The first thing Lauren Jelencovich does during our interview is sing.
“There you gooo!” She croons as I ineptly set up our Zoom recording. We both laugh and even her giggles perform a pleasing trill. Her voice is high and melodic. I take a moment to collect my inner child because she looks and sounds like a Disney princess with cascading brown hair and a jubilant grin.
Throughout the interview, Jelencovich breaks into song. She punctuates stories, shows me her vocal exercises and at one point sings a slew of curse words to express her nervousness before going onstage. Though briefly shattering the princess illusion, she radiates charisma. Her smile is unwavering, even as we discuss the difficulties of the past year. “My whole life is traveling and singing. None of that is happening.”
Jelencovich may be wrong about this though. She doesn’t just sing and travel, she adapts. This year may have taken away many artists’ careers, but Jelencovich has found ways to serenade her fans through the pandemic and ensure her work remains steady.
In February of 2020, Jelencovich began preparations for another global tour, starting in Latin America. “We were supposed to go to Colombia and Costa Rica and Mexico.” News began to filter in about the coronavirus pandemic as she flew to her first stop in Mexico City, throwing the tour into chaos. “The day we left, Colombia was canceled.”
As tour date cancellations rolled in, Jelencovich’s anxiety increased. Two hours before the concert in Mexico City, she found out that it would be their last. Everyone was to fly home in the morning. She recalls feeling that nobody in Mexico had reacted to the virus’ scope yet, but there was a sense of finality in the air.
At the end of the show, Jelencovich came back on stage as the entire crowd of over 20,000 performed Cielito Lindo, their phone lights raised, like fireflies at dusk. It ended up being one of the last arena concerts in the world before the global shutdown.
The tour cancellation didn’t hit Jelencovich until she returned home and saw the beginning of the devastation caused by Covid-19. She realized shortly after that her thoughts of returning on tour would not happen for a while. She knew she needed to become creative in expressing her art in order to continue in the music industry and earn a living.
Lauren Jelencovich, age 35, is a vocalist born in Texas, but raised in Florida. “Growing up I was singing a lot,” she tells me. While still in high school Jelencovich won Star Search and received the exclusive distinction of being presented with a giant check from Ed McMahon. That experience gave her the push she needed to definitively pursue a career in music and she recorded her first album shortly thereafter at age 16.
After graduation, Jelencovich moved to New York City to study classical vocals at the Manhattan School of Music. Though, at the time she felt like, “an odd duck,” she received many accolades during her time in college, including a scholarship from Andrea Bocelli’s National Italian American Foundation. An admirer of Bocelli, she yearned to intermingle the classical style she was learning in school with a more modern sensibility.
Years later, after various high-profile vocal performances and acting in Off-Broadway productions, Jelencovich received a call. It was Halloween weekend and she was working as a cocktail waitress in Manhattan. The job was grueling and she often worked until sunrise to support her musical career. Her phone rang during her shift on a Friday night and it was the team of famed Greek composer, Yanni. They requested, at Yanni’s behest, for her to listen to some tracks, record her vocals over them, and send back what she had recorded. She leaped at the opportunity but worried that her unconventional schedule would mar her chances of impressing the team. “You know, I’d come home at four o’clock in the morning and listen to the songs. I would wake up in the morning or try to get up as early as I could before I had to go back to work and listen to the songs,” she says.
Seven days later she sang for an audience of 13,000 people alongside Yanni at his concert in Puerto Rico. She hadn’t told anyone outside her family.
Since that moment ten years ago, Jelencovich has traveled with Yanni on tour across the globe. She’s visited remote corners of the world and performed in incredible venues, such as AlUla, Saudi Arabia, where she was the first woman in modern history to perform onstage without a headscarf.
Jelencovich remembers nerves overtaking her before stepping in front of the crowd, but beams as she talks about the empowerment felt on that stage. She describes the experience as, “one of the most memorable moments I’ve ever had in my life.” Women in the audience approached her after the show to tell her how much the performance meant to them and it moved her deeply, showing the depth of her relationship with her fans, long before the coronavirus demolished the state of her industry.
Jelencovich now uses her time to virtually engage with fans of her work, even going so far as to text some in her fan community. She puts her phone up to the camera during our interview to show me rows upon rows of texts from her fans. “They want a connection,” she explains when she sees my visible confusion. “And same thing with me!” She recently partnered with a tutoring agency to host singing lessons and has plans for other virtual live-stream performances, including Disney singalongs, of course. That along with a new Patreon account, virtual “tea parties” with fans and social media engagement may not provide the glamour or financial security of a global tour, but allows Jelencovich to pursue her art during Covid-19.
Jelencovich recently held an “Ask Me Anything” session on her Instagram account, and the questions from her 10,000 followers give great insight into their strong relationship with the singer. They ask questions like, “Would you ever go skydiving?”, “[Do] you prefer summer or winter?”, and, “What inspires you the most?” Jelencovich responds with enthusiasm, punctuated with exclamation points galore, and shares personal photographs along with her answers. She is letting people around the world into her life, her opinions, her experiences. Fans match her energy and more questions roll in. People are eager to engage with the artist for connection and community among precarious circumstances.
The fan community gave Jelencovich a new intimacy and insight into the world, one ironically not gained through her extensive travels. She feels as though she knows her audience better now than when she was performing regularly. “I’m getting carpal tunnel,” she jokes, “I want to text but there’s not enough hours in the day for me to keep in touch with these people!”
Fans reach out to her in their own times of uncertainty for a sense of comfort and Jelencovich does the same. She puts her hand on her heart in sympathy telling me how her fans are asking her when Covid will end, if at all. She doesn’t have an answer, but she does free space for her fans to talk to her about their experiences in the pandemic. She also uses fan recommendations for how to spend her time in quarantine, what to watch, what to listen to. So far she’s become a fan of Bollywood movies, curated by a fan with whom she texts.
Her touring days may be over for now but, unsurprisingly, Lauren Jelencovich has still found joy among uncertainty. “Everybody’s kind of going through the same thing right now. That connects us in some way,” she tells me, ever-optimistic.
Exactly what you’d expect from a Disney princess.