Portrait by Whitney Curtis
Michael Jackson died two days after Neal E. Boyd’s freshman album hit stores. To some, this fact might seem inconsequential. But a week after TMZ broke the story, as allegations of drug overuse are surfacing and “Billie Jean” loops endlessly on the radio waves, thoughts of the late King of Pop weigh heavy on the opera singer’s mind.
“You start watching celebrities differently,” says the 33-year-old winner of last season’s America’s Got Talent.
Reclined in a conference room at the Touhill Performing Arts Center, the lauded tenor adds, “I’m at the beginning of this thing. I’ve seen a little bit of it, the way you’re treated differently by people and friends. And the one thing you ask yourself is ‘Can that happen to me?’”
At the moment, of course, this seems a stretch.
When I first meet Boyd, he’s behind the wheel of a maroon Ford Five Hundred, the same car he owned prior to winning $1 million. (“If I want something, I can buy it—but I’m so used to growing up poor that I barely spend.”) Dressed in a tan-and-black Hawaiian shirt, slacks, and a beret, he has as his only entourage a back seat of dry-cleaned suits and a pile of papers riding shotgun.
“Neal E. Boyd,” he says, extending a hand out the window. That middle initial, the first letter of a name he never reveals, sounds a bit stilted in person. (He adopted it in seventh grade, when a teacher explained historic figures like JFK found it fashionable.)
Boyd is eminently likable, baby-faced with a slight Southern drawl and a constant grin. He’s shed 55 pounds since the show by strength training, but still weighs in somewhere in the vicinity of 350.
The prior Wednesday, Boyd performed with country singer Kenny Rogers at a charity concert in his hometown of Sikeston. Next week, he’ll appear on Live With Regis and Kelly. Then it’s a 10-city tour from Dallas to D.C. with Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts. “A lot of airplanes,” he says.
After throwing his car in park and picking out a suit, Boyd walks downstairs to change. Bulbs flash as he takes place center stage inside an empty auditorium. With little direction, he gazes angelically upward and then peers seriously into the camera lens.
“He’s a natural,” the photographer says.
“Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me…”
(“But my secret is hidden within me…”)
Boyd’s story sounds something like a modern-day Horatio Alger tale—except with cameos from Sharon Osbourne and Jerry Springer.
He was born November 18, 1975. His white single mother, Esther, raised him and his older brother, Michael. The three lived in a two-bedroom house, where some nights to save on the electric bill, the only light came from a TV. Boyd’s mother worked at an accounting firm and took on a second job at Wal-Mart to afford Christmas presents. Because the family didn’t own a car, the boys walked to school. “My mom would say, ‘The day you and your brother walk out of the house without a smile on your face, then people are gonna know how tough it is on you,’” Boyd recalls. “That’s probably how I learned to smile so well.”
While other family members were naturally athletic, sports weren’t in the cards for the overweight boy. “If I was playing baseball, I had to hit that ball pretty hard and pretty far just to get to first base,” he recalls. “‘Swing for the fences, Neal. Otherwise, you’re gonna be out.’”
Boyd found acceptance elsewhere. “When you’re big and black and you’re growing up in a town that’s somewhat racially divided, and you’re in the middle of it all—you’re half black, half white; I always call myself a ‘Halfrican-American’—you wanna be accepted and be popular.” He did so by pouring himself into student government, eventually becoming class president. His lifelong friend Shawn Taylor recalls, “Pretty much everyone in school knew him because he was always flamboyant and loved to be kind of a class clown.”
All along, of course, there was the music.
“I would always mimic what I heard on the radio, regardless of what song or artist or style it was,” he says. As a kid, Boyd sang along to Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson on his mom’s Motown 20/20 album. There were also the less predictable influences: Peter Cetera and Air Supply, Journey and Bon Jovi—“these singers who could hit really high and beautiful notes.”
Then, on a day when Boyd was 13, everything changed. “I was on one side of the room writing poetry, because I was in love or something—that never changes,” Boyd recalls. His brother came in, explaining he had extra homework after getting in trouble for mocking classical music, and he popped in a Three Trenors CD. The words began to resonate through the small bedroom: “Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!...”
“I can’t understand a word Pavarotti’s singing,” Boyd recalls. “All I do know is that I’m welling up; I’m having a physical reaction to this song.”
