. If you look at those Prince Theories in terms of how the very small things in our universe work, it seems to be subjective in the sense that the universe seems to react to the observer. When you start getting into that stuff, you really start getting very close to how video games function. Maybe that’s part of the subconscious reason that I gravitated towards video games.

Torment – One of many entry points into the Unknown 9 universe
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment

You’re now the CCO Reflector Entertainment. Storyworlds are at the heart of your new company.

Reflector was born of certain ideas that I started having when I was at Ubisoft. One thing I realized while working on the Assassin’s Creed universe was that the mythology we were building, and the world that we were creating, transcended the video game medium. So, while I was helming both Revelations and Unity,a lot of my time and attention was focused on the novels and the comic books that were being produced. This work was being done with an internal team that we called the IP Team. As we fleshed these out, it was really important to me that the stories weren’t just redundant stories, or simply an adaptation of the video game story. We wanted stories that transcended the video game – maybe from a different angle, or a different character’s perspective, or maybe even a portion of the story that wasn’t necessarily told within the game. So, instead of having the typical ancillary novels for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, we actually had two novels that, instead of being about the story of the game, were actually prequels. They were the stories of the two main protagonists, and how they got to where they are in the game. In doing so, the novels gave audiences a glimpse into the psyche of these characters. They also fleshed out their backstories, and dived into other important characters that gravitated around them. It was the same thing when it came to the comic books. They weren’t about the game, they were about different things. They were connected to the game through some artifacts, or some side characters. I really felt that this was, in itself, a new form of storytelling.

Storyworld Development
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment

The storytelling landscape has changed. Would you consider this a paradigm shift?

In a very real sense, yes. I looked at what people were doing 30 years ago. They used to say, “‘I’m a film fan,’ or, ‘I’m a novel fan,’ or, ‘I’m a comic book fan.’ But today, people are far more likely to compare themselves to an IP. Today, they’re a Harry Potter fan. Or a Star Wars fan. Or a Lord of the Rings fan. Which means that they consume that world through multiple platforms – through films, through books, through comics, and through video games.

Does Reflector fill a niche, or is it leading the way in this bigger transformation?

When I started Reflector, I felt that, even though consumers have the evolved towards this way of consuming content, companies had not. Companies still viewed themselves through the lens of what they sold. I felt that this was, in a lot of ways, very similar to the mistake made by Kodak, where Kodak went from being the first, most valuable company in the world in terms of film and pictures, to being bankrupt within a very short amount of time. The reason this happened was because of digital photography. Digital photography essentially made film obsolete. The irony is that digital photography was actually developed by the R&D department at Kodak. They patented the chip that is actually able to transfer images into digital pictures, but then they sold it off. Why? Because it wasn’t part of their main revenue stream, which was film-based cameras. This was the 1970s, when 85% of the cameras purchased were Kodak cameras, and 90% of the film purchased was Kodak film. If Kodak had chosen to identify themselves not as a film company, but as an image company, or a memory company, they would likely still be the 800-pound gorilla in an industry that today is dominated by others. If they had evolved toward digital photography, they might also be making all the stuff that we take for granted today, things like Photoshop, smartphone cameras, and the like.

It seems like a common mistake that doom a lot of companies.

The same thing happened to Blockbuster. Blockbuster should’ve been about getting entertainment to people wherever they were, but they forgot about that. Instead, they were all about brick-and-mortar stores that rented out cassettes and DVDs. The same thing happened to them. Had they aligned themselves properly, they could have become Netflix.

Do you see the same potential for this cycle repeating itself in the entertainment space?

Very much so. Who knows if the traditional film industry, which has focused on movies being released to theatres first, is going to survive COVID, much less the transformation it has been going through in the past decade. The one thing I know for sure is that people are always going to consume audio and visual experiences. So, if companies sort of view themselves as producers of media, if they see themselves as creators of worlds and characters, then maybe that would open new doors.

Reflector values small teams of passionate individuals
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment

Reflector is platform agnostic, with something you call “Storyworlds” at the center. Not the other way around, where channels drive the creativity.

That is essentially the concept we developed while working on Assassin’s Creed, and the motivating factor that led me to create Reflector Entertainment. Reflector is precisely as you describe: It’s a company that creates worlds that we call Storyworlds, which we then deploy them across media. One product is no more important than the other. Of course we have our revenue streams, and we have certain products and certain media that we don’t think will make money, but we still believe that these  are good vectors for telling stories, and that they enrich the overall IP. These products bring value to the universe that we are creating, whether or not they make money.

What’s going on at Reflector right now?

We’re busy creating our very first Storyworld, which is called Unknown 9. Unknown 9 is a very ambitious universe that we’ve crafted, which is something that I’ve built around an old East Indian mythology. Right now we are busy creating a novel trilogy, a comic book series, a podcast series, and a video game. We’re also developing a film, as well as loads of digital content. And we’re developing an entire digital platform that will host it all.

Please tell me about the teams that you have at Reflector. Are teams critical to the success of these Storyworlds?

That’s an excellent question, because what we do is ultimately all about the people. IP is all about ideas, right? Reflector is built on what comes out of people’s minds. The critical thing is finding the best talent all over the world. I think that one thing that was really important for Reflector from the beginning is that, yeah, we’re based in Montréal, and we have an amazing talent pool of people that are expert video game developers, but we are not limited to that, right? We will find the best possible collaborators, wherever they are. For this reason, we do work with a lot of people that are remote. For example, some of our authors are in Europe, and some of them are in the United States, so the idea of finding the right collaborators is the most critical element.

Another important part of team development is creating a healthy mix of veterans and up-and-coming talent. You’re reassured by bringing in established talent with proven track records, people that you can judge by their work and the projects that they’ve already been through. The newcomers bring fresh ideas and perspectives. It allows us to counterbalance our experienced talent that with the young, up-and-comers that still have a lot of stars in their eyes and think that they can do the impossible. I think it not only rejuvenates the veterans, it also benefits the newcomers, because they benefit from working with veterans who have years of knowledge and expertise. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. This also helps ensure an amazing level of diversity.

Teamwork is essential to success at Reflector
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment

How much creative freedom are they given?

Once you get the right people, you can give them a sandbox and let them create. You have to make sure that everything still fits together, and that everything still lines up, but you have to give people the creative freedom that will allow them to shine. When people feel that they’re trusted and have the freedom to express themselves, I think that they will do their best work and transcend even what they thought was possible. For those reasons, trust, creativity, and respect are the pillars that make up Reflector.

Do you see yourself as the conductor of an orchestra?

I think that that is a great analogy. An orchestra has its sections – you have your star violinist in the first chair, and then there are other very talented violinists occupying the other chairs in that section – and these sections have to be perfectly in concert with the other sections in order for the symphony to sound its best. It’s the conductor’s job to unify performers, set the tempo, and control the interpretation and pacing of the music. That’s really what my job is at Reflector. It’s a great analogy.

Creativity output isn’t the same as mass-producing widgets. Do you have to keep that in mind, even with deadlines looming?

Yes, absolutely. Placing undo stress on someone often makes them less creative, so you have to balance the need to finish something on time with the need to get the most out of your team creatively. You have to keep in mind that creativity isn’t something you produce by flipping a switch. Constant, undo pressure can lead to burnout and a loss of creativity. I want my teams to enjoy their work, whether they are developing a book, a video game, or a comic. Passionate, engaged, and motivated teams can achieve far more than the work given to them.

The Assassin’s Creed titles that you helmed at Ubisoft are known for their quality. Now that you’re at Reflector, how do you maintain that same focus on excellence?

It’s important to keep in mind that excellence is something that is very fleeting. It’s something that is almost intangible – you can chase after it, but you never catch it. If you are lucky, and if you chase it with enough passion, energy, and temerity, then I think it’s something that you can sort of touch the edge of. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, but what’s most important is the chase. When I look around this industry, I think a lot of products have become just that – products. In many cases they are good enough, but they don’t exceed expectations. At Reflector, we want to produce transcendent work. I think can only be achieved when you are truly in the pursuit of excellence.

Final Question: If you had one piece of advice for other aspiring creatives, what would that be?

If you are able to keep that sacred fire kindled, and if you have in your mind the that your work is going to be a lifelong pursuit, then I think it’s possible to have long and successful career doing what you love.

Alex Amancio
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Robia Scott – Leap of Faith

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

Robia Scott was the quintessential ‘80s girl, from the shoulder pads and leg warmers to the big hair and a love of all things MTV. She bought a ticket to see Flashdance and emerged from the theater transformed, the next steps in her adolescence forged by the movie whose lead protagonist is a steel mill worker by day and exotic dancer by night. Yes, every prodigy needs her very own Ginger Rogers or Josephine Baker – i.e., a mentor and model – and Jennifer Beals was exactly that, inspiring Scott to dance her way into scores of music videos, land on the cover of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls LP, and take the stage with The Purple One during his European tour promoting the album. The twenty-two year-old beauty walked away from dancing following that tour, embarking on an acting career that would include Beverly Hills, 90210 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before coming full circle in 2019 with the release of Unplanned, a true story about a Planned Parenthood director turned avid Pro-Life activist. Stepping in front of the camera for the first time since 2005, Scott plays the role of Cheryl, the clinic’s executive and the film’s chief antagonist.

“Cheryl is a Cruella de Vil type of character,” Scott says with a laugh. “She’s definitely a character the audience loves to hate. I was a little nervous about the role, but after reading the script and getting to know more about Abby Johnson, I found myself becoming a lot more comfortable with the idea of acting again.”

Scott – born Robia LaMorte – spent her early childhood with a nomadic, free-spirited mother who never stayed anywhere long enough to lay down roots. After bouncing from Queens to Ocean City to the Florida Keys, a stability-starved LaMorte moved in with her Connecticut-based father. She was hooked on dance by then, twelve years old and full of big dreams. It didn’t hurt that she was built like a dancer and possessed a magnetic, effervescent personality – qualities that would later turn Prince’s head and endear her to the camera – or that she was brimming with ambition. Her father’s eventual move to Los Angeles led Robia to the famed Dupree Dance Academy, attended through the years by the likes of Cher, Drew Barrymore, Kirk Douglas, and Burt Lancaster. That experience, coupled with her proximity to Hollywood and the explosion of MTV, put LaMorte at the epicenter of the music video universe, the right person in the right place at the right time. Dancing alongside Debbie Gibson in her Shake Your Love video, LaMorte used the performance as a springboard to dozens of other music videos.

“I hired an agent and stayed busy,” reflects Scott. “I danced for big names and obscure artists, it didn’t matter. I was young and having fun.”

While the work was steady, none of the videos were ripe to produce dancing’s next “It Girl.” All of that changed when her agent called with an audition she couldn’t refuse: The opportunity to dance with Prince.

