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Anybody remember Dia Frampton?
Frampton was the St. George singer-songwriter who made a medium-sized splash in a band with her sister, Meg & Dia — before becoming briefly famous as one of the finalists on the first season of "The Voice."
Whatever happened to her?
"I'm just a (almost) 29-year-old musician who writes songs during the day and works selling sausages and waiting tables at a food stall in Grand Central Market in Los Angeles," Frampton writes in a moving essay for the website Cuepoint, where she talks candidly (and with a few swear words) about the ups and downs of her musical life.
Frampton writes about starting out performing around southern Utah with her sister, Meg, touring as Meg & Dia, and then competing on "The Voice" — and how "I didn't know what 'The Voice' was until I was knee-deep in it."
Frampton talks candidly about how going solo after "The Voice" strained her relationship with Meg, and how she lost some of the spark that made music important to her —leaving her "a washed up, bitter ex-musician who used to have a future."
She describes going into a studio session with a producer handling a new artist, a just-signed 16-year-old.
"The producer introduced me to her since he'd been already working with her for a long while. 'This is Dia. She's here to help you write lyrics. She used to be an artist too so she knows what it's like,'" Frampton writes. "The 'used to be' made me cringe. It still does."
But Frampton persists. She has a new album, "Bruises," that she spent the last five years making. The theme, she says, "is the theme in my life: Keep going."
"In the end, I'm just a small town girl from Utah who loved to sing," Frampton writes. "And that girl is somewhere inside me still. I can feel her trying to get out and it breaks my heart."