Mom’s advice propelled ‘Idol’ contestant Leer
Some people can point to a particular moment — or event — that signaled a dramatic course correction in their lives. For “American Idol” top 10 contestant Grace Leer, it was what her mother calls the “kitchen epiphany.”
Leer, a Danville native, was 24 at the time. She had graduated from UC Berkeley, where she was a standout soccer player. And now she was back living with her mom, Kristi, in San Ramon and earning money as a coach of two teams in the Mustang Soccer youth league while doing some babysitting on the side.
She also was the lead singer in a country band playing at wineries and bars around the Bay Area. Music long had been Leer's passion, but she didn't know if it made sense as a career choice.
Should she keep at it, or give up? Should she attempt to get into nursing school — her “backup plan” — or try something else?
Discouraged and confused, she was wracked with existential dread.
“I was crying in the kitchen with my mom,” recalls Leer, who moved into the “Idol” top 10 last weekend with a rousing cover of “Over the Rainbow.”
“What was I doing with my life? I really didn't know. I told her that I felt like I'm missing out on something.”
Frustrated by the scarcity of lucrative gigs in the
Bay Area, Leer often had talked of moving to Nashville, the nation's country music capital. But her mother knew that talking about it, and doing it, were very different things.
“There was always something holding her back,” says Kristi, a physician's assistant in general surgery for Kaiser in Walnut Creek. “She needed money to move out. She needed money to buy a car … I finally had to tell her: ‘What's stopping you? You're young. You've got no ties.' … I just think it was the fear of the unknown. The fear of leaving home.”
After hours of angsty discussion, Kristi issued an ultimatum: She told her daughter that she couldn't leave the kitchen until she booked a flight to Nashville, Tennessee — not to make a permanent move but simply to check it out and get the lay of the land.
“I said, ‘Really, what's the risk? Just go visit and see how you feel about it,' ” Kristi recalls. “‘If it sucks, we don't have to talk about it anymore. You can shut up and move on to something else.'”
And so Leer flew to Nashville and was captivated by what she saw: The musicians and the passion and the whole dreamy, intoxicating scene. Yes, she knew it would be supercompetitive, but she had to take her shot.
Six months later, in the spring of 2017, Leer packed up her Mazda and made the cross-country drive — with her mother — to Tennessee, staying in “dive motels” along the way. Soon afterward, she was joined there by Sonoma native Kyle Clouse, a songwriter and member of her band.
“She gave me the kick in the butt that I needed to get me out of my comfort zone,” Leer says of her mother. “I've been growing and learning ever since.”
And ABC's iconic singing competition has been a big part of that growth.
After surviving several cuts and a top 20 vote-off that pitted Leer against her friend and fellow Nashville resident Lauren Mascitti, she was back at her mother's place in San Ramon last week as “Idol” continued to stage stay-at-home performances brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The journey so far has been an “opportunity of a lifetime and a careerchanger,” says Leer, who points to the massive exposure the show has afforded her.
“I've never had a fan base like this,” she says.
On Sunday, another big elimination comes as the field will be sliced to seven contestants. If Leer advances, Mother's Day figures to feel all the more special for the woman who gave her talented daughter the push she needed.
“I've always known, that since she was a child, Grace was destined to sing,” her mother says. “I just didn't know how, or when.
“But now it's really happening.”