Robia LaMorte (Pearl), Prince, and Lori Elle (Diamond) in the video, Cream

“I was nineteen at the time,” she says. “Prince was a superstar. Maybe it was because I was so young, but I wasn’t intimidated by him or overwhelmed by the moment. I just went about it like any other audition. Looking back now, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Cast as the character Pearl alongside her “twin” Diamond, LaMorte appeared in the videos for Cream and Gett Off, hit songs from Prince’s thirteenth studio album, Diamonds and Pearls. Released in 1991, Diamonds and Pearls remains one of Prince’s most enigmatic works: Anti-materialist yet strangely attracted to bling, decadent but with striking moments of purity, flirting with multiple sexualities while insisting that a ″woman be a woman and a man be a man.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be Prince’s muse,” Scott says. “He always liked to find a female muse for every season of his work, and for the album Diamonds and Pearls the word was that he was looking for a set of identical twins. I’m not a twin, so that didn’t seem on the cards for me. I went to audition as a back-up dancer for the Cream video. It just so happened that another dancer who auditioned, Lori Werner, looked a bit like me. When Prince saw us together he decided that we could work as the twins. That one-week job became the next two years of my life.”

Recorded at a time when a pop star′s sexual netherworld could seem wildly glamorous – we wanted glimpses of the carnivalesque life behind the curtains – the idea of a sexual empire carried a lot of currency. The video for Gett Off is set in this type of dream-world, a realm of writhing bodies and sizzling guitar riffs. Gett Off juggles a number of moods: Leering innuendo, refined courtship, dream-like repetitions. Introducing the twins to the comforts of his home, he then taunts one of them for the tightness of her dress (“I heard the rip when U sat down”), triggering the same shriek which opens the track. Robia, for her part, was right at home inside Prince’s lustrous imagination.

“Prince was Prince,” she says. “He’s known for this provocatively sexual persona, but he was nothing but a professional and a gentleman. He made everyone feel comfortable, which helped bring out the best in all of the dancers. And the set was amazing!”

Prince and LaMorte (Pearl) in the video, Gett Off

The song Cream is an immense work of restraint – breathtakingly clean and concise, introducing each element with cut-out precision, as if to say: “Here’s your basic beat, here′s the classic riff, here’s where you boogie down.” There is lush imagery, but it is lyrically sparse (″Cream / Get on top / Cream / You will cop″). The supremely stylistic video provided the perfect counterpoint to the song’s streamlined workout.

“Everything about that video was big,” Scott says. “He had hair stylists and makeup artists flown in from New York, and some of the most creative people working to put it together.”

Prince would soon launch a European stadium tour to promote the album, with LaMorte and Werner dancing onstage with him nightly. When the tour was over, so was LaMorte’s dancing career.

“I was still very young, but I’d accomplished everything I wanted as a dancer. After dancing in front of 60,000 fans with Prince, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. I decided it was time to walk away and try something else.”

Robia’s next career move was into acting. She got her start in commercials, snagged the role of Jason Priestley’s girlfriend Jill Fleming on Beverly Hills, 90210 in two episodes, and played the female lead in the live action video game Fox Hunt. From there she landed her first regular role, playing high school teacher and techno-pagan Jenny Calendar on the first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“The writers of Buffy took their job very seriously,” Scott says. “When they were doing the witchcraft scenes, they didn’t just make things up. They did their research. They would recreate actual spells, and you could feel the environment shift.”

Robia LaMorte and Anthony Head share a scene in the hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

At a point in her life when she was already wrestling with the concept of God, Robia found herself conflicted and searching for a sign.

Scott laughs at the memory. “When you’re driving down the highway and praying for a sign, and your car is suddenly surrounded by a Jesus biker gang, I’d say that’s a pretty clear indication of His hand at work.”

Robia continued to act after her character in Buffy was killed off, but by then a transformation was underway. Obsessed with weight and body image issues, and by now a chronic chain smoker, she decided to put her faith in Christianity.

“God spoke to me and wanted me to start a ministry,” Scott says. “I continued to act over the next few years, but the more I went on auditions, the more I found myself saying ‘no’ because so much of the content didn’t align with my faith. By 2001 I had given up the theatrical side entirely. I stayed in the commercial side for a while longer, because I had always done really well with commercials. They were a bit more wholesome and clean, and I kept doing that because that was also a good way for me to keep earning a living while staying in the industry. But honestly, even that got to be where it felt like a little bit of a compromise.”

Her faith-based ministry – focused to help others experience the freedom, fun, and fullness of life that God created everyone to enjoy – has touched thousands in the years since. Through her book, Counterfeit Comforts, Robia shares her journey of overcoming her own counterfeits, including the chain smoking and body image issues that plagued her as a dancer and actor. She provides online mentoring, is a sought-after speaker, and is once again in front of the camera with the release of Unplanned.

Robia Scott in a scene from the 2019 movie, Unplanned. Scott plays Cheryl, the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic

“I love what I’m doing,” Scott says, smiling. “Now that I am a Christian, people often ask me if I have any regrets from my former life. I loved what I was doing back then – I was able to work with a genius in Prince, and I got to dance in front of thousands of people, which was my dream growing up. I walked away from a thriving career in Hollywood and into full-time ministry where I get to share my faith with others. It doesn’t matter which part of my life I look back on. God has been right there with me the whole time.”

Take me back to the beginning.  What are some of your childhood memories from the 1970s?

My parents divorced when I was two and then I lived with my mom, who was a bit of a gypsy. She loved to move a lot, so I had many different homes when I was younger. I was born in Queens, but I also lived in Colorado, Maryland, and the Florida Keys, which is what I remember the most about my upbringing. The Keys was an interesting place to grow up. It’s not as built up as the rest of the country. You have your cutoffs on and a pair of flip-flops, and you wear that the school. Then, after school you go fishing. It was a very different upbringing. I loved it very much, but I eventually wanted to have a bit more of a stable lifestyle. So, at the age of twelve I went to live with my dad in Westport, Connecticut.

Was moving from the Florida Keys to New England a huge culture shock?

It was very different in terms of the schooling and the environment, so it was a bit of an adjustment. It’s also where I started dancing seriously. I had a girlfriend who was taking dance classes after school, and I ended up taking a class with her. She became my best friend. We went to see the movie Flashdance, and from that point on I was hooked. I would dance as many days a week as I possibly could, until we moved to Los Angeles, and then I really started pursuing it.

’80s Girl: Robia Scott – then Robia LaMorte – was so inspired by the movie Flashdance that she tried
to emulate everything about Jennifer Beals, including the perm.

You attended the prestigious Dupree Dance Academy in Hollywood.

I got a scholarship to attend Dupree so I went to school there, and then after school I would dance until about 10 o’clock at night. At age sixteen I got an agent and started working professionally.

Did you ever suffer from burnout?

At that age dancing never felt like an arduous commitment. I loved it. Dupree was where I wanted to be. Dancing never felt like it might for an Olympic athlete, where you have to say “no” to so much because you are completely focused on your sport. I didn’t feel as though I was sacrificing the teen years of my life. Don’t get me wrong, you do have to make a commitment to dance professionally, but I wanted to dance all day. That’s what I did.

What was your favorite style of dance?

My favorite style was contemporary jazz, similar to what you might see on the show So You Think You Can Dance. But at Dupree, you were required to do everything. You had to do ballet to get a good foundation. I knew I wasn’t going to be a ballerina – I didn’t desire to be a ballerina – but I took a lot of ballet because that’s your core as a dancer. You need to have that technique. I did a lot of ballet, I did a lot of tap, and did a little bit of ballroom, but my heart was in jazz.

You were sixteen when you landed a spot in the Debbie Gibson video Shake Your Love.  What was that experience like for you?

Well, it was really cool to actually get my first job after all of that training! It was also fun to be on my first set. Paula Abdul was the choreographer – she was a Laker Girl at the time, where she also did all of their choreography. I remember Debbie Gibson complaining afterwards because I had so much screen time in the video. They actually went back and they edited me out a little bit [laughs]. From there, my dance career just took off. MTV was on the rise at this time, and every artist – people you’ve never heard of – did a music video. That was my bread-and-butter at that time. I did video-after-video-after-video until Prince. It was a blast.

Who were some of the other artists you worked with?

I was in a video for the band Guy. I did a videos with acts like Donny Osmond, Joe Cocker, and Yanni. I remember doing a video with a guy named Tommy Page, who sadly committed suicide a few years ago. I also performed in videos for a lot of bands that didn’t really go too far.

Were you still going to school at this time?

No, by this point I had actually gotten my GED and I was working as a full-time professional dancer. In addition to the music videos, and I toured with the Pet Shop Boys in Europe. That was incredible. I think I was 18 at the time. I did all sorts of sports industrials for companies like Reebok, and they would fly you all over the world. I remember flying to Reebok’s headquarters in Germany a couple of times a years to do these big dance shows for them.

NEW YORK CITY – OCTOBER 15: Lori Elle (Diamond) and Robia LaMorte (Pearl) attend a party honoring Prince on October 15, 1991 at Tatou Club in New York City. (Photo by Ron Galella)

Tell me about getting the call to audition for Prince.

I was about 19 years old when I auditioned for Prince. With the first call it wasn’t a huge deal – to me it was just another music video, even though Prince is Prince. I wasn’t sure what the job would entail. I figured I would just be one of many dancers in a big group of dancers, and that was pretty much how the audition went. Then I got a call back. They explained that Prince was looking for twins, and that he couldn’t find identical twins who looked the part and who could dance the way he wanted. They said Prince really liked my dancing, that there was another girl who looked a lot like me, and that they wanted to bring us in to audition for the twin part. The two of us dressed alike that day, and he ended up hiring us. Lori Werner was cast as Diamond, and I was cast as Pearl.

Most twins have great chemistry, finishing each other’s sentences and things like that. What was your chemistry like with Diamond?

The dance world is pretty small, so it turned out that Lori Werner and I knew each other. She went by the stage name Lori Elle at the time. We had great chemistry. We got together on the phone, and the more we talked the less convinced we became about doing the twins part. In our minds, the twins probably weren’t going to get as much coverage as the dancers. We imagined that there would be this big dance number, and that the camera would pan over to a couple of twins sitting at a table drinking a coffee or something. So we went to the audition and tried to sabotage it – we didn’t dress alike even though they had asked us to, but we got the twin part anyway [laughs].

What was it like to meet Prince for the first time?

I remember going to the dance studio to rehearse. It was just me, Lori, and the choreographer. Prince had not named us Diamond and Pearl at that point, we were just two dancers rehearsing and trying to learn our roles. I remember warming up on the floor, and looking in the mirror and seeing Prince, who was at the back of the room, standing in the doorway. That was the moment that it hit me – Prince was actually in the studio! He just stood there in a designer outfit, taking it all in and looking like a rock star, larger-than-life. When he finally walked into the room you could feel his presence.

