Sabrina Bryan is on the telephone from a city where she and her fellow Cheetah Girls are appearing on tour. Trouble is, she’s not sure which city.
“I think we’re … somewhere,” the 22-year-old singer/actress says with a laugh. “I know we were in D.C. yesterday. We’re going to be in Rochester tomorrow. We’re 30-something shows into our tour now, you know? I’m just going where they point me.”
For the record, she’s in Syracuse, N.Y. But the Cheetah Girls’ rise has been so fast that you can understand why Bryan and her fellow Cheetahs, Adrienne Bailon and Kiely Williams, are a bit off-balance. (The group comes to Denver Jan. 17 for a performance at the newly christened Wells Fargo Theatre at the Colorado Convention Center.)
The three started off in a movie adaptation of author Deborah Gregory’s popular book series about a teen singing group. The first film, which aired in 2003 on the Disney Channel, was a hit and spawned a double-platinum soundtrack that yielded the hits “Cinderella” and “Cheetah Sisters,” as well as “The Cheetah Girls Karaoke” CD in 2004 and the spin-off album “A Cheetah-licious Christmas” (2005).
Things are still spot-on for the Cheetahs, thanks to “The Cheetah Girls 2” (2006) and its accompanying soundtrack, which debuted at No.5 on the Billboard album chart in August and has sold nearly 600,000 copies so far.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I expect anything like this,” says Bryan, a California native who also has a fitness-and-dance DVD, “Byou: The Hot New Dance Workout” (2005). “We were just doing it as a movie, you know? With Disney’s reputation of bringing up stars and stuff, you do hope for the best. If nothing else, it’s a good building block in your career when you’re a young actress.”
In fact, Bryan says, originally Disney didn’t even plan to release a soundtrack from the first Cheetah Girls movie.
“But, when they did, it was like a gold mine,” she says, “and we really found our fan base wanting more from the Cheetah Girls. That’s when we decided to make a real group out of it.”
The Cheetah Girls took shape in 2002, when Disney began casting for the movie. Disney veteran Raven-Symone, who has appeared in both movies but leaves the touring to the other three Cheetahs, was signed for the lead role. Bailon and Williams came from the hit-making R&B group 3LW (Three Little Women), which had released three albums and put two singles – “No More Baby (I’ma Do Right)” and “I Do (Wanna Get Close To You)” – on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
For her part, Bryan was a trained dancer who previously had acted in the television movie “Mrs. Santa Claus” (1996) and on the daytime drama “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
“Kids like it because they can relate to us,” Bryan says. “Any girl out there can look at the three of us and find something she can relate to. And the three of us are so different from each other: We were raised in different areas and have different views on things and totally different personalities. Even our taste in music is so different, and the kind of boys we like.
“There’s just so much stuff that sets us apart from each other, but makes it easy for all our fans to find things they can identify with.”
And speaking of boys …
“Oh yeah, it’s cool to see the ‘Cheetah Boys’ that come to our shows,” Bryan says. “We have our favorite posters, like ‘Will You Marry Me?’ It’s so cute.
“Really I think that it’s good music,” she adds, “so, whether they admit it or not, they like the music. And they like to party and rock out just as much as any of the girls.”
The Cheetahs are getting ready to give all their fans, girls and boys alike, more to like in the near future. The trio is already working on material for its next album, which is targeted for release in spring 2007.
“We really want to raise the bar,” Bryan says. “(‘The Cheetah Girls 2’) was a huge leap for us, and we feel like we can go even further. We want to create a hybrid of the fan base we have now and older fans. There’s no reason why we can’t put out really good tracks and songs that are cool, that an older audience would like, but still have the clean lyrics and clean topics to sing about.”
The trio has also been doing some of its own writing while on tour, she adds.
“We’re trying to get (instrumental) tracks from the record company to really start writing some stuff,” she says. “We want to have everything done by the time we get off this tour and go straight into the recording studio.”
The Cheetahs plan to work with producers and writers from their previous albums, Bryan says, but will also explore new collaborators such as Timbaland, who had hitmaking success this year with Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake.
“He’s just amazing at creating beats,” she says.
The trio is also hoping for a third “Cheetah Girls” film, but Bryan emphasizes that, while she, Bailon and Williams still wear their spots proudly, they hope that this “building block” will lead to other things in their individual careers.
“We’re riding the wave and using the doors opened through the Cheetah Girls to do other things,” the singer/actress says. “I have a production company, I’m doing some book-reading and looking at something I want to make a movie out of. There’s a couple of TV shows that I would love to get going.
“There’s a lot of things I’d like to do, that we’d all like to do,” Bryan concludes. “Being on the road and not actually being home and in my office makes it hard to get everything done, but I’m still very happy to be doing this.”