Spotlight on Krista!

Krista is a new songwriter and musician – and is considered a vibrant, emerging artist. What she has felt in her life, you will feel in her music, and like her background, Krista’s music brazenly defies categorization: a combination of soaring vocals, big beats, beautiful melodies, and street-savvy raps.

Krista comes from the mashed-up streets of Brooklyn, New York – Sunset Park, to be exact – where a stroll down the neighborhood streets is a kaleidoscopic merging of colors, cultures and flavors. Krista is herself a mash-up, the product of a Puerto Rican father and Italian mother, and growing up in a neighborhood rigidly defined by cultural identity, she both embraced and was alienated by her mixed-race heritage. “My neighborhood, growing up, was very hard,” Krista explains, “but all the bullshit around me was what I knew I didn’t want to be. I used it as a springboard to try and do everything right.”

Krista is inspired by the boisterous attitudes of early female MCs (Salt-n-Pepa, Queen Latifa), and the escapist rock of Evanescence and Linkin Park, or the angelic voice of Sarah McLachlan. Really. One moment her music pulsates with the rhymes and beats of a boastful, savvy, street-reared MC (much like the storytelling of early Tupac), and the next her voice soars with melodious lyrics of alienation and suffering – often on the same song. She mixes live instruments with bedroom beats, and incorporates the sass and fire of her heritage into everything she does.

Krista’s break came at the age of 19, when she met her current producer, musical mentor, and music industry veteran, Camus. He took her under his wing, making her the hallmark signing of his Vel Records, and worked for two years to help develop her sound.

“My interests, musically, are extremely eclectic, and I feel I can do anything (stylistically),” says Krista. “So we would just go to the studio and experiment, find a chemistry, just try things out until I felt comfortable with myself. It was a real organic process. And his support really gave me the confidence to just go in the studio and show who I was.”

Follow Krista on her official site and MySpace!

Check out her music video too!

Image Credited to Apex Exposure