Lori Elle (Diamond) and Robia LaMorte (Pearl) in the Prince video, Diamonds and Pearls.

Were you nervous?

We said our hellos and I tried to appear calm, but I was still a little bit nervous. I had watched the movie Purple Rain like everyone else, so I was secretly like, “Oh my gosh, it’s Prince!” But before you know it, we were all dancing together and doing all of these routines, and it was apparent that the three of us had a good chemistry with each other.

It was during that rehearsal that Prince had an epiphany. He said that we were more than just a couple of dancers that he wanted in the video, that he was going to name us Diamond and Pearl, and that we would become the muses for the album. It was from there that Prince laid the foundation for the videos, as well as for the idea of the album cover and the world tour. Altogether, we spent about two years with Prince.

Tell me about rehearsing for the videos Cream and Gett Off.

Oh my gosh, that was so long ago! Cream required a lot of rehearsal because it was such a huge production. We had a large group of dancers involved, and then we had our little section, so Cream was not your normal, run-of-the-mill music video. I think it required a couple of weeks of rehearsal time, and then two or three days of shooting.

When it came to Gett off, we didn’t even have rehearsals. Prince would just decide to shoot. He was very impromptu in that regard. Our agents were usually the ones to call us, but sometimes Prince would call us himself and get us on the phone. We became friends over time, so we would talk quite a bit. He would say, “Hey I’m going to do a video, can you guys come to Paisley Park?” Of course we would say yes, and then we would hang up and frantically pack. Two hours later we would be on a plane headed to Minneapolis. That’s what happened with Gett Off. We got there and saw the set – it was incredible – and met Sean Cheeseman, who was the choreographer. He would put some things together for us, and we would step onto the set and just do it. To this day Sean is an amazing talent, and he has had an amazing career. It was very special to work with him.

Robia LaMorte dances with Prince in the videos Cream and Gett Off

Did you have any input into the choreography?

Prince liked to free flow, that’s really how he worked creatively, so we were always able to throw some things in. We could pitch ideas, work with the choreographer, or sometimes we would just do our own thing. That’s the way it was with the house mix version of Gett Off. That video was completely impromptu. We didn’t have a choreographer, we didn’t have anything planned or scripted. We were just playing around in front of the camera, and out of this came the video. That’s how Prince worked. He would get inspired and make it happen.

Were any of the videos more demanding than the others?

I don’t remember feeling like any of them more demanding. They were just a blast, because we were working with incredible people and the sets were phenomenal. Prince is Prince, so the music was genius and he spared no expense. We had the best hair and makeup people the business, and the costumes were amazing, so needless to say we looked incredible.

When you’re shooting a video like Cream, you’re working twelve-to-sixteen hour days, so it can be exhausting – but it’s also so exciting. I don’t remember feeling like, “Oh my gosh, this is too much.” It wasn’t like that at all. I loved every minute of it. We were flying all around the world with him, and flying to Paisley Park at the drop of a hat. Being twenty I had the stamina for all of that, so it really was the perfect time in my life to experience Prince.

Robia LaMorte and Prince on the cover of Prince’s 13th studio album, Diamonds and Pearls

You appeared on the cover of Diamonds and Pearls. Please tell me what that means to you now.

It’s incredible to be a part of history, and to be associated with such a legendary performer. I was so young at the time that I don’t think I truly appreciated it as much as I should have. Looking back now, I’ve come to understand how vast his talents really were, and how lucky I was to have been a small part of it. Being on the album cover is still a thrill.

What was it like to tour with Prince?

It was fantastic. I’d had some experience touring Europe with the Pet Shop Boys when I was seventeen, so I knew what it was like to be overseas and far from home for an extended period of time. The Pet Shop Boys were awesome, but Prince was on another level. He was beyond rock star…he was a rock god! I remember being on stage, and the lights would come up and you would look out, and there were people as far as you can see. And for me, dancing in front of 60,000 people was extraordinary. It was as good as it gets, and a lot of fun!

Robia LaMorte (far right) performed with on stage with Prince during his European tour promoting the album, Diamonds and Pearls.

Did it ever become a chore?

Never. The ironic thing is that, here I was, performing in sold-out stadiums every night, and yet I’d never gone to a concert in my life. My first concert experience was being on stage with Prince. And then later when I actually went to a concert, I remember thinking to myself, “This doesn’t even compare. This isn’t a concert. They’re just standing there on the stage and singing [laughs].” So yes, I was a bit spoiled to be thrown in at that level with him. To perform with Prince and to travel with him to places like Australia, Scotland, Ireland, and Hong Kong…to travel with him and experience all of these cultures…to be able to bring his music to life, and to see how much the fans loved him…it doesn’t get much better than that. So it was never a chore. Prince is in a small, select group in terms of musicians. He is one of the all-time greats. He was incredible every single show. He was just an extraordinary performer and musician. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

After touring with Prince you walked away from dance and appeared in a slew of commercials. How did you score those gigs?

It was very similar to my start in dance. I hired a commercial agent who knocked on doors and made phone calls, and because of that I was able to audition on a regular basis. I landed commercial spots with companies like Mitsubishi, The GAP, GE, and Oil of Olay. It was steady work.

You eventually made the leap to TV, landing on the popular and critically-acclaimed series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How so?

Interestingly enough, it was similar to my experience with Prince, which was supposed to be one music video but turned into almost two years with him and included multiple videos, doing the album cover, and touring the world. With Buffy, it was supposed to be just one guest starring role in one episode, but it turned into a recurring role on a great show.

Robia LaMorte as Jenny Calendar in a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Tell me about auditioning for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I remember going in to audition, and then being called back to meet with the producers, which also included Joss Whedon. Joss created Buffy and has gone on to do great things like The Avengers, but at the time I was not familiar with who he was. My scene that day was with the fictional character Rupert Giles, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t put it together that Giles was a schoolteacher. I played Jenny Calendar, the computer teacher at Sunnydale High School. I thought Rupert was actually one of my students. Based on that, I had this whole take on how I was going to read the scene, and I decided to use an authoritative, almost derogatory type of tone with him, as if I were talking down to my student a bit.

When I walked in the room there was Anthony Stewart Head, who is this seasoned actor, and he was reading the part of Rupert Giles. We started the scene, but I still didn’t know why Anthony was there, who he was, or why he was reading the character with me. So I went ahead and read it in a very snarky way, and I talked down to him a little bit. The producers love it [laughs]. They thought that our banter really helped the chemistry, and that was actually why they decided to hire me for the part.

When did you realize that Buffy was going to be a big hit?

I remember reading the script and thinking that it was really good. The show hadn’t been on the air yet, but after I saw how well-cast it was I knew that they had something special. I did my one episode and they called me back, and they just kept calling me back. That’s how I ended up doing a couple of seasons of Buffy.

Iyari Limon (Kennedy), Indigo (Rona), Robia Scott (Jenny Calendar) and Nicholas Brendon (Alex) pose to promote a 2017 Buffy fan meet in Levallois-Perret, France

As I understand it, you became a Christian three months into the show.

I had always believed in God, and I had always been a seeker of spiritual things. I was into the New Age movement at the time, which was prevalent in Southern California, and there were some areas in my life where I was really struggling. I was a chain smoker, for example, and I really felt a bondage to cigarettes. I was also dealing with food issues, and body image issues…being a woman, I think these issues are a universal issue for women, but being a dancer and an actress just escalated them. You might not have known it by looking at me, because I have always been in shape, but I felt the constant pressure of having to be thin. It tormented me emotionally. So, all of these things were driving me for answers. I desperately wanted to find out how to break free from those things and be at peace.

What happened next?

I started seeking God. There were some people who talked to me about being born again, and about Jesus being the only way to God. I just wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Then one day I said, “God, you know I believe in you. I don’t really get the whole born again thing, and I don’t get Jesus being the only way, but if that is really the case please show me something. Give me a sign, speak to me, anything.”

What happened next is one of the stories that is so prevalent in my testimony. I am driving in my car one afternoon and I’m again praying for a sign. As I’m driving, I am suddenly encompassed by a biker gang of Hells Angels. I just remember thinking, “How ironic, here I am praying, and I’ve got Hells Angels all around my car.” There were probably ten bikes in total. I’ve got them in front of me, I’ve got them on either side, I’ve got them behind me. I look a little more closely, and I notice that the two bikers in front of me are wearing leather jackets, and on the backs of their jackets are big crosses, and over the crosses were the words “We ride for Jesus.” They weren’t Hells Angels – they were some sort of Jesus biker gang. I started cracking up and laughing harder by the minute. I’m asking for a sign from God, and I have Jesus bikers surrounding my car!

That was one of the things that God did, in a series of events, that led me to a church where I learned more about what it meant to be a Christian. Very soon after that, I came into my walk with Christ. So as I moved forward with my career in Buffy, I started to feel very conflicted. Buffy was a fantastic show. It was well-written and super intelligent, but I definitely started to feel the pull of all of the occult and the witchcraft. That was really the antithesis of where I was going in terms of my spiritual walk. Eventually my character on the show was killed off, which I saw as another sign from God.

You walked away from acting altogether in the early 2000s and went full time into your ministry.

Pretty early on in my walk with God I felt an affinity for the things of God. When I prayed, I felt a power and an authority inside of me. When I read the Bible, I felt a connection very quickly. It didn’t take long until I sensed that my time in Hollywood – as well as my 20-year career in the entertainment industry – was winding down. I felt that God wanted me to use those same gifts – expression and communication – for His kingdom through teaching. So I walked away and  jumped into a full-time ministry when I did not have a ministry anywhere in sight.

Higher Power: Robia Scott’s leap of faith has led to a successful transition to her higher calling, a thriving ministry that keeps her busy as a speaker, teacher, and author.

You took a leap of faith.

Yes, which fits with my personality because I am sort of an all-or-nothing kind of gal. It takes time to develop a ministry, to build something like that from the ground up. But it was a season of transition, a faith walk, and I really learned to depend on God to provide for me. He did some supernatural things during that time, things that were just extraordinary.

Give me an example.

Walking away from your career with no income is hard. It got to the point where I really had no money and no job. I spent a lot of time praying and seeking God. I put all of my faith in Him and kept pushing forward, even though my financial situation had become dire. Then one day I got a phone call from my agent. He said that they were going to bring back a commercial that I had done ten years prior, which is unheard of. They never do that. They basically brought it out of the trash and put it back on the air, and they wound up sending me a big check. So, God did all sorts of things to sustain me during that time. And then, little-by-little, doors started opening. Now I have platforms for me to share my testimony. I do a lot of traveling and speaking. And I’ve written a book, Counterfeit Comforts, so I speak a lot on that topic while I’m on the road.

One of the counterfeit comforts that you talk about is busyness, whether that is in your home life or professional life.

