In a few weeks, this Mooresville woman will climb on stage with Nickelback. But then what?

The dreamer in Kayla Vega would love to be a superstar on the level of Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.

If you reel her in a bit, though, the aspiring singer-songwriter from Mooresville says she certainly would settle for a modest career in the lo-fi niche genre of “bedroom pop.”

But there’s also a Kayla Vega who is fully grounded in reality. One who is 28 years old, one who has spent more than a decade desperately trying to get her music out there, one who is no longer positive she’ll ever get to a place where she’s making a living solely as an artist.

And that Kayla Vega knows there’s no harm at this point in throwing a couple of unorthodox ploys at the wall to see what might stick.

With nothing to lose, this past spring, Vega decided to go all-in on two different promotions run by the same Charlotte radio station — and won both. First, she did well enough in a Mix 107.9 singing competition to earn the chance to help open a show for a former “American Idol” winner in June. Then just a week and a half later, she won an unrelated call-in contest that awarded her with an even wilder prize: On Sept. 12 at PNC Music Pavilion, she’ll get an opportunity to sing one song on stage with the rock band Nickelback during its Charlotte tour stop.

She’s been told by Mix 107.9 that her big moment will come during the 2006 hit “Rockstar,” a tongue-in-cheek rock anthem with an iconic hook that starts like this: “’Cause we all just-a wanna be big rockstars...”

Other than that...

“They have told me absolutely nothing,” Vega says of what her collaboration with Nickelback next month will look like, laughing. “So I think I’m gonna be rolling up to PNC blind and just being like, ‘Hey, I’m here!’ Hopefully I’ll know something a couple days before, but as of now I know absolutely nothing. I don’t know where I’m gonna be sitting, I don’t know if I’m gonna be going backstage at all, I don’t know if I’m even gonna have a moment to say, ‘Hi, I’m Kayla, nice to meet you guys, I’m a big fan!’ I have no idea.”

But maybe — most likely not, but just maybe — it’ll lead to the big break she’s been hoping to catch all her life.

Lots of focus, but limited success

Vega can barely remember a time in her life when she wasn’t singing, thinking about singing or fantasizing about a singing career.

While growing up on Long Island in New York, at 6, she first dreamed of being — as she described it then — “a professional rock star.” At 7, she was cheering for Kelly Clarkson to win the inaugural season of “American Idol.” At 8, Vega was singing Clarkson’s “A Moment Like This” and “Before Your Love” on her family’s Party Tyme Karaoke machines. At 12, she was a huge Taylor Swift fan and had gotten her hands on her first guitar.

By the time she was a teenager, she was recording low-quality videos of herself singing covers of her favorite songs on her “crunchy-sounding” MacBook and uploading them to Facebook and YouTube; and by the time she was 16, she had progressed to using the much more sophisticated Pro Tools software to make music that she’d share on social media.

She made a run at college after high school, briefly enrolling to study to be a music teacher, but then dropped out after just one year because she couldn’t resist the urge to spend most of her waking life pursuing a music career.

Into her 20s she mostly performed at restaurants and bars — “coffeehouse-style performances, because it was just me and my guitar,” she says — then when her parents moved to Mooresville around the time she turned 21, she tagged along.

Although it was never anything terribly glamorous, Vega found steady gigs where she could in her new home state.

The Festival of Food Trucks in downtown Mooresville. A Christmas party at the South Iredell Senior Center. A party at a picture frame shop, also in downtown, celebrating the release of an independent album she made. A block party at Brawley Commons. A farm-to-table restaurant in Statesville.

She made headlines in her local newspaper when she signed a record deal with a tiny New York label and made several more after she wrote a song that she dedicated to a Mooresville police officer who was killed in the line of duty (and after coordinating multiple fundraising events in his honor). But Vega struggled to make a name for herself beyond the borders of Iredell County.

And in more than a half-dozen attempts to try out for “American Idol,” she’s never once been invited to Hollywood.

‘I’m gonna try to prove you wrong’

Before the end of next year, Vega will in fact age out of being eligible to audition for “Idol,” the show that provided one of the original sparks that ignited her passion for singing.

So it’s no surprise to hear she’s also starting to have thoughts about getting too old for this, in general.

Not too old to sing for her own enjoyment. Not even too old to sing for the enjoyment of others. Just maybe too old to keep trying to crack the code that would open the door to a career in the music business lucrative enough to make it so she wouldn’t have to work a “regular” job.

Her mother — Jo Vega, whom they both refer to as her “mom-ager” — is an eternal optimist, and believes it when she says this: “It really is who you know in a lot of places. But we haven’t met that person yet, so …”

Kayla, though, keeps growing up a little more all the time. She still lives in the same house as her parents, in part because it makes more financial sense but also because she’s been helping to take care of her father since he was diagnosed with cancer last year. Before long, though, she’ll probably move out; she recently was engaged to be married.

She’s also open to having kids down the road. So she knows she can’t hold onto this dream indefinitely.

“When I was younger, it was definitely soul-crushing when I didn’t get accepted into, like, the talent show in school,” she says. “I would stop singing for months on end, and my mom would be like, ‘Kayla, you’re a good singer, stop it.’ It’s like, ‘No, I’m not a good singer.’ I was very dramatic about it. Too dramatic, I think.

“But as an adult and someone who’s very level-headed now, the rejection hurts, yeah. I try to not let it like chip at my dignity, though, or at who I am. Because I also think art is very subjective. I think that talent is very subjective. ... If you say ‘no,’ I’m gonna try to prove you wrong, or I’ll try and find an avenue that will work for me, because just because this one doesn’t work (doesn’t mean another won’t).”

Which brings us back to those radio contests.

As both skill and luck would have it...

It started in the spring when Mix 107.9 offered listeners a chance to send in clips of themselves singing, with the idea being that the station would post the clips online and have its audience vote on their favorites.

Vega’s abbreviated cover of “Rainbow” by Kacey Musgraves wound up among the top-five vote-getters, qualifying her and the other four for the opportunity to perform one song each at the Taste of Charlotte Festival in June. There, she sang a fuller version of “Rainbow” on stage in front of a decent crowd and got a chance to meet the event’s music headliner, Phillip Phillips, who won “American Idol’s” 11th season back in 2012.

Not even two weeks later, Vega was listening to Mix 107.9 when it held a contest that involved listeners winning pairs of tickets to September’s Nickelback concert and also being entered into a drawing for the grand prize of singing with the band on stage.

She tried calling in repeatedly without success. But on the last day of the promotion, she got through. And as fate would have it, she won the grand prize in a rather unusual way.

AJ Anelli — promotions director at Radio One, which owns Mix 107.9 — explains: “It’s a hot AC (adult contemporary) station, you know, an older crowd, so some folks didn’t want to get on stage and sing ... and they decided to pass on it.” He says when Vega’s name ultimately came up as an alternate winner, they immediately recognized it and were excited to have the prize go to someone they knew could actually sing.

As for what her experience with Nickelback is going to look like, Anelli admits he doesn’t know a whole lot more than she does.

Who knows, though? Maybe her brief moment in the spotlight at PNC Music Pavilion will lead her to a serendipitous meeting with “that person” her mom thinks is out there, the one waiting to turn Kayla into a pop superstar, or a “professional rock star,” or maybe even just a modest bedroom-pop success.

“Hopefully it’s not the end,” Kayla says of her upcoming “Rockstar” moment with Nickelback. “Hopefully that’s not the last cool thing I do. I hope that it just snowballs, that more things continue happening, that I strike the right chord with someone and that everything will kind of align.”