He was hooked. There was just one problem: “You have nowhere to go. Sikeston’s two hours from a theater in any direction, so if you wanna hear it, you’re gonna have to re-create it,” he recalls. “I got very, very good at it.”
So good, in fact, that it stopped choir teacher Willie Grega in his tracks when he overheard an eighth-grade Boyd imitating Pavarotti in the hall one day. “It was unusual for a junior-high kid to be making those sounds,” Grega recalls. After some persuasion, he convinced Boyd to join choir.
During high school, Boyd sang at state competitions, festivals, community concerts. He made all-state choir and earned a music scholarship to Southeast Missouri State University. “I don’t wanna say that some of the other singers tended to not like him as much,” says Taylor. “But it’s kinda hard to shine when you’re standing next to the sun.”
Boyd later told the judges on America’s Got Talent, “This is the one thing I’ve always done well. I’ve always been the big fat kid, but when I open my mouth and I sing to people, just something changes. I’m accepted.”
Beyond the voice, he displayed a certain charisma onstage. “This has always been my thing, being a romantic,” he says. “You’d find that one beautiful woman in the audience, or anybody you’re crushing over at the time, and sing right to her. The intention was to make that girl cry or shake or fall in love with me. What you started to realize was that everybody was so engaged, everybody fell in love with you.”
At the time, Grega saw Boyd’s emotional performances, singing as if on the verge of tears, as showboating. “I pulled him aside after a contest one time and said, ‘Stop it. There’s no need to do all that stuff—you just get up there and sing.’
“Well, I didn’t know that would go on to pay off for him to win a million dollars.”
“Il nome suo nessun saprà…”
(“No one will know his name…”)
“A lot of people say you’re an overnight success,” Boyd says. “But it took 20 years to become an overnight success.”
When he first stepped onto national television, most viewers were skeptical. Those who’d heard him in college, however, were familiar with the voice.
From the outset of college, Boyd continued to win singing contests. Then, to his chagrin, he was introduced to the operatic number “Ingemisco” from Verdi’s Requiem. “That was the first piece of music that I couldn’t get under my belt right away,” Boyd recalls. After battling for months with the passaggio—when a singer switches from one range of pitches to another—he left music in spring 1998 to pursue his political aspirations.
He landed an internship with Rep. Paula Carter in Jefferson City and later worked for then–U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft. Over time, he performed for each of the state’s last seven governors—from Gov. Kit Bond to Gov. Jay Nixon—and earned the nickname “The Voice of Missouri,” a title he’s proud to possess. “My mom and I always joke that I’ve been running for governor since I was 5,” Boyd says. All along, though, Boyd longed for his first love—music.
He eventually enrolled at the University of Missouri–Columbia. With the encouragement of associate professor Ann Harrell, he signed up for the Music Teachers National Association’s Young Artist Voice Competition—the country’s most prestigious college music contest. He faced overwhelming odds: No one from Missouri had ever won, and the contest included 12 songs, far more than he’d ever sung in any competition, performed at increasing levels of competition over three months. Slowly, he assembled a 40-minute set list. Its highlight? “Ingemisco.”
The day before performing at the state competition, Boyd still hadn’t conquered the song. Standing in front of the judges, though, something changed. “I noticed that because I’m so competitive, because I enjoy it so much, it feeds my performances,” he says.
Boyd won, going on to take first at the national contest in June 2000. “That really prepared me, I think, for what came to be America’s Got Talent,” he says.
Success seemed a sure thing. He’d won nationals. Newspaper and TV reporters followed him around campus. In March 2001, he performed his senior recital at Carnegie Hall. “It was one of those things where there’s no more pretending that you’re not as good as everybody thinks you are,” he says. His biggest concern, apart from the preshow butterflies? Paying for a tux while working part-time at Domino’s.
Instead of chasing his dreams in the big city after graduation, though, Boyd returned to his hometown and taught music appreciation. Nearly a decade later, former students tell him they aspire to teach music. “You go, ‘I really did change some lives,’” he says. “But at the time, you’re going, ‘I don’t know if I want to teach anymore.’”
When the school year ended, he enrolled in a grad program at Boston’s prestigious New England Conservatory of Music. This was supposed to be his launching pad, his chance to raise his game an octave.
Instead, disaster struck.