There is a fine line, because I do believe that God is into excellence. So throwing yourself into your work is a wonderful thing, especially if you are striving to be excellent and your whole heart is involved. But I do think that, just like the Scripture talks about in the parable of the sower, the cares of the world are things that all of us have to deal with, because we’re all busy with things like making dinner, going to the grocery store, cleaning the house, going to work, and taking care of the kids. And in today’s world, you have the additional distractions that come with social media. We need hours every day just to scroll through our social media [laughs]. Seriously, I think it’s so easy to get caught up with life. All of these things can be distractions, so I think that it’s important to be aware, and to not let the cares of the world dictate and take all of our time. In that regard, busyness can for sure be a counterfeit.

In today’s world, social media and smartphones have become a huge distraction.

Social media can be a real, attention-stealing trap. The danger is that when you become consumed with social media, then you’re not really dealing with where you are internally. It’s so easy these days to become consumed with the superficial, and to be externally focused, especially with social media. You have to walk that line very carefully. Without realizing it, you can find yourself looking outward so much that you are rarely looking inward to find out where you really are in your walk with God.

Do you see a parallel between drugs and social media, in that both can become an addiction?

Very much so. So many people today are unable to be still and quiet. I was reading an article recently, and it was talking about how we just don’t allow ourselves to be bored anymore. We don’t know how to sit in a room and just wait for 10 minutes. We have to be looking at our phones. What a detriment that is for our creativity, and our mind, when we can’t be present with ourselves and actually have any kind of a reflective moment because of social media. We have that phone, and we have easy access to any and everything, which makes it so hard to put down. In many respects, it’s the ultimate counterfeit comfort.

In your ministry, you often speak about the concept of positioning.

Positioning is achieved through a combination of things. It comes through revelation and teaching, and also through prayer, and by shifting spiritual things for a person to get them into a place with God where they are not just learning about God, but they are also interacting with Him. I think that we get into this realm where we study God as if He were a subject in school instead of really engaging with Him in a personal way. Positioning is getting to a place where the Bible is alive for you, and where God is activated in your life. At that point God is not just an idea. We are suddenly in a position where what we read about in the Word is actually happening in our lives. That is accomplished through different variables – teaching, training, and equipping.

You also talk about becoming “unstuck.”

In Hosea 4:6, the scripture speaks of people who are destroyed for lack of knowledge. There are many wonderful people who love God but are not living anywhere close to the freedom that’s available to us in God. A lot of that comes from a lack of knowledge, as well as a lack of understanding certain spiritual principles in the Word. I’ve found that spiritual warfare is not taught very in-depth in today’s mainstream church, nor are the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit. To get someone unstuck, they have to understand the spirit realm. They have to understand that there are very real demonic forces at work, and that there is real power in the Holy Spirit. Those things shift people out of a church routine and into a more engaged place of love.

After a 13-year retirement from acting, you return to play the role of Cheryl, the head of a Planned Parenthood clinic, in the movie Unplanned.

This project came out of nowhere. I had no intentions of ever going back to acting. I did have people over the last few years say that they could sense that God wasn’t done with me in the entertainment industry. so I said, “We’ll have to see. He will have to bring it to me, because I’m definitely not going to pursue it.” And God did.

Movie Poster: Robia Scott stars in the 2019 film Unplanned

What moved you the most about this project?

Through a random series of events I wound up meeting Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, who wrote the screenplay for Unplanned, and who also wrote the film God’s Not Dead. I had a coffee with them, and they told me about Abby Johnson, a young gal who was recruited from her college campus by Planned Parenthood. She starts out as an intern before working her way up the ranks to become the clinic director, eventually overseeing close to 22,000 abortions. She then has a life-changing experience when she’s called in to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion. As Chuck and Cary told me more about the movie, I was instantly intrigued. I loved the idea of being able to reveal a whole other side of this industry, which is really not told through the media, and to let people see the truth up on the screen so that they can be more informed about their decision.

Your character is very much at odds with your stance on abortion.

There was some internal conflict for sure. They ended up sending me some material about my character, as well as a couple of scenes to read. I was initially hesitant about taking on the role because the scenes in the movie are so intense. My character is also very intense, and I thought, “Oh my gosh really, now that I’m a Christian and I am going back to acting, can’t I play the minister who is praying for people? I have to say these lines? Do I have to really play this woman [laughs]?” I just didn’t know if I was supposed to do that, but I very quickly got a sense that yes, this was the perfect time for this movie, and that God had prepared me to play this role. So, I auditioned for the first time in 15 years. I was rusty, but I somehow got the role.

Your character has been compared to Cruella de Vil, the film’s love-to-hate character.

I am the love-to-hate character [laughs]. What I love about the movie is that it really is not a cliché. They show many of the pro-choice women in the clinic as wonderful women who have a heart for people, and believe that they are doing a good service. They show some people on the pro-life side as radical and a little bit over the top, in addition to some of the pro-life people being wonderful and compassionate. So there’s really a genuine attempt to show all viewpoints. But yes, my character is the no-nonsense character, so I am what you would expect. I definitely am the villain in the movie.

Did you get a chance to meet the real Abby Johnson?

She and her husband were on the set with their kids for a couple of days, so I did get to meet her, and since the release I’ve been able to visit with her at several different events. She is a force of nature, and just an extraordinary person. She’s also incredible speaker. She’s so knowledgeable about the topic because she was on the inside. She really knows all of the ins-and-outs of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. It’s been incredible to be a part of telling her story.

What’s going on with your ministry today?

Right now I’m very busy traveling and speaking. I’m either speaking at pro-life events, or I’m speaking at churches. I enjoy sharing my message, which is all about emotional healing, freedom from counterfeits, operating in the supernatural, all of those kinds of things. Looking ahead, we’ll see what happens. I’m not sure what the future holds. I definitely go with the flow of the Holy Spirit, so my life is constantly changing direction and changing form. I’m not someone who has a five-year plan. I just try to stay connected to where the Spirit is leading me, which makes it exciting and different at the same time.

When she’s not ministering or acting, Robia Scott lives in Southern California with her two favorite people on earth: Her husband, James, and their daughter, Gemma.

Final Question – If you had one piece of advice to offer someone, what would that be? Each person really has a specific calling and contribution, a purpose which God puts in each one of us. My advice is that the more time you spend seeking God, the more He will reveal your calling. Whether that calling is to create music like Prince did, or to simply be a good parent, He will reveal your gift by knowing Him.

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Michael Lombardi – Sno Babies

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

Michael Lombardi is used to laying it all on the line. Whether charging into a burning building as firefighter Mike Silletti in the critically acclaimed FX series Rescue Me, or rocking out as the lead singer for Apache Stone, the ruggedly handsome multihyphenate has built his career by going full throttle. His latest project – as a producer and star of the heart-wrenching Sno Babies, which depicts the grim realities of addiction and its effect on a middle class town – brings into full repose this unmitigable fact: The opioid epidemic in the United States is no longer relegated to places like Atlanta’s Bluff neighborhood, notorious for its gangs and its open air heroin market, where dealers swarm unfamiliar cars looking for new customers. Opioids have rolled through Middle America, decimating entire towns and snuffing out some of our best and brightest, killer drugs omnipotent in their reach and godlike in their sway over the addicted.

Into this crisis steps Lombardi, the creative force behind the first feature from Better Noise Films, a new venture from entertainment mogul Allen Kovac. Together, Lombardi and Kovac – whose storied career includes managing such artists as Bee Gee’s, Luther Vandross, Blondie, Meatloaf, Mötley Crüe, and The Cranberries – have crafted a gritty, character-driven film that peers voyeuristically into the descent of Kristen, the quintessential girl next door whose addiction starts with one oxy pill.

“The film is about a beautiful young girl from a very well-to-do family, a high schooler with the brightest future in the world ahead of her,” Lombardi says. “She has the full support of her parents, who have hired an SAT tutor and who dream of their daughter going to a great school like Princeton or Harvard. All of that changes when she goes to party and she’s introduced to an opioid by an injured football player. From that moment forward, this bright, rising star who is so full of potential morphs into someone quite different. Sno Babies shows us how her life spirals out of control after that dark turn, so the film is really about her demise.”

Directed by talented filmmaker Bridget Smith, Sno Babies is fictional only in the sense that the characters are representative of what’s happening in towns across the country. Smith’s research, which includes time spent with several current and recovering addicts, gives Sno Babies serious street cred. Visiting the Philly neighborhood of Kensington, the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast, provided Smith with a glimpse into the abyss: Dealers out in the open, calling out brand names, some even handing out free samples; addicts injecting heroin needles into their arms, their necks, and the skin between their toes; zombies everywhere, some of them limp and nodding off, others laying on the ground looking dead.

Smith walks down this dark road with Kristen, brilliantly played by relative newcomer Katie Kelly. We can’t help but ache for her character, from an early scene when Kristen is violated at a party, right through to the closing credits. The critics are going to love Kelly’s performance. Audiences will be chillingly reminded how one bad decision can change everything.

Katie Kelly and Paola Andino – Photo Courtesy Rogers & Cowan PMK

“Bridget spent a lot of time with both young co-stars, Katie Kelly and Paola Andino, before shooting this film,” Lombardi says. “Bridget is a wonderful director, and she’s also naturally warm and supportive. I think these were critical elements when it came to making this film, because they were willing to take that risk with her. If you trust the director, then you are willing to go there. Bridget really nurtured these two young ladies, earned their trust, and got the best performances out of them as a result.”

None of this would have been possible without the one-two punch of Lombardi and Kovac. Sno Babies is a product of their shared vision, Lombardi smitten by Mike Walsh’s script and Kovac drawn in by the subject matter.

“Allen continues to put his time, energy, and money into fighting Substance Abuse Disorder, especially where artists and actors are concerned,” Lombardi says. “We’re losing talents like Prince, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Heath Ledger to this epidemic. Allen is doing everything he can to stem the tide.”

For his part, Lombardi continues to lay it on the line. He’s now the Vice President of Production for Better Noise Films, and will star in the company’s second major release, The Retaliators, scheduled to drop in 2021. The William Esper grad is a dad now, a tennis fanatic, and a hard rocker who still jams onstage with his band. His 93-episode run on Rescue Me continues to open doors to new opportunities. Sno Babies is just scratching the surface.

“This is a phenomenal film with a powerful message,” Lombardi says. “I’m very proud of the way it turned out, and I hope we’ve done our small part in this battle against the opioid crisis.”

Sno Babies will be released on Sept. 29.

What attracted you to the script?

