Christian Navarra is an Indianapolis-based pop artist specializing in acoustic covers with chill, lo-fi undertones. His cover of “Get You the Moon ” by Kina and Snøw has been used in over 40,000 videos on TikTok and has 170,000 streams on Spotify. Since then, he’s released an EP of covers entitled “Songs that Remind Me of You,” and a series of other covers and singles, including “How to Save a Life” by the Fray and “brooklyn boy” by Jeremy Zucker. When he’s not creating music, Christian is a student at Holy Cross College, where he previously played on the school’s basketball team. To learn more about Christian and to be the first to know about his new music, check out his Instagram and find his discography, including new single “nj (stripped),” on his Spotify.
Tune into a playlist curated by Christian and learn more about his background and current and future projects below!
Tell us your musical background.
I’ve been singing my whole life. I would sing at home, or in the car, or at school, places that I probably shouldn’t have been singing, but I would anyway. Then, as I got older, I sang in choir. We toured all over the country and even Canada- that was really cool. And then, a couple of years ago, I just decided to go to the studio, because I had a little bit of extra money and I had never been. I wanted to see what it was like, because it was something I always wanted to do, and the engineer was like, “why have you never came here before?” And ever since then, I make music, because why not?” I never had any training. I always sang just for fun, but it’s for real now, which is really cool.
Tell us about the mix you curated. Does it give off a type of mood? What should we be doing while listening in?
I think the most real kind of music that you can make or listen to is just that really mellow, indie pop music. I think that a lot of the songs feel like you’re going on a drive, there’s drama going on in our lives now, people are going their separate ways. Like when you’re sad or angry, you’re driving around midnight, and you just want to let it all out. It’s being able to embrace the words, because when you can relate to something that you hear, it not only lets whatever emotion, whether it be anger or happiness, out, but it also calms you down.
What groups or artists are killing the game right now?
Since I was a little kid, I always loved Bieber, because he just reminded me of myself because of the way that he grew up. To see what he’s become since he was a five year-old kid with a single mom who raised him in a crappy apartment, that shows that you can do it. It’s possible.
On the other hand, my two favorite artists in the whole world are Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler. They are so talented. They’re only twenty-four years old! They’re everything that I want to be and more right now. They just had an EP called “brent ii” that came out.
Tell us about your past and current music projects.
The first song I put out was my version of “Get You the Moon.” The success is crazy to me, because I didn’t promote it. People loved it, and that made me really happy. Since then, I’ve done a bunch of different covers of songs that I like. I had a project called “The Songs that Remind Me of You.” I spent a lot of time on it trying to really convey how I felt, so I’m proud of it in that regard, and I hope that people enjoy it when they listen to it.
After that, I ended up booking a trip to Connecticut. I went with my friends Dylan and Christina, and we started working on an EP at the same place that Jeremy Zucker and Chelsea Cutler wrote “brent i” in Connecticut. It was this little carriage house studio in the middle of nowhere. It was my first project working on my own songs and working together. We were up from 10 in the morning to 4 in the morning the next day.It’s still not done yet, but hopefully in the next 7 months we can get that done. I’m super excited for that, because that will be my first official project that I’ve done originally.
Other than that, I’m working with a man named Matthew Schuler, who was on the Voice in 2013. We’re writing a song together. He’s just the dopest human being.