In an April 1966 profile for Esquire titled “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” journalist Gay Talese recorded the devastating consequences when the Chairman of the Board caught an ailment considered by most to be minor. Talese wrote: “Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence…”
It was in Boston, while struggling to pay bills, where Boyd received a far worse prognosis: partial paralysis of a vocal cord and a potential polyp. If Sinatra’s cold was like Picasso without paint, then this rivaled Barbaro with a shattered leg, Joe Theismann with a compound fracture—it threatened to end a promising career. “The doctor said, ‘Take six months,’” says Boyd, “and six months became six years.”
He moved to St. Louis. Found an apartment in Brentwood Forest. Took a sales job with Enterprise. Performed stand-up on open-mic nights at The Funny Bone, sometimes telling self-deprecating jokes about his weight (“Army of one? I’d be an army of three.”). At one point, he told his mother he thought he’d peaked at 25.
“It really hurt his spirit,” recalls Taylor.
Slowly, the voice began to improve. In May 2003, he performed as the lead in Mizzou’s opera Corps of Discovery, where he met the woman who’d become his girlfriend of five years, Heather Tomko. He followed it up by singing with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem and at Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
During summer 2004, he auditioned for American Idol. He didn't make it past the first round. (“The big joke with the producers is ‘Would you have rather lost to Carrie Underwood or won America’s Got Talent?’”)
All along, Boyd was shifting toward a career in business. He took a job at Aflac, quickly climbing the ranks and settling into a routine of seeing his girlfriend on weekends. (While much was later made of the “singing insurance salesman,” it’s interesting to note that Pavarotti at one time also sold insurance.)
“It’s kind of like Good Will Hunting,” explains Boyd. “All you wanted to do was hang out with your friends and have that same routine, and even if you did have something extraordinary about yourself, you didn’t want to admit it because then you’d have to live up to it.
“It was almost like you were sitting on a lottery ticket that you were just too afraid to scratch off.”
“All’alba vincerò!”
(“At daybreak, I shall win!”)
America’s Got Talent happened on a whim.
After watching for years as Boyd put all his energy into sales, Tomko convinced him to try out for the show’s third season. He was reluctant at first. “I was used up, in my mind,” he admits. “I had failed, and this was you going to get kicked one more time just to convince yourself that it’s truly gone.”
Without telling his mother or best friend, he drove to Chicago last spring and stood in line with 20,000 others. He sang Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” then followed it up with the bridge to Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli’s “The Prayer.” The result? “I’m on a plane to L.A. four days later to show the judges that I’ve got talent,” he recalls.
In retrospect, of course, Boyd’s win seemed inevitable. In 2007, just months before Pavarotti died, a one-time cellphone salesman named Paul Potts was crowned the winner of Britain’s Got Talent. While Boyd says Potts inspired him, he still saw his chances as slim: “It didn’t surprise me that an opera singer could win in England; there’s not an aversion to opera in that area for mainstream audiences. To me, it was a challenge to think that it could be possible here.”
That first show was unlike anything Boyd had ever experienced. He hadn’t performed a solo in six years. People were handling him backstage. Jerry Springer was whispering in his ear, reminding him of the moment’s significance. (Fittingly, before the performance, he listened to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”) The tap-dancing granny had just been buzzed off the stage and was in tears backstage. The tempo for Boyd’s song, “Nessun Dorma”—the song that introduced him to opera and helped catapult Potts to victory—seemed too slow. Simon Cowell stood in the wings. And then Boyd was onstage with a live audience and cameras following his every move.
He peered beyond the stage lights. The show’s three judges stared back. Judge Piers Morgan, a Brit with a no-nonsense temperament similar to Cowell’s, began to lob questions about his journey to this point: his hometown, his motivation for trying out, his mother. As he answered, Boyd began to choke up. The questions made him consider the weight of the situation, as when a golfer studies a must-make putt for too long. Suddenly, Morgan said, “When you’re ready, Neal.”
“There was this horrible pause as I almost talked myself out of singing the song,” he recalls. “I remember taking a deep breath, noddin’ at the guy, and the music started.”
“Nessun dorma…,” he began to sing, timid at first. “Nessun dorma.” A grin crossed his face as he heard brief applause. “Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle!...” He raised his voice and threw out his arms. Suddenly, the crowd was on its feet. And then the aria’s final word—“Vincero!” (“I shall win!”) “I don’t think I’ve ever hit a note so hard in my life as that last B,” he says. The camera cut to Morgan, who sat back and said simply, “Wow.”