In part because there’s a stereotype that still exists in people’s minds. There are a lot of people who still think that opioid and heroin addicts are only those who are homeless and living on the street. I was just as guilty of that same false judgment at times, because, as a young man, that was what I saw. Everything is different today. This epidemic isn’t confined to the inner city. It’s affecting every corner of the world in which we live. It has forced us to reconsider every assumption we’ve ever made about addiction. These are real lives being destroyed – human beings that have a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a home. The threat is real, it’s unprecedented, and it can literally affect anyone. What I loved when I read the script is this: Here’s a young girl who you would think this could never happen to, not in a million years. She has so much going for her; she’s smart, attractive, and popular…and yet one bad decision changes the trajectory of her life forever. It is quite a journey, and it gets dark at times, but I don’t think that there is any other way to tell the story of this horrible crisis.

Did you start out as a creative producer on Sno Babies?

I got into this film as an actor first, and then ended up as a producer. I took the role because I really enjoyed the script, and because it was being shot in Philadelphia. My character and my storyline weaves in and out of the two high school girls’ lives who are the center of this film. He certainly crosses roads throughout – in in a big way – as the film progresses.

How did you meet Allen Kovac?

Our kids go to school together in Connecticut. I’ve had several bands, and had a record deal back in the day with MySpace Records, so we had a natural connection because of music. Then, on the acting side, for seven seasons I was a series regular on a television show called Rescue Me. My band was actually written into that show, so there was that hook as well.

We met at a charity event that I did at our kids’ school. My band performed, and I hosted it like a late night show – I even had an opening monologue [laughs]. We had this shared a love of music, and he knew that I was a musician and an actor, so we hit it off immediately. At some point that evening he said, ‘Hey, maybe we can get involved in a film together some day.’ If you know Allen, when he says something he means it. He also talked about his other passion, which was bringing art education to the kids in our small town. He felt that the kids growing up there weren’t exposed to a ton of art, and thought that it might be a nice opportunity to start an internship program tailored to the arts. That way kids wouldn’t have to travel to New York City or other places for that kind of exposure. We just kept throwing ideas around like that, and I could tell that Allen had an open mind about a lot of things. I quickly recognized that he was the kind of guy that I could work with.

Allen Kovac – Courtesy of Eleven Seven Label Group

How did Allen become involved in Sno Babies?

Allen already had a long and successful career managing acts like the Bee Gees, Blondie, and Mötley Crüe. Then, in 2006, he started Better Noise Music, which became an immediate success. Mötley Crüe, Five Finger Death Punch, and The HU are part of Better Noise label today. His next move was to jump into film and original content by starting Better Noise Films, which is part of the Better Noise Entertainment shingle.

Well, I happened to be at dinner one night with Allen and [Mötley Crüe bassist] Nikki Sixx, and they were talking about the heroin epidemic and this opioid crisis. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m doing a film about this exact subject matter!’ So I told Allen about Sno Babies. We talked a little bit and then he said, ‘Look, come over to the house on Sunday and let’s talk some more about this project.’

I went over to his house, and we chatted for close to four hours in his den. The guy just works so hard – his little boy had to come in at one point and say, ‘Dad, let’s go. It’s Sunday.’ [Laughs.] He sat with me and I told him all about the film. He had so much interest in it – and so much passion for it – that I could tell that he was all in. That really jumpstarted where we are today. I got a sizzle reel together for him, and then, after several meetings and many months of consideration, Allen ended up selecting this small, independent film to be the first project in the Better Noise catalog. Not long after that I was asked to come onboard as the Vice President of Production. So that’s basically how we started Better Noise Films, and how Sno Babies became our venture’s first movie.

How hands-on was Allen?

Allen immediately rolled up his sleeves and immersed himself in the writing, the rewrites, the pick-up shots, the reshoots, and a lot of different things in order to help the story crystalize and deliver its message, which is deeply personal to both Allen and Nikki Sixx.

Allen Kovac has long believed that the industry needs to better support artists, helping them to maintain their health and take responsibility for their “bad deeds.” This film seems to fall in line with that philosophy.

Very much so, and that is such a great point. The mission of the film is to save lives. In fact, both Allen and Nikki Sixx are so passionate about this cause and hold it so close to their hearts that Better Noise Films will be donating its share of the profits to the Global Recovery Initiatives Foundation, where both men are new board members. All of the artists’ royalties from the soundtrack are also being donated to the fund, and Allen is going to match their contributions. The soundtrack includes two tracks from SIXX:A.M., and Top 10 hits from Country/Rock star Cory Marks (Outlaws & Outsiders) and from chart toppers Bad Wolves (the #1 hit Sober). There’s also new music from Eva Under Fire, From Ashes to New, and Escape The Fate.

The message wrapped inside of Sno Babies is indeed powerful stuff.

People can look at this film and say that it’s Hollywood, that it’s fiction, that it’s just a made up storyline with made up characters who aren’t real addicts. Sno Babies is a film based on facts. The writer, Michael Walsh, has really done his research on the subject matter. The thing is, this film is a representation of what is really going on in our country. The fabric of small towns is being torn apart by this crisis, and promising young lives are being destroyed every single day.

You don’t have to look very far to find someone who has been touched by the opioid epidemic.

There is a very small town in Connecticut, and every single person that I’ve spoken to in that town has been affected by this crisis in some way. Whether it’s an aunt, an uncle, a brother, a sister, a parent, or a friend…everyone you talk to has a story. I was having a conversation with the high school ice hockey coach in this small town, and he told me that one of his players died of a heroin overdose at home, in his own bedroom. This is happening in Middle Class America. This is happening to kids living in good homes with good, hardworking parents. That’s the other thing I wanted to express to you about this movie and why it appealed to me. The parents care. They care so much, but they are working all of the time in order to provide for their families. Because they’re not as connected, things like this slip right under their noses.

The film really makes that point so well. So many of these victims come from loving homes.

That is so very true. You can’t watch the movie and not get it. The parents are extremely busy with work. They are under financial stress, and they are trying their best to provide for their two daughters. The mother’s boss is putting pressure on her to meet quota, which causes stress on the marriage, which in turn is another reason the warning signs are missed.

Let’s talk about the cast, specifically the two leads.

Sno Babies is a film that’s completely character-driven. The lead of the film is a girl named Katie Kelly. I think she is going to break out from this film. She hasn’t done a ton before this, but her work in the film is really spectacular. You can’t take your eyes off of her, from a promising beginning through her descent into darkness. Her best friend in the film is Hannah, played by Paola Andino. Paola is very young, but she’s done a lot. She was on was on a Nickelodeon show, Every Witch Way, for a long time.

What impressed me the most about these two young ladies was their dedication to the script and their work ethic. The subject matter is very intense, and the script is dark. These two characters go on a journey together, and I have to say, I was so impressed with how Katie and Paola jumped off that cliff as actors. And then, when I saw the rough cuts, I was blown away. They are both fantastic. They carry the film. Without them, we wouldn’t be talking right now. They are so good, and they really tell the story beautifully.

Bridget Smith, Katie Kelly, and Paola Andino

Better Noise Films has several other projects in the works. Please tell me about The Retaliators.

I brought the script to Allen and he really liked it. It’s a great script – it’s unique in that it’s a psychological thriller with horror elements and heart. It touches upon morality. Religion. Justice. Like Sno Babies, this film is character-driven. Bridget is actually co-directing this film with Samuel Gonzalez, Jr., which makes for a great pairing: Bridget is such a wonderful storyteller, and she relates so well to the characters, and Samuel Gonzalez brings such great skill as a director of thrillers and horror. He is so stylized in visual – his shots are incredible. His work is David Fincher-esque. So, the two of them really complement each other. It’s not like one of them is stronger than the other. The combination of them both in this film is spectacular.

Where did you find the script for The Retaliators?

It goes back to when I had my record deal. I used to write with these two brothers, Darren and Jeff Allen Geare, and we became friends. I hadn’t spoken to them in a while, but I needed some help with a song that I’d written for that charity event, a song called Heaven and Hell Collide. So I called them up and we started talking about all of the scripts that they had been writing over the past several years, and one of them in particular caught my attention. I immediately asked them to send it to me, and that’s how I found The Retaliators.

What does the cast look like for this film?

It stars Marc Menchaca from Ozark and Stephen King’s The Outsider. We also have Joseph Gatt, who is a veteran actor who had a really nice role in the show Banshee Origins, as well as roles in Game of Thrones and Tim Burton’s Dumbo. So he’s been around, and he’s fantastic in it.

Here’s the wonderful thing: The musicians that we were able to use for the Sno Babies soundtrack, we were also able to put them into cameo roles in this film. I’m really proud to say that it is not gratuitous in any manner. If you were watching the movie, and if you didn’t know they were musicians, you would think that they were actors. Five Finger Death Punch plays a motorcycle gang, and you couldn’t cast better actors to play the part. They are fantastic in it. I could go on and on. The musicians also came ready to play. They were prepared, and they brought it big, every one of them. So they were phenomenal with their cameo roles, as well as supporting the soundtrack for the that movie.

Let’s talk about Michael Lombardi. You attended the prestigious William Esper Studio in New York. There have been some notable alumni go through that program, including Jeff Goldblum, Patricia Heaton, and Larry David.

Another great – and I love this guy – Sam Rockwell went to Esper. I love that school so much. It was such a wonderful foundation for me. Marc Menchaca, who is one of the leads in The Retaliators with me, is also an Esper grad. He and I have a lot of great scenes together in that film, which is another reason I can’t wait for it to come out. Esper was really special. It’s an actor’s school, in that it’s all about the work.

Michael Lombardi – Rescue Me – Photo Courtesy FX

You were a musician at the time, but you transitioned over to acting.

I was a young guy in New York City, playing in several bands and pursuing my career as a musician. Then, one summer, I took an acting class at William Esper. It was an intro class, and I really fell in love with acting. Not long after that I started to produce small plays. One of them was John Patrick Shanley’s Danny in the Deep Blue Sea. It’s an intense, two-person play. We did it in a small little theater, with barely 100 people in the audience. That play was as if you were looking through a window into someone’s life, but you shouldn’t be watching. Such a raw story.

I enrolled at William Esper not long after that and went there for two years. From there I landed my first professional acting gig, as a bartender on Saturday Night Live. Kate Hudson and Radiohead were the guests, so that was really cool. I got to watch Radiohead rehearse, which was an awesome experience because of my love for music.

And then you landed a pivotal role on the short-lived ABC crime comedy The Job.

I played ‘Manuel the Cabana Boy’ on an episode called The Vacation [laughs]. That happened because I met a guy named Denis Leary, and we became friends. One day, he was like, ‘Mikey, here, read this,’ and he threw me the script to a show called Rescue Me. I  went in and auditioned for Sony, Fox, and FX, and ended up getting the part.

You worked with Denis Leary on a mockumentary just before joining him on Rescue Me.

It was a Comedy Central show called Project Searchlight. This show was basically a spoof on Project Greenlight, which was created by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to give first-time filmmakers the chance to direct a feature film. I played a young guy who gets to make his own TV show, but everything falls apart. It was really funny. Every single thing that could go wrong goes wrong.

