SPOTLIGHT: Cristina Vane Reclaims Her Roots On ‘Hear My Call’

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 keep an eye out for more all month long. 

Singer/songwriter Cristina Vane’s wanderlust runs deep through her music, starting with her 2021 album, Nowhere Sounds Lovely. Then on 2022’s Make Myself Me Again, she set out on a journey of self-reflection, culminating in her latest album, Hear My Call.

Vane was born in Italy to a Sicilian-American father and a Guatemalan mother. Because her upbringing took her to many places in Europe, she struggled for years to identify with one place. On Hear My Call (out Feb. 21), she uses a blend of string band and blues trio arrangements to look back at her formative years and reclaim pride in her many cultural identities, something she explores in depth on the rock anthem “Little Girl From Nowhere.”

“Rather than still seeing it that way, I now realize that’s exactly what makes me who I am,” Vane tells No Depression. “Before it felt like a problem, because everyone else has a hometown. ‘Little Girl From Nowhere’ is me feeling like my place is exactly where I am.”

During her youth, Vane also lived in several European cities, including London and Paris, before later moving stateside. Along the way, she absorbed multicultural experiences that now extend to her music, a mesmerizing mix of swampy Delta blues and old-time string band sounds that she navigates with relative ease between slide guitar and clawhammer banjo.

Vane started learning slide guitar around 2013, when she was just starting to pursue music, and didn’t yet know much about the business. While on a summer visit to see her dad in London,  decided to pass out resumes with her music to booking agents in the hopes of landing gigs, and it worked. During one of those resulting shows at a club called Proud Camden, she first discovered slide guitar, while watching Sam Green & The Midnight Heist perform. 

“It was my first time hearing a lap slide and I was instantly obsessed,” she says. “I remember going home and Googling slide guitar that night, and things snowballed from there.”

Going down a rabbit hole about slide — and later banjo — music Vane not only honed her own playing skills, but also gained a massive appreciation for each instrument, their history and the foundational artists who shaped their sound before her. With each of her own songs she does a masterful job of toeing the line between honoring that legacy while reflecting her own experiences and influences, something that’s easier said than done for a person who grew up far removed from the world of blues and bluegrass.

“When I got into slide guitar I quickly realized my main goal was to be as authentic as possible, which was hard because I’m not a blind man in Beaumont, Texas in 1920; I’m certainly not from Mississippi, and I don’t know what those experiences were like,” she says. “But what I found so amazing about the blues — and later old-time — was how that could resonate so deeply with someone like me, who’s a million miles and years away from a completely different background. It touched me in the deepest part of my heart, so I wanted to let that influence my music while still making art that felt true to me.”

That appreciation for vintage sounds comes through loud and clear on the banjo ballad, “My Mountain” and heavy blues of “Coming In Hot.” But on “Shake it Babe,” Vane adds in her own signature style. According to Vane, the co-write with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Mike Harris was modeled after the hill country blues of Jessie Mae Hemphill and her similarly titled song, “Shake It, Baby.” Much like Hemphill’s original, Vane’s reprisal aims to empower with its fun and brash lyrics that make it one of the most energized songs of both the album and her live set.

“She’s not overtly trying to be sexual or lude, she just likes to have a good time,” Vane says of Hemphill. “I wanted to write something like that too, because I typically don’t showcase that kind of energy in my music. The protagonist isn’t trying to get anyone to sleep with her, she’s just saying ‘you can shake it for me if you want.’ It’s fun and sensual, but not over the top.”

Interspersed among those “fun” moments are several lessons of vulnerability and growth as well, many of which revolve around Vane’s life on the road. These include the isolation and grind of touring on the subdued “Getting High In Hotel Rooms;” and imposter syndrome and having healthy metrics for success on “Hard Rock Bend.” The latter has been harder to come by for Vane, who with over 114,000 Instagram followers (and counting) is constantly combatting what she describes as a “dysphoric” case of perception vs. reality for what her online presence means for her career.

“I have to keep reminding myself that whether or not those things materialize, there are other really important things I’m doing this for, namely the connection with human beings, whether that’s five people in a crowd or 500,” she says. “My goal isn’t to be famous, it’s to have people feel something and connect with the art I’m making — there’s no better feeling.”

Through that cycle of triumph and despair that Vane has found the strength to keep chasing down her musical dreams, no matter where they take her. In her life, Vane has known many mountains — the foothills of the Alps, where she was born, the Appalachians near where she lives now, and the mountains of adversity that have come into her life along the way. Hear My Call stands as proof that home is just as much a state of mind as it is a physical place and how a fluid, diverse sound is her biggest strength.

 “I don’t need permission from the genre Gods, a scene or a sound to make music,” Vane says. “Sometimes I’d feel pressure from myself to give into all that, but with this album, I felt so much closer to myself, narrowing the gap from my inner self to what I present on the outside.”