When Boyd finished, he held a shaking hand to his face. The crowd was standing to applaud. “Right now, you are the frontrunner,” declared David Hasselhoff. The other judges weighed in, and Morgan announced, “Neal, you are going to Las Vegas!”
The performance later was featured on endless TV promos. “If you want anonymity,” Boyd says, “it went out the window the first time those commercials aired.”
Throughout the season, the judges gushed over Boyd’s performances: ballads that merged opera and pop—what Boyd refers to as “popera.” “I’ve had too many contemporary, pop, and country influences to stick to opera,” he says.
Then there was the week the show’s stylist bought him a new suit and black beret. Suddenly, Sharon Osbourne was calling him handsome; dozens of adoring fans followed suit on Facebook. “I still get messages today: ‘I don’t care if he’s a big guy—he’s hot!’” Boyd says. “All of a sudden, you started to become desirable on a whole new level. There was no doubt in my mind that I’d always have a girlfriend as long as I could sing. But to sing to millions of girls, forget about it.”
The weeks passed, and the competition shrank. Finally, last October, Springer declared the results: “America has voted. The winner of the $1 million, the headline show in Las Vegas, and the title ‘Best New Act in America’ is…Neal E. Boyd!”
Confetti rained down. Sparks flew. His friend Taylor, who was in the audience, nearly blacked out. His mother, who was still in Sikeston because Boyd said, “It might get crazy,” embraced her other son, Michael. Onstage, Boyd burst into tears. An instant later, his hero Plácido Domingo congratulated him via video. With disbelief, Boyd asked, “What has happened to my life?”
“Guardi le stelle che tremano d’amore…”
(“Watch the stars that tremble with love…”)
“A giant demolition ball.” That’s how Britain’s Got Talent contestant Susan Boyle later described the feeling of instant celebrity.
For Boyd, that moment came a month after his win, before singing the national anthem at a Rams game. At the time, he was still living in Brentwood Forest in relative anonymity. It was a Sunday morning when a stretch limo pulled into the parking lot there, temporarily blocking traffic. A small crowd gathered to see who would get inside. After a moment, Boyd appeared. “The second I come down the stairs, it’s over,” he recalls. “You’ve got dozens of people staring, and you’re just going, ‘What has happened to my life?’ This has happened.”
It became the same anywhere he went. A trip from his new home in Town & Country to Wal-Mart turned into a start-and-stop journey from the car to the cash register, with passersby interrupting him every few feet for an autograph or picture. And it wasn’t just the adults. “Kids are apparently in love with me,” he says, “and I think it’s because I look like a big Winnie the Pooh.” While he was eating breakfast at Uncle Bill’s, for instance, a little girl with a pen and napkin once approached him, he recalls. “I’m like, ‘How is that kid my fan?’” he says. “I was waiting for her to say, ‘Thank you, Ruben [Studdard, winner of American Idol’s second season].’”
He appeared at stadiums and on morning shows, rubbed elbows with Tony Bennett and Jamie Foxx in New York, performed in Vegas. He recorded his freshman album with producer Simon Franglen (of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” fame). He traveled between Memphis (where he’s taking voice lessons), Nashville (home to many friends), and St. Louis. Thousands of letters poured in from fans each week. Lambert’s Café—Sikeston’s original claim to fame—hung a portrait of Boyd on the wall.
He handled notoriety with a certain playfulness. “A lot of the people I work with take me way more seriously than I take myself,” he admits. “I have fun with this, because to me I’m a kid who got what he wanted for Christmas, and I’m determined to play with it until it breaks or gets worn out.”
Still, fame brought its downside: the endless plane rides and hotels, the pressure and public scrutiny, the requests from newfound friends. “We keep stock of who was there before,” says Boyd. “Even some of the closest people to me couldn’t handle it. There were just too many people and too much pressure, and all of the questions to them were about me. After a while, they start to feel like going from whoever they are to Neal’s buddy.”
During that time, he went through several breakups. “It goes to show you, that’s when you really know your life has changed, because there’s so much pressure on relationships at that point,” he says. “To be honest with you, when some people think you’re gonna leave them behind, it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy.”
Is it that celebrity changed Boyd?