Michael Lombardi

Rescue Me is the show that really put you on the map.

Absolutely. I read for Rescue Me and got the part, and then I went on a seven year, 100-episode journey as a series regular. It was life-changing. Looking back, I realize now how much I learned from Denis. He was not only the star of Rescue Me, but he was also the producer and co-creator of the show. Being around him on that show for seven years, I learned so much that has come into play for me now at this point in my career. It helped prepare me for my role with Better Noise Films, and my new life as a producer. I think you’ll see the results with Sno Babies. It’s a great film with an important message.

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Vince Gill – Straight Shooter

Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Vince Gill wasn’t born with a guitar in his hands, but the country music legend damn sure didn’t waste much time getting acquainted with one. Gill, who’s racked up 21 Grammy Awards (and counting), more than any other male performer in the history of country music, began plucking around on an old parlor guitar at the age of two, an act as autonomic as breathing. His fascination with the instrument fueled childhood dreams of being part of a band, an important distinction because Gill has always been most comfortable fitting in – something he did recently when he joined the Eagles on tour, filling in for the late Glenn Frey. The Oklahoma native is just wired that way. He’s never been driven by fame or adulation, or by a hunger to see his name up in lights, happily working as a session musician long before breaking it big. In fact, Gill still finds great joy in playing on other artist’s records, something he has done more than 500 times over his career. His well-deserved celebrity – Gill has been named the Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year five times, and its Entertainer of the Year twice – may allow him the freedom to call his own shots, but it sure as hell hasn’t gone to his head.

“I’ve been in bands before. I’ve been a sideman,” Gill says. “I kind of know how to act in whatever role, and I think that goes back to the way we were raised. You’re not going to be a showoff. You’re not going to be an arrogant kid. For me, it has always been about the music.”

Like rings of a tree, the stages of Gill’s musical journey can be marked by a guitar of some sort. There’s the Gibson ES-335, which was given to him by his parents at age 10 as a Christmas gift. He bought his first acoustic, the Martin D-41, while attending Northwest Classen High School. The 1942 Martin D-28 with the signature herringbone pattern? He scored that prize in the mid-1970s, while he was on tour with Bluegrass Alliance. The man selling it wanted $2,500, a price way beyond Gill’s means at the time, so he negotiated a trade, giving the man his D-41 and writing a check for $1,600.

For Christmas 1967, Vince Gill’s parents gave him his first professional instrument, a Gibson ES-335 electric guitar. He still has it. (Courtesy of Vince Gill)

“I emptied out my bank account,” Gill says, “so I was dead broke, but I had that 1942 D-28.”

While the Vince Gill backstory is populated with myriad guitars and a deep love of bluegrass, country music, and rock & roll, it’s relatively tame when compared to the lives of other legends, guys like the dark-starred George Jones, who spent a good part of his career drinking himself into a straitjacket, or Johnny Cash, who for years battled drug addiction. Even Gill’s idol, Merle Haggard, spent time in San Quentin State Prison before turning his life around to sing and play a complex, loose-shackled, intensely durable brand of country music.

Gill has no such turbulence in his past. A plainspoken, no-nonsense, straight shooter, Vince Gill was raised by parents with old school sensibilities, the kind who expected their son to live according to the principles that come from generations of working the farm. The rules were simple: Toe the line, and all was right with the world. Do or say something that didn’t make sense, and prepare to suffer the wrath.

“My dad was pretty gruff, but he was fair,” Gill says. “There was no messing around much. If I wanted to keep playing my guitar, then I knew not to step out of line.”

His father, a lawyer and administrative law judge, was a lover of country music who played guitar and banjo with friends at parties and dances. He taught his son the rudimentary chords and encouraged his interest in music, much of which Gill picked up on his own. (The piano and violin lessons he suffered through in grade school, along with playing in the school orchestras, almost guaranteed that Gill would be self-taught when it came to the guitar.) By his teenage years, Gill had given guitar lessons a try, only to abandon them in favor of his other passion, golf. He was happier playing by ear.

Vince Gill began his career as a teenager, playing with bluegrass bands in Oklahoma City and the surrounding area. (Courtesy of Vince Gill)

“I took some guitar lessons in junior high school, but as I look back, I don’t think they were really informative,” Gill says. “It was something to do at the time. My teacher was a neat old guy, and I enjoyed him. But I just basically learned songs. That was something I was already doing on my own.”

By high school, Gill’s talents were becoming harder to ignore. He played with a series of local bluegrass bands, performing in Oklahoma City bars with the local favorite Mountain Smoke. One night, they opened for the country rock band Pure Prairie League, a group that would play a substantial role in Gill’s future. His parents greenlit these late night shows on the condition that he keep up his grades, and by graduation it was clear that he would pursue music full-time. He packed everything into a van and headed off to Louisville, Kentucky, to join the band Bluegrass Alliance. The year was 1975. Gill was barely eighteen. He toured with the group for several months before jumping to Ricky Skaggs’ Boone Creek Band, a brief stop that would yield a lifelong friendship (and frequent collaborating partner). A few months later, a 19-year-old Vince Gill moved to Los Angeles, where he started working as a session guitarist and harmony vocalist for other artists.

“Southern California was a great time,” he says. “I moved there to play bluegrass music and be in this great band [Sundance]. The music scene there was unbelievable.”

Sundance, a bluegrass group fronted by fiddler Byron Berline, ended up scoring a gig at the famed Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood. The star-studded audience included country music heavyweights Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell.

“It was surreal, seeing all of these people I’d idolized. I was awestruck for a minute, and then I introduced myself and made some friends. I guess you could call it networking – whatever it was, I jumped in with both feet.”

Like a Wharton Business School graduate, the opportunistic Gill was eager to climb the ladder, never really content, always on the lookout for a better caliber of musician. In 1979, only four years after leaving home, he was hired as lead vocalist for Pure Prairie League. His transition from acoustic bluegrass to electric country rock was seamless. He toured extensively with the band and recorded three albums. A single, Let Me Love You Tonight, featuring Gill on lead vocals and David Sanborn on saxophone, cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

While playing with the band, Gill met singer Janis Oliver, of the country music duo Sweethearts of the Rodeo. They married in 1980 and had a daughter two years later, a storybook beginning to a decade that saw him jump at the chance to join The Cherry Bombs, led by Rodney Crowell. Gill occupied the revolving guitar chair, filling in when Albert Lee was touring with Eric Clapton and Richard Bennett with Neil Diamond. It also connected him with keyboardist Tony Brown, who was just starting in A&R for RCA Records. Brown felt that Gill was not only a great guitar player but a great singer, and convinced him to make the move from Los Angeles to Nashville.

Singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell. Vince Gill played in Crowell’s band, The Cherry Bombs, in the 1980s

Gill signed a three-record deal with RCA, but his career there was marked with fits and starts: Two Top 10 singles and a 1984 Academy of Country Music Award as Top New Male Vocalist were the highlights, both swallowed whole by mediocre sales for albums that were unimaginatively produced.

To complicate matters, Sweethearts of the Rodeo was having substantial chart success, with six Top 10 country singles between 1986 and 1989. Gill forged ahead as a much-in-demand session guitarist and singer, most notably for Roseanne Cash, but a lot of country music fans knew him only as Janis Gill’s husband. Existing in the shadow of his famous wife, and with his own solo career stalled, finding an audience continued to be a struggle. If Vince Gill doubted himself through any of this, he never let it show.

“There was plenty of support from people in the industry that I respected,” he explains. “I was still making music. It didn’t matter if it was on one of Emmy’s [Emmylou Harris’] records, or Conway Twitty’s records, or one of my own. I was still a part of the process and doing something that I loved. I didn’t have to be the center of attention. It didn’t have to be about me. Besides, the people I respected the most all said the same thing: ‘You sing good, you play good, you write neat songs, you just haven’t had the right record yet.’”

Tony Brown helped find the right record.

Pissed that he couldn’t produce the acts that he’d signed to RCA, Brown moved on to become the president of MCA Nashville. He knew that Gill was greatly undervalued as an artist, in large part because RCA didn’t understand exactly what they had in the straight-shooting Oklahoman – an underrated songwriter with world class guitar skills and a voice tailor made for ballads. How could RCA hope to make Vince Gill a star if they couldn’t make the most of his strengths?

Gill, for his part, was facing another pivotal career choice – Dire Straits wanted him to join the band as a second guitarist. It was a tempting offer for someone still struggling to find his identity. Gill thought long and hard about making the jump, but ended up turning down Mark Knopfler’s offer, instead continuing to chase his country music dream. Into the void stepped Brown, convincing Gill to make the jump from RCA to MCA. Brown then went to work producing Gill’s first album for MCA, When I Call Your Name. The title song exploded, reaching Number 2 on the country charts and earning Gill his first Grammy, for 1990 Best Male Vocal Country Performance. The album was certified platinum for selling over a million copies and established Vince Gill as a bona fide country music star.

Vince Gill and Reba McEntire (Photo by KMazur/WireImage)

From there, Vince Gill simply dominated the 1990s. He was asked to host the 1992 Country Music Awards broadcast, bringing a warmth, sincerity, and humor that was an immediate hit with television audiences. He hosted the show for 12 consecutive seasons, a record for hosting a television awards show. Fourteen of his 21 Grammys came during the decade, with Brown producing virtually all of his work. In ’91 he was named the CMA Male Vocalist of the Year for the first time, an award he would go on to win in five consecutive years. Throw in Seven Grammys for Best Male Country Performance, two Grammys for Best Country Song, back-to-back CMA Song of the Year awards, and a CMA for Album of the Year, and that’s just scratching the surface of what Vince Gill accomplished during the 1990s. He was Michael Jordan with a pick, Tiger Woods with a guitar, Wayne Gretzky with a microphone.

Not bad for a guy content simply fitting in.

For Vince Gill, the 1990s weren’t  entirely paved with gold. His father passed away in 1997, and the following year, his marriage to Janis came to an end. His 1998 album, The Key, marked a return to a traditional country sound. It was the bestselling country album of the year, with the Grammy-winning hit, If You Have Forever in Mind, and a duet with Patty Loveless, My Kind of Woman, My Kind of Man. He stepped outside of the country music mainstream to sing a duet with Barbara Streisand. He was arguably as popular as ever, but there was a problem: Everyday Vince Gill wasn’t nearly as happy as Vince Gill the Entertainer appeared to be onstage.

Enter Amy Grant.

