It's All According To Alexz's Script (ITW)

Sujet: It's All According To Alexz's Script (ITW) Mer 8 Oct 2008 - 17:31

She played an instant star on TV, but singer-actor Alexz Johnson says she decided to take her time when it came to her own musical ambitions.

The 21-year-old Vancouver performer, whose TV series Instant Star airs the first episode of its fourth and final season tonight (7 p.m., CTV), has been singing since almost before she could talk, winning a best anthem-singer contest at 11 years old and going on to sing the anthem at Vancouver Canucks and Grizzlies games before she was a teenager.

Johnson stars as Jude, a singer who wins a reality-TV contest and gets a record contract. After four years of the fictional Jude's adventures in the record business, the real Alexz is ready to launch her own recording career.

"The show is done, I finished filming right before Christmas last year," says Johnson, who grew up in Coquitlam and Port Moody, the sixth sibling in a musical-artsy family of 10 brothers and sisters.

"I ended my contract 'cause I got an opportunity to do a record in the U.S. so I jumped on that boat, it's kind of been my dream to focus on the music. I thought four years [on the series] was good."

The fictional Jude is a starry-eyed romantic, but the real Alexz comes across as far more pragmatic. She got her first big acting break at age 13 as another singer in the Vancouver-filmed Disney TV series So Weird, and further honed her singing craft doing benefit concerts with producer-musician David Foster.

She first played Instant Star's Jude at age 16 (the character was supposed to be three years younger than Johnson), and talked the show's producers into letting her and her producer brother Brendan write some of the songs she sang on the show.

The show is a hit in Canada, Asia and Europe, but unlike other teen actor-singers who scored as fictional singers on TV -- the Lizzie McGuires and Hannah Montanas -- Johnson resisted offers to do concert tours in character for the show's tween-skewed fans.

"It's just not me," she says. "I love the character, but I'm speaking someone else's words, someone else's lines. I'm writing some music but I'm not writing the music for me, I'm writing for some 16-year-old pop star."

Fictional Jude is torn between two hunky guys, but Johnson's own personal life is currently focused on the little Chihuahua-cross puppy she brought home to her Yaletown condo.

Amid her work for the show, Johnson scored a recording deal for herself two years ago, which she then dropped after that U.S. label changed ownership. Last year she got a new deal with Sony Epic, and after finishing work on Instant Star's fourth season last December, she headed to L.A. to record 10 tracks for an album that's due for release next year.

"It takes time, you have to sculpt it, you have to want it for the right reasons," Johnson says, citing singer-writers Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox as inspirations. "If I wanted to be a pop star I would have done that a long time ago. I would have used the show to do it."

As to acting, she's had enough of that for now. "It kind of helped out with buying my studio equipment, being one of 10 kids. After I've done a couple of records, I'd love to be part of a really strong, great movie. But all these auditions, there's a lot of parts for teenaged girls who are over-sexualized."

But Johnson loses her pragmatic cool when she talks about the recording work that's kept her busy of late. She recorded her album in the basement studio of the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood, where everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Beach Boys have cut albums.

"Things are happening now in my life where I'm starting to go 'holy crap,'" she says.

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