Cristina Vane Photo by Stacie Huckeba
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cristina Vane is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for February 2025. Read more about her and her new album, Hear My Call, out Feb. 21, in this feature and check out this ND exclusive video.
Mountains are the buckling points of the earth’s tension, a visual and visceral release of tectonic pressure. A gift that is violently forged, not freely given—a haven and a heaven.
Mountains were with me before I could name them. They towered over the foothill town where I was born, darning the skies. My parents had friends with a cabin, and so my siblings and I were stuffed into tiny snowsuits and brought up to the Alps. I remember white kitchen tiles, hot milk, and the sparkling snow, and being fascinated by the icicles that hung like string lights from the balconies, dripping in the morning sun. Though we grew older and moved away from Turin, we came back to the mountains every year. I was on skis once I had a first inkling of coordination, impatiently enduring the woolen underclothes and sunscreen applications so I could go with my brother to ski school. We saw the older children learning to race. Our family friend’s daughter, a slalom champion, may as well have been made of stars. Always a competitive monster, I cried at the end of the week when my naturally gifted brother Stefano won a medal and I didn’t. I have the photo of a leathered-skinned instructor holding back his laughter, trying to comfort me as I stand glowering, six years old with a ski mask tan and whole lot of feelings already.
The snow was quiet. My mother hated skiing but quite enjoyed laying out with a hot chocolate (or was it wine?), while we followed a trail of clumsy peers behind a patient instructor down the mountain. Afterward, my father took us to the icy creek that wound its way through town. We ate focaccia and ragù and ham sandwiches.
In my early adolescence, I switched to snowboarding, and I felt cool. My brother was a skater and I wanted to be anything he was, plus I figured Avril Lavigne would have probably been on a board, so sign me up. My sister Francesca was younger than us, so it was often Stefano and I paired together—I followed him into the soft powder among the pine trees, which became my favorite feature of the landscape. Looking down from the frozen metal of the ski lift, the emerald conifers that dotted the white carpet of snow made my heart skip a beat.
In high school, we piled in the train from France to Switzerland for ski trips every year. In the countries close to the Alps, schools give a week off in February (the white week) and stagger them so the quaint towns aren’t overrun with annoying teenagers. My birthday always fell during white week, thus every birthday was spent at elevation. This somehow felt unlucky, as I was unable to throw a birthday party with my schoolmates because everyone would be gone. Now, I think of the glittering white when I think of February, and it feels like celestial magic.
I left Europe and went to college, but the mountains stayed with me. I went to Canada with my university ski team, a thinly veiled excuse to get drunk in unforgiving temperatures. The first day on the slopes, a boy got sent home with frostbitten feet (we were reluctantly sympathetic as he was insufferable), another girl followed with windburn from the freezing air on her exposed cheeks. Though icy and punishing, the mountains reminded me that they were still there, across the Atlantic.
I moved to Venice Beach, CA after college, where I had a view of the Santa Monica Mountains hugging the shoreline whenever I stepped out. Seeking the peaks (and some peace from the city) I started going to Rose Valley, Ojai. The Ojai Mountains were unlike my native range; the dry desert air, the hot sun beating down on the dust, the waterfall at the end of the short walk from the campsite. The ocean glittered on my left side as I took the right turn from Ventura up into the hills, and there I felt the familiar snake of a mountain road; Route 33 curving up in switchbacks, making my stomach flutter. The blue oak, western sycamore and desert willow may as well have been the evergreen pines I grew up with. I took acid and sat under the curtain of the waterfall, always feeling closer to myself by the time I left.
At 23, I wanted to quit pursuing music professionally; beaten down by fake managers and the LA gig scene. I gave it one last shot by getting out of the city, deciding to live out of my car for six months on a tour I dubbed “my grand adventure.” All across the country, the mountains were waiting to meet me. As I stopped to smoke a joint on the side of the road in the Cascades, they loomed over me with the comforting presence of a guardian. I hiked to a snow-topped lake in the peaks of Glacier Park, and saw a moose and a marmot in the Tetons. Battling the flat prairie of the Dakotas, I was bowled over by the striated protrusions of the Badlands before I headed south. I landed in the magic of Asheville and camped out in the Balsam mountains—Cataloochee Valley to be precise. The Appalachians had none of the crags and peaks that I had grown up with, but I felt them just the same.
Headed to Taos after going down through Florida and back across through Texas, I perked up as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains cropped up in my windshield (which got cracked by a golf seized hailstone as I drove through Colorado springs to get to the Rockies). The La Sal Mountains smiled at me as I made my way to Utah, the green mini-mountains of Moab captivated me before I lost and found myself in the Zion peaks. As I scrambled ancient rocks and zig-zagged the country, my resolve returned to me. I remembered that making music and connecting with people was something precious to me, and that I was surrounded by magic and beauty that fueled this endeavor.
The upward energy of the mountain has always spoken to me, and probably always will. They arise, like all of the earth’s marvels, from the natural order of things; and yet that order is formed out of chaos, quakes, boulders, splits and rifts. I am trying to learn how to strike that balance within myself. I want to be there among them, but moreover I want to go there, for it is in the arriving and the inevitable departing that I am reminded of the mountains’ home in myself.