“He’s the same person I’ve always known,” says Taylor, who still sees him on a regular basis. “I think a lot of it is just some people want more attention out of him now that he’s who he is, and when he can’t give it, they get a little frustrated.”
Nonetheless, Boyd acknowledges fame’s temptations. “It’s so easy to get sucked into that world because everybody around you is telling you that you’re great,” he says. “At the end of the night, you call your friends and family to remind you that you’re the same person as when you left.”
Of course, he recognizes the inevitable truth: “After a while, the moniker ‘America’s Got Talent winner’ fades away.”
It’s one reason his first album is so significant to him. “People think, ‘You won a million dollars, and life’s hunky-dory,’” he says. “But I don’t know how I would’ve felt if that recording contract never came to fruition.” The CD, My American Dream, is an 11-track compilation—ranging from “Nessun Dorma” to “Amazing Grace.” (As of early August, it was No. 4 on Billboard’s Classical Albums chart.) Each of the songs holds deep personal meaning to Boyd, he says. “If he can’t connect to the song, if he can’t relate to the song, then he won’t sing it,” says his mother.
The same goes for live performances. “In my heart, I sing from a much different place than many singers do,” says Boyd. “You wanna make sure that person in the very back walks out and goes, ‘What just hit me?’”
“…Lo dirò quando la luce splenderà!”
(“…I will say it when the light shines!”)
Enough talk. To see for myself, I drive five hours north to see Boyd perform on a Monday night in July. He’s on the last leg of his tour with Potts, and the duo is performing at the 4,400-seat Rosemont Theatre near Chicago. As the crowd waits, I overhear a man say, “Think what he went through to get here, what an inspiration he is.”
The lights fade, and the curtains open to reveal an orchestra and a black piano. After a stirring musical prelude, Potts walks onstage. As he sings, he looks into the distance, his expression rarely changing. Following several Italian arias, he introduces “your reigning champion of America’s Got Talent: Neal E. Boyd!”
Boyd walks out with an ear-to-ear grin. He wears a suit with pinstripes, a crisp white shirt, a red tie, and, of course, a black beret. He opens with “Mama,” then follows it with “Anthem”—“a story about a man who yearns for home no matter how far he travels.” The performance is far more theatrical than Potts’, with Boyd gazing dramatically toward the balcony and acting as if he might burst into tears at any moment. Finally, after singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story, he closes with an operatic version of a song that he fought to get on the album: “God Bless the USA.”
Having grown up near Branson, where a mix of religion and patriotism is near-mandatory, I’ve heard the song enough times that I assumed I was turned off for good. Lee Greenwood’s ballad, typically preceded by a heartfelt dedication to veterans, is tailored to provoke a standing ovation. In this case, however, the audience remains seated as Boyd sings, “And I gladly stand up…”—but for the opposite reason: The performance is stunning. His booming voice is so overpowering that I react as Morgan did, rocking back in my seat as Boyd hits a high note. He finishes, taking a bow as the audience stands to give a rousing ovation.
When Potts returns, the air seems to have left the room.
“Tramontate, stelle!”
(“Set, Stars!”)
Let’s rewind, though. Three weeks before the performance, Boyd is explaining what it’s like to stand at the cusp of stardom—or at least his version of it.
“I’m gonna be the best at what I do,” he says, adding that he feels as if he's creating a new niche. (In reality, this point stretches beyond the music’s genre: As a Billboard.com album review states, “Like many winners of televised talent competitions, Neal E. Boyd fits into no particular marketing schematic of the 2000s.” Indeed, no AGT winner has defied this dilemma yet by achieving the same level of mainstream success as, say, Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood.) Boyd is hinting at a second album, a world tour, how his voice as a tenor is supposed to improve with age. “Nothing’s been predictable to this point,” he admits.
Again, he returns to Jackson.
“When I was born, they would’ve thought that I was gonna sing R&B or, like, Michael Jackson, and that slowly faded away. No one would’ve expected that me, of all people, would discover opera while growing up in Sikeston, in the middle of the heartland.”
Yet knowing how it all turned out, the opposite seems true. His story has almost begun to seem scripted—cliché even. I tell him so.
After a moment of thought, he grins and says, “There’s a reason it’s called ‘My American Dream.’”
Jarrett Medlin is SLM’s senior editor.
