Belinda Bach debuted in Bloomington Indiana on June 16, 1979, a pretty pink baby with a shock of dark hair and eyes that would turn deep brown. "She was so beautiful." remembers mom Sharon. "It just took my breath away how beautiful she was." Born to an opera singer and a rock star, she inherited a flair for creativity, which displayed early. Shopping one day with her parents and baby brother, toddler Belinda bumped into a can display in the grocery store. The crash attracted a crowd of onlookers. "As the last cans rolled to a stop," remembers her mom Sharon, "Belinda looked around surveying the dismayed grown-ups and without missing a beat, threw her tiny little arms out to the side, flashed a big smile and exclaimed, 'TA-DA!'" She was a natural star.
As Belinda grew bigger and learned more words, the acting bug took bite. She first stepped onstage as the youngest snow child in a production of "Carousel." She was hooked.
Belinda's family settled in Coral Gables, a suburb southwest of Miami in her second half of first grade. There she stayed through most of high school, fine-tuning her triple-threat talents in acting, dancing and singing.
At 9, Belinda landed a spot at fine arts magnet school where she learned musical theater. By middle school she was dancing: Ballet, jazz, tap, modern - Belinda spent endless hours practicing her crafts. She dove earnestly into ambitious projects, challenging herself to surpass her personal artistic best. Her youthful achievements include acclaims many adults just wish for: she won talent contests, scholarships and awards. In the spring of eighth grade - her first semester at her home school - Belinda wrote and directed an original musical inspired by West Side Story. Called "Bayside Story," it was a tale of doomed romance set against the backdrop of Miami's gang wars. That same semester, Belinda won the school's "Best Theater Student of the Year" award.
Costume and character intrigued her so that she incorporated it into her everyday life. Over the years she learned makeup techniques - including special effects makeup - and enjoyed changing her own looks with face paint and fancy wear. Her hair - naturally a wavy brunette - often changed to intense hues. Sometimes she'd wear it long and black; in her final months she'd wear a straight, fiery auburn bob. Belinda found routine robotic. Yet she found ambivalence in change. "If change is the only thing that's constant," she wondered in writing, "Why do we never seem to change?" Those thoughts inspired the chorus for her signature song, "Leaves of December:"
"And I ask myself the question:
'Do we learn? Do we learn?'
And I know that time is blowing me away.
But life is just a story;
Pages turn. Pages turn.
And the paper falls to the ground like leaves of December."
Music in the Genes
She was wee when she wrote her first song, "Dancing to a Heartbeat," complete with verse and chorus. She played it with a few chords her mom showed her on a kid-sized guitar. In first grade, she won first place in a jingle-singing contest, garnering a TV and a VCR. In 1989, her class had a songwriting contest. She wrote the lyrics, then added a melody, sang it with a keyboard player and sent the tape to Billboard Song Contest. She won an original song honorable mention for the piece: "Neverending friendship." She was 10. Precocious, she was. Then again, she had music in her blood.
Mom Sharon sings with an "amazing instrument," Belinda said in a 1999 radio interview. Dad, the late Paul "Oz" Bach, co-founded the 1960s pop group Spanky and Our Gang. A bass player, composer and arranger, he worked with top stars, including Gordon Lightfoot and Linda Ronstadt. "He was kind of a hero to me, especially musically" Belinda told Mark Snyder in her interview with PMP Network. Belinda admired the era in which her father gained fame. The 1960s was a wonderful time for music, "a real renaissance," the music "timeless," she told Snyder. Modern music seldom impressed her. "It just comes and goes" she said. "And will continue to come and go for quite a while."