Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2008-06-11


Interview:
We had the honor of sitting down with Krista, a new artist on J Records. She's a fun cross between pop, punk and hip-hop. She recently performed at the Winter X Games and Bamboozle. Her new album is due out this summer. Here's what she had to say:

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into music?

I feel like music raised me. I come from a broken home, and my dad was working all the time, and my grandmother is a lot older than other grandmas and she was really conservative. So there wasn't really anyone in my household that I could relate to, and I discovered music as something I could relate to as far as my experiences in my life.

I've read that Brooklyn, NY was one of your main inspirations for this album since you grew up there. Can you talk a little bit about how the city itself influenced you?

I would say it definitely gave me the raw, "angsty" attitude. It gave me that "Yo, you know what? If you're from Brooklyn, you can make it anywhere." That's the kind of attitude that the city helped me develop. New York City helped me embrace the different people, the different sounds and the different lifestyles. I think all these things are in me and come across in my music.

Is there a song off of your upcoming album that feels the most personal to you? If so, can you explain?

All of my songs are personal to me, but I feel like the song that makes the album is a song called "Stained." It's a song about me just basically rapping about the things that went on in my life and the things that represent where I come from. It's not where I come from, it's a part of who I am, it's a part of me.

Do you have a song that is your favorite to perform live?

I like "Boiling Ashes of Pain" because that's a song that I wrote completely for me. Well not completely for me. I wrote it for me, but I wrote it letting people know that you don't really need anyone to believe in you but yourself.

Do you write your own songs and if so what is the song writing process like for you, does the melody come first or the lyrics?

Yep. The concept comes first, the whole idea comes first. If I hear a beat, it just makes me automatically think of something messed up that happened to me, and then I know where to go from there.