You'll Never Guess What Pop Star Vitamin C Is Up to Now

If you were obsessed with '90s pop music, you'll remember singer Vitamin C for hits like "Smile," but you're going to have a hard time believing where she ended up.

Former pop singer Vitamin C has plenty to smile about these days. 

Known for such late 1990s hits as "Smile" and "Graduation," the 49-year-old showbiz stalwart, whose goes by her real name, Colleen Fitzpatrick, is now a music executive for Netflix. During an interview with Variety that published on Tuesday, Oct. 19, she explained how she went from performing on stage with brightly colored hair to working behind-the-scenes on music for streaming projects. 

After her performing career slowed down, Colleen started a production company called VCR in 2006, where she worked with such stars as Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. In 2012, Colleen became Nickelodeon's vice president of music before landing at Netflix in 2019. 

"If there's a particular show, and it's a musical, I work on casting the composer and the music supervisor and work with the internal creative teams and the external creative teams on original songs, and how the written word, if you will, ends up being executed on the music side," she shared about the Netflix gig. "If it's something that's more score-facing, I work internally with people to get the right composer on board and work with the creative to set up the scores and songs."

Colleen, who also had roles as an actress in such films as Liar Liar, said she became focused on writing music rather early on in her life, which helped lead her down the unlikely path that got her where she is today.

"Where my talent limitations could hold me back as an artist, they didn't necessarily hold me back if I were writing for other people," she said. "I could imagine a world far greater than my own, far different from my own. That led me into artist development." 

Colleen said she's grateful for the work she's done at Netflix, which has earned her a credit on the music-centric series Julie and the Phantoms, among other projects.

"There are a lot of different ways to look at music," she shared. "It's not just as simple as, 'Oh, there's a song in the show.' What does that song do? What do we want that song to represent? And how do you get there?"