Vince Gill performs with his wife, gospel star Amy Grant, on NBC’s Today Show in 2003. (© Getty Images)

Gill’s 2000 marriage to the contemporary Christian/pop crossover artist was a game-changer, fulfilling him in ways that his superstar status never could. They had been in each other’s orbit since 1993, when they met to record a video for House of Love, their duet from and the title track of Grant’s 1994 record. It was, essentially, love at first sight. Fast forward to the end of the millennium. With Gill single and Grant divorced from Christian singer Gary Chapman, the two reconnected and began dating. They were married on March 10, 2000, on a rainy hillside outside Nashville, with Grant barefoot and bagpipes in the background – forming Nashville’s newest power couple. While it took time for their blended family to coalesce – Grant and Chapman had three children during their 15-year marriage – the birth of Gill and Grant’s daughter, Corrina, proved to be the missing ingredient.

“She’s the glue of this whole family,” Gill says. “She came along and bonded us all in a way that nothing else could.”

The rest of the 2000s have been a star-crossed blur. Seven albums have followed, along with seven more Grammys, induction in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His most recent album, Okie, is Vince Gill at his straight-shooting best, tackling such weighty issues as sexual abuse, teenage pregnancy, and race, and doing so with the Oklahoma sensibilities that make him who he is today.

No doubt his father is looking down proudly at the man Vince Gill has become.

Take me back to your Oklahoma roots.

I was born in Norman, Oklahoma, a small college town just south of Oklahoma City. It’s a great town. We moved up to Oklahoma City when I was four, so I really grew up there. Both of my parents were farm people in that they grew up on a farm and had a great sense of the earth. They knew about hard times, and they knew what it was like to work for everything that they had.

My father was a lawyer, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom for most of my life. My father was quite a character. I like to say that he was a lawyer by trade, but a redneck by birth. He’d go to work in a suit and tie, his hair slicked back and his sunglasses on, and then he’d come home, put on overalls, no shirt and a ball cap. He was a very imposing man – six foot three and over 300 pounds. It was like having John Wayne, Patton and Clint Eastwood all rolled up into one guy.

Vince Gill as a schoolboy in Oklahoma, City. (Courtesy of Vince Gill)

Were your parents musicians?

My mom played the harmonica a little bit. My dad played the banjo and the guitar. He and some friends had a little band that would occasionally play at outdoor events, which was just for fun. I always got to play along, and just being around musicians was a thrill.

What was your childhood like?

I was a Beaver Cleaver kid. I was pretty normal. I liked reading and still do, and I liked reading books about the Civil War. I also loved biographies of sports people that I admired, so if there was a book on Willie Mays or Hank Aaron, or whoever the great baseball player of that era was, I was going to read it. I also played all the sports. I was a decent golfer. I played on the high school golf team, and I played a lot through high school.

You knew very early on that you were born to play music. Were your parents supportive of your dream?

My folks never forced me to follow a blueprint, never said that I had to get an education before I jumped into music. They knew from the time I was seven years old what music did to me. I invested my whole life in it, and they didn’t throw up any roadblocks or try to talk me out of it.

Vince Gill and his father, Jay Stanley Gill, an administrative law judge and country music enthusiast who gave Vince his first guitar lessons. (Courtesy of Vince Gill)

When did you start playing guitar?

I can’t remember the exact age, but I’ve seen pictures of me when I was one or two, and I’ve got this small parlor guitar that I’m dragging around. It was broken and didn’t have all of its strings, but I beat around on that thing every waking moment. My father had two guitars of his own, and I played them as I got a little older. I learned the rudimentary chords from my dad. At one point he got me a tenor guitar, which only has the first four strings, and I tuned it like the first four strings of a regular guitar. I played at the show-and-tell during second and third grade.

When did you get your first “serious” guitar?

I was 10 years old. I can still remember finding that gift under the Christmas tree. My folks scrimped and saved, and they took that old tenor guitar of mine and traded it in on this new electric Gibson ES-335. It was the best Christmas gift ever, a great instrument – in fact, I still have that guitar today. It’s an instrument that I would have sought as a grown, matured player – there are a lot of great guitar players that play the 335 today. I might not have fully appreciated how great that guitar was at the time, but it was inspiring to have something that great to start learning on.

What kind of music did you grow up on?

I grew up with Western swing. Bob Wills was king, so the basis of their sound is in my blood. It was the music of dance halls all over Oklahoma and Texas, partly because it was such a perfect way for rural towns to get people together. There wasn’t much to do in those small towns, but people would come together for a night of swing. I was later able to join the Time Jumpers, which gave me an avenue to play that kind of music.

I loved listening to records and trying to emulate what I was hearing. I’m self-taught and all by ear, and just by hearing the music come through the speakers. I’d ask, “How do they do that?” and just sit and practice and mess around until I made the same sounds. I also had my favorite records. I loved Chet Atkins, and I loved the Beatles. Merle Haggard was my biggest inspiration. The way he led a band, the way he played, the way he sang, the way he wrote songs…what gave him the greatness that he had was that he went to prison and knew what it felt like to have his freedom taken away. He sang with an angst and a hope that was different than most people. Merle was the pinnacle on every level to me. Nobody equals Merle in my eyes.

LAS VEGAS – Musician Vince Gill performs onstage during the 42nd Annual Academy Of Country Music Awards held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 15, 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

When did you start playing in front of people?

My parents were not real strict. They let me go play in bars while I was in high school in different bands. They said, “You keep your grades up and don’t give us any reason to not let you.” That’s all I needed to hear. All through high school I was out playing gigs and traveling around with bands, sometimes out of state. Then somebody called me – I was 18 – and said, “Hey, do you want to come be in this band in Kentucky?” So I packed up everything and I moved there.

When was the first time you heard yourself on the radio?

The first time I ever heard myself on the radio was in Oklahoma City, on I-40. It was the first record I ever made, and I was 17 years old. I can’t even begin to tell you what that meant. It gave me this amazing sense of hope that I could make a career out of doing what I love.

You moved from Oklahoma City to Louisville right out of high school. That’s a big jump, especially at such a young age.

The opportunity was too good to pass up. There was a band called Bluegrass Alliance, which was one of the really well-known bands in bluegrass during the ‘70s. A lot of great musicians went through that band. My folks supported my decision even though I was young and didn’t know anything. I had all the stuff that I owned in my van – a guitar, a few t-shirts, my golf clubs, and whatever else I had – and I went off to Kentucky to play in this band. I found a little place to live. My rent was $15 a month. I stayed in an attic in this old house in Cherokee Park, with a house full of musicians that all loved bluegrass music. It was a great experience. It gave me a chance to travel around the United States a lot and play at different kinds of festivals. It was a really fun, innocent period in my life.

Vince Gill

Were  you prepared for life on  your own?

One of my favorite memories of those days was when I ran out of clean clothes. Obviously my mom wasn’t around, and she’d always washed my jeans and my t-shirts. I had this pile of dirty laundry, and I said, “Now what do I do?” So I went to a laundromat and I started watching people, and that’s how I figured out how to wash and dry my clothes.

I remember finishing my first load of laundry and trying to fold everything. A woman was there at the time and saw me struggling. She was laughing her head off. She said, “You don’t know how to fold your clothes, do you?” I said, “No, ma’am, I’ve never done my laundry before.” She showed me how to fold my shirts, and it’s something that I still do to this day.

Your next move was to Southern California. You were a 19-year-old-kid.

I moved to Los Angeles to play bluegrass music and be in this great band. It was a great time in Southern California. The music scene there was unbelievable. I got some session work playing and singing on other people’s records.

You weren’t there long before your talent was noticed by the likes of Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell.

The first real gig that I did with a band that I’d joined was a gig at the Troubadour in L.A. It’s one of the most iconic music clubs in history. We opened for Guy Clark, who was a great singer-songwriter from Texas. I couldn’t believe who was there that night – people like Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. I think Linda Ronstadt was also there that night. I couldn’t believe it. Here were all these people that I’d seen on the backs of records and studied my whole life, and suddenly I’m performing in the same world as them.

That performance led you to join Pure Prairie League.

I trusted my instincts – I made friends and networked. Back then it was about jumping in the water and see how deep it was. Joining Pure Prairie League was a big step because they had a major label record deal. That was an exciting period in my life. I was part of three records over three years with them. I remember they asked me if I had any songs, and I wound up getting five songs on the first album I did with them. That shocked me because I had only been writing for about a year. Overall, I wrote about half of the songs on the three albums I did with them.

What came after Pure Prairie League?

I started playing with Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash. Rosanne was having big hits, and I was her guitar player, which was great because her music featured the guitar a lot. It was flattering because she had worked with people like James Burton and Albert Lee, arguably two of the greatest guitar players that ever lived. James played with Elvis for years, so I was occupying a pretty heavy seat for a guitar player. One of the guys in the band was a guy named Tony Brown, who also used to play with Elvis. He was a piano player, and he was also an A&R guy – a talent scout – for RCA Records in Nashville. He said, “Man, you need to start making country records!” And so he played a major role in RCA signing me in 1983.

Let’s talk about this period in your life. While you achieved some success with singles like If It Weren’t for Him, Oklahoma Borderline, and Cinderella, stardom wasn’t immediate.

I made my first record and not much happened. The same thing with my second and third records. Then I moved over to MCA Records a few years later and got another opportunity. Looking back, I am really grateful for the years of struggle. It was a humbling experience. There were times when I felt like I was beating my head against the wall and saying, “Why isn’t this working?” Then at some point you realize that maybe there’s another way. Maybe it’s better if you go around the wall instead of trying to run through it. So I found a way to go around the wall.

Did the fear of failure ever enter your mind?

No, because I was young and I didn’t know any better. There’s some beauty in that. The best part was I didn’t need much back then. When you don’t have much, you don’t need much. That felt good to me. Progress was more important than success. It wasn’t about how much money I could make, it was about how much better I could be. Was I improving as a guitar player? Was I playing with better musicians? Every step felt like I was making progress, even though it might not have looked like it financially. I was satisfied with that.

Vince Gill

Why couldn’t you break through during those early days with RCA?

Who knows why. I can say that my name’s on those records, so it’s on me that they didn’t work and I’m okay with that. I left RCA on good terms. They believed in me as a singer and as a musician, but I knew that they didn’t believe in me as a songwriter. That was important to me, so I decided to move on.

What did people like Tony Brown and Emory Gordy teach you about songwriting?

Tony and Emory knew the value of a good song. That’s why they both wound up being great producers and having successful careers. They produced the majority of my records. Emory produced the first two, and Tony produced all the ones I made in the ‘90s. They believed in me as a songwriter, which was really a great gift.

If I learned anything, it’s that songwriting is about being a good communicator. Songwriters are like painters. They paint pictures with their words and in their songs. Hank Williams used to write songs that were simple, but there’s a real genius in not cluttering up a song. There’s an undeniable beauty in the simpleness of a Hank Williams song.

You were also a prolific session musician in Nashville during the 1980s.

I sang on so many records during that stretch. It’s how I made a living. It meant something that people thought enough of what I did as a supporting cast member to be a part of those records. And in all honesty, I would have been fine had that been my career, because I didn’t have to be at the center of it to have it matter. I just had to be a part of it. I still work on a ton of people’s records.

