Christy Vanden

Christy Vanden was born to travelling musician parents and grew up home schooled, moving from place to place in British Columbia. Her family made yearly winter roadtrips from Canada to Baja California Sur, Mexico in a ramshackle Volkswagen van, where Christy learned to play on her tiny orange classical guitar, given to her by her mother Leslie. From age seven onward, she was "casually" mentored by her father Dave, who inspired her to play the guitar in the first place. Between Christy's mother and her sister Amanda, she learned how to sing, and picked up harmonies by listening in on her parent's band rehearsals. During highschool years, Christy kept her music private, recorded GarageBand tracks non-stop for an entire year, and when she graduated, developed herself into a busy college student instead! Focusing on Liberal Studies and archaeology, she went to Greece on a study abroad trip and an excavation, and became a librarian assistant at North Island College Library, Before she could become too sedentary, Christy met Brodie Dawson (2014 VIMA Vocalist of the Year) by chance at Long and McQuade in Courtenay (where Christy later became the popular female guitar teacher). Brodie, liking Christy's style, offered to showcase her in Brodie's band as guitarist for the summer of 2014 - they played their second show at the 2014 Sunfest Country Music Festival main stage in Duncan, where there was a showing of 40 000 people over the weekend. During 2015, Brodie had Christy join her on a recording of Brodie's song "All This Time", which was nominated in the 2015 Vancouver Island Music Awards for Roots/Blues Recording of the Year. Later, Brodie and Christy formed a powerful touring trio with the talented singer/songwriter/guitarist Tracy Riley of Yellowknife. As She Could Be Trouble, the trio toured B.C and Alberta at around 70 venues between early 2015 to the end of 2016, resulting in a live release CD titled Nineteen Hours. The title of the CD was the number of hours it took for the trio to record 13 tracks between two days! She Could Be Trouble was nominated at the 2016 Vancouver Island Music Awards for Group of the Year, and they also were accepted into the first round of Juno Nominations for 2017. After the mutual dissolution of the band, Christy moved to Vancouver with her partner and at 23, Christy feels she is finding her place in music and hopes to continually improve her art and deepen her songwriting, which she finds time to undertake between teaching music and session work. Her solo album, drafted as "Unexpected Road", will be released later in the year...stay tuned!