Sometimes the old channels don't work. You send out demos, play showcases, bash your head against the wall, and get nothing for it but a migraine and a self-doubt hangover. What do you do when you've got the musical goods but no one's interested in accepting the delivery?

You keep your eyes open for the unexpected oppurtunity. And when it comes, you grab it without hesitation or apology.

So it was with Leah Andreone, a young singer now touring on the wings of her first album for RCA but not too long ago, a waitress with a tiny flat in L.A. and a tiny budget that relied heavily on the kindness of her customers. She had paid her musical dues in San Diego; she was all of eight years old when she began singing with her sister's band at "some bar or club down in Mission Beach." Later on she led her own group and did pretty well on her hometown circuit. And she had, in fact, gotten nibbles of interest from labels who couldn't help but notice her riveting, expressive voice and assertive presence -- interest enough for her to move up to L.A. and take her chances in the industry's back yard.

Once she settled in, though, things began falling apart. Her label contacts didn't pan out. She scrounged enough money to cut a demo, but its production quality was as iffy as her income, and the titles -- mainly covers -- seemed to underscore her own feelings that she hadn't yet developed an original voice.

Soon Andreone began scuffing for day jobs. Ironically, her first position was at her future label, RCA, in the accounting office. "I just wanted to get my tapes out," she explains, "so I looked for a job at a record company. Zoo, Arista, RCA: I asked every single one of them. 'Is there anything I can do here? Any kind of secretarial work? Accounting? Anything?' And when I finally did get a job, it was awful. I was there for two and a half months, and I did give out a couple of tapes to people at RCA and someone at Arista, but I don't remember who they were and nothing came of it."

After taking about as much of this as she could handle, Andreone quit and went to work at a diner on Sunset Boulevard, in the heart of the recording jungle, near the offices of BMG and A&M. The location had nothing to do with it: "I took that job because I needed to eat," she says. "I was trying to support myself in Hollywood, and it was hard."

But then one day she overheard a couple of guys at one of her tables talking about music. Acting on impulse, she got permission from her boss to dash home for a demo tape. Her customers were just leaving as she hurried back.

Skip Miller now works with Lionel Richie, but on that fateful morning he was head of black music at RCA's A&R department -- and Leah's customer. "I was with an attorney," he recalls, "and we were talking about the need for talent. RCA wasn't really hot at that time, other than with SWV's first album, which was just coming out. Then as we got up to leave, our waitress came over to me, looked me dead in my eyes, and said, 'Take a listen to this.' It was almost an order; it stopped me dead in my tracks. I felt that I had to listen to it immediately, which I don't usually do. But I went into my car and put on the tape."

Andreone remembers it this way: "He went out to the car. I watched him, and I actually got on the phone with my mother and said, 'Oh, my God! This guy's listening to my tape! He's got his head back and his eyes are closed!' Then he drove away, and I was so upset."

She needn't have been. "Leah's tape was incredible because the things she was attempting to do showed no fear," Miller says. "She had chosen Barbra Streisand songs, Aretha Franklin songs -- difficult things to sing. I went back to the diner the next morning, just so I could meet her again."

That night he caught her act for the first time. It was a far cry from the fist-clenching, Tori-inflected, Mariah-sprinkled melodramatics of Veiled; she was crooning standards at the Mondrian Lounge on Sunset. "Things you'd have a drink to," Miller laughs. "I've always thought that people who have an instrument like Leah's should write music for that instrument."

"It was kind of funny," Leah recalls. "Instead of saying, 'That was good,' or whatever someone would say, he asked me, 'So was that the best you could do?' I'm like, 'Uh, yeah, that was the best I could do.' And he said, 'I thought so too. How'd you like to sign a record deal?'"

Like Lana Turner at a Hollywood soda fountain, Leah Andreone was at the right place at the right time. But ultimately it was her initiative, and the instincts of a receptive label executive, that made it happen. Dave Novik, her current A&R staffer at RCA, explains, "It depends on the commitment to listen, because you never know where the next great artist is going to come from." Or, as Leah puts it, "If you're afraid of what might be, nothing will ever be."

Robert L. Doerschuk