The ’80s may have been a struggle, but Gill scored 14 of his record 21 (and counting) Grammy Awards during the 1990s

What did you learn from being a session musician?

Being part of the supporting cast teaches you to know your place. You come in and you do the work that they want you to do, that you’re hired to do. You don’t get to just do what you want and play what you want to play. You’re a small part of something bigger. You have to make something work, you have to make something fit, you have to be a chameleon.

In 1990, you were adding background vocals to Dire Straits’ On Every Street album. What happened as a result of that?

I was invited by [lead singer and guitarist] Mark Knopfler to join Dire Straits. It was at a time when I was broke and struggling. I had had a record deal for several years, but couldn’t turn that into hit records, and couldn’t turn that into a big career, even though I was trying. This would have been a very lucrative move, and musically it would have been a great move, but I turned it down.

You bet on yourself.

I had just changed record companies and I had invested a lot of my life in country music. I didn’t want to bail on it and then wonder years later what might have been. But it was a tempting offer. It was as if the golden egg was being dangled in front of me. Looking back, it was the right decision. My next record completely turned my life around.

Singer Vince Gill in Press Room at Academy of Country Music Awards. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/DMI/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

That record was When I Call Your Name. Why do you think it was such a massive hit?

I think it’s as simple as having the right record at the right time, and having the right song at the right time. I moved from RCA to MCA, had seven years of struggles, and had a few records that landed on the charts, but I never had that out-of-the-box home run, that real career record. I’d made my first record for MCA, and we released two singles but not much happened, so the pattern wasn’t any different. Then here comes the right song at the right time, and that was When I Call Your Name. There was just something about it that struck a chord. After all of those years it was fun to go, “So that’s what having a hit record feels like.”

What are you most proud about with this song?

One thing is that it is a traditional country record. I really like a deep-rooted, hardcore, twangy kind of country music. The old school stuff, like those great old records of the ‘50s and ‘60s that I grew up on. To me, that’s country music. There’s a lonesome piano intro on that song, and as soon as it happens you know what record it is. The piano player was a guy named Barry Beckett. He came in late one night and played the intro to When I Call Your Name. It was perfect. That’s why I love making records, because you just never know when that special moment is going to come. In this case, the piano gave the song its definition and identity. You knew exactly what song it was as soon as it started.

Patty Loveless sang backing vocals on When I Call Your Name.

We had this great intro, we had everything else done, and we wanted to put harmony on it. Patty Loveless had become a dear friend. She has this beautiful, aching voice that is pure Kentucky. I had sung on her records for years and thought we sounded really good together, so I called and asked her if she’d come sing on one of mine. When she sang that first line of harmony I looked at Tony and he looked at me…we both got chills on our arms.

Vince Gill and Patty Loveless sang together on numerous recordings, beginning in the 1980s. Here they attend a charity gala in Los Angeles, 1993. (Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd/WireImage)

After years of struggle, Vince Gill is suddenly a star.

I’m grateful for the years of struggle. People would say, “I can’t understand why you’re not producing hit records. You sing beautifully, you play beautifully, you play with great musicians. You’re writing songs with great songwriters.” For whatever reason it hadn’t happened. Then that song came along and changed everything. All it takes is that door opening. Then you have the opportunity of longevity, and you have the opportunity of making a difference and being heard. I was beyond grateful because it changed a lot of things, but it never changed my focus on what I loved and what I wanted to do.

How did you handle the fame?

Fame was interesting for me in that your anonymity was gone. Be careful what you wish for – there’s an element of that that is great, and there’s an element of it that’s not so pleasant. In some respects, those years of struggle helped prepare me for the fame, because I watched people react to success – I felt that some reacted favorably and handled it well, and some reacted poorly and didn’t. I saw enough of it to go, “I know I don’t want to act like that.”

Country music legends Merle Haggard and Vince Gill share a moment. Gill considers the late singer his Number 1 music inspiration.

In the late ‘90s, the country music being played on the radio changed. Suddenly, artists like Shania Twain were playing what was referred to as “Country Pop.” You stayed true to your roots and released The Key, an album with a hardcore country sound.

My dad died in ‘97, and I went through a divorce and all that, so that period of time was very trying. Those things certainly influenced me, but what drew me to want to make a country record – a real, traditional country record – is I saw that type of music waning in terms of how much was being recorded and getting played on the radio. I missed that style of music. My father’s passing triggered memories of all of those records I’d heard as a little boy. Songs that my mom and dad would play in my house, artists like Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, and Webb Pierce. So the rebel in me wanted to make this record to prove a point, which was that radio had moved on from traditional country music. I was right – they didn’t play that record very much!

The public’s taste may have changed, but you still had street cred where it mattered most – your peers. Tell me about Eric Clapton.

I was fortunate, because having the hit records opened up a whole new world of collaboration. I loved the fact that the phone would ring and you would never know who would be on the other end. Eric Clapton called one time and I answered the phone. He goes, “Vince, it’s Eric Clapton. I’m having a guitar festival down in Dallas, and I’m only inviting players I admire. I’d like you to be there.” This was the 2004 timeframe when I’d sort of fallen out of favor with radio. I couldn’t say ‘yes’ fast enough.

Vince Gill and Eric Clapton – Nashville 2-27-10, photo by Reed Galin

That was Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival.

I can’t tell you what that experience did for me. At the time, I had been struggling with my place in the music world, but that one phone call reinvented me. It inspired me to turn my guitar up and let it fly, just to see what came out. I went into the studio with some really creative people, and with no deadlines to meet. Suddenly, all these songs started coming out of me – and they weren’t all country songs. I kept recording with no agenda, other than to see how these songs would turn out. We stayed in the studio for five or six weeks. By the time we came up for air I had recorded 31 songs.

Speaking of peers, the Eagles thought so highly of you that they asked you to join the band. How did that come about?

I’ve known those guys for quite a while – I think I first met them in 1980. After the band broke up, Glenn [Frey] and I became friends through our mutual manager, a man named Larry Fitzgerald, and his partner, Mark Hartley. They managed Glenn during his solo years. Glenn and I crossed paths quite often. He would come to some of my early gigs, and then he became obsessed with golf, like me. Sometimes I’d go along to a Lakers game with him. So we had some things in common.

There were other connections. I recorded I Can’t Tell You Why for an Eagles tribute album that they put together. Later, Joe [Walsh] and I became friends. I also worked with Don [Henley] on his Cass Country album, and we later performed a duet on an Elton John project. There were so many times our lives converged, so after a while I think everybody sort of said, “Well, this might be possible…”

Was it hard to put your solo career on hold?

Being in the Eagles was a different animal from my solo career, but it was special because I got to honor my pal Glenn. I think he’d be okay with me doing my best to sing and play his songs. As far as my solo career, it probably pales in comparison to my career as a sideman. The Eagles gig was like that. I just looked at it as helping friends out. I was thrilled that they wanted me to be a part of it.

Vince Gill and Don Henley perform together with the Eagles at the Classic West concert in L.A.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

As a guitarist, what was it like playing with Joe Walsh?

Joe plays with a great brevity and restraint; there’s always so much thought he puts into each note. That’s what I like about him – his patience. It’s not about whittling a bunch of notes and trying to impress you. It’s the way he’ll bend a note, the time and care he’ll put into it. I’m just in awe of him.

You’ve won 21 Grammy Awards and have been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, but you seem very down-to-earth.

I’ve watched plenty of people be the opposite of humble. My folks would have kicked my ass if I had acted any other way. That’s the way we were raised. You’re not going to be a showoff. You’re not going to be an arrogant kid. Being humble is natural to me. It’s not put on.

Do you enjoy the limelight that comes with winning all of those Grammys?

I don’t enjoy a lot of attention. I’m a little bit shy. I don’t have a problem putting a guitar on and playing and singing in front of 15,000 people, but in front of two or three I might be a little more uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I really like people. If somebody wants a picture, or somebody wants an autograph, that’s no big deal. That doesn’t bother me. It never has. I didn’t want to be a recluse, I didn’t want to run from anything, I didn’t want to all of a sudden be thinking I was something that I wasn’t.

Amy Grant, Vince Gill, Jenny Gill at the Vince Gill Hollywood Walk Of Fame Ceremony, Hollywood, CA 09-06-12

Your wife is a superstar in her own right.

I’m lucky in that I married a woman that is the same, and that’s been a great gift. She could care less how successful she’s been. I try to be that way, too. We’ve both done okay, but we don’t jump up and down.

You’ve described your 2019 album Okie as a songwriter’s record. What do you mean?

I didn’t go into this project thinking any of the songs were going to be hits. My intent was to never get in the way of the song. I don’t play any electric guitar on this record. I only played a couple of solos on the entire record. The rest of it is just kind of moody, ethereal, all of us playing together, and nobody trying to stand out above the rest. I think the point of it was, hopefully, that nothing ever got in the way of the song.

To Vince Gill, what does it mean to be an Okie?

Oklahomans are very salt-of-the-earth-type people. We have a common sense that I like. I think what I took most from Oklahoma was common sense. It’s that matter-of-fact, no blowing smoke way of seeing the world, talking and working.  I am proud of Oklahomans, and I’m very proud to be one. I try to bring that same focus to my songwriting, to say the most with the least words and to be genuine about it.

Okie has references to your wife, Amy Grant, on Honest Man and When My Amy Prays. Tell me about that.

It’s a running gag between us – you know you live in Nashville when you write your girl a love song and she tells you the third verse could use a little work [laughs]. It’s really great to have a friend that tells you what’s right and what’s not, and what’s good and what isn’t. It’s easy to be inspired by her because she’s so gracious with people. She’s the most welcoming person I’ve ever seen in my whole life. It’s easy to write songs about her.

Vince Gill and Amy Grant

What goes through your mind when you perform live?

I’ve done every conceivable kind of gig there is, so there’s nothing that’s going to surprise me anymore. I’ve been the opening act, I’ve been the middle act, I’ve been the headliner. I’ve been the act that nobody’s ever heard of. I got booked in a gig one time at a college during spring break, and nobody came. You have to have tolerance. If you have enough savvy, you know what kind of crowd you’re playing to.

You’re a longtime member of the Grand Ole Opry.

Until the 1950s, radio was the only way you ever heard country music, and it was the end-all to end-all if you were on the Grand Ole Opry. It’s not that way today, obviously, because of the changes in our country and culture and technology and all that. To me, the Grand Ole Opry has such a beautiful reverence that I’m out there playing probably a lot more than any of my contemporaries that are also members. I love the fact that they’re still playing bluegrass out there on the stage. It’s a place where you can hear all different kinds of music as far back as the 1920s, and you can hear it all in a single night.

Final Question: If you had one piece of life advice for others, what would that be?

That’s easy:  Be kind.

Michael D. McClellan and Vince Gill