While guitar hero George Lynch is probably the name that will draw a larger number of curious listeners towards ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, the debut album of Casandra’s Crossing, Casandra Carson’s immense voice is at least as defining a feature. Carson is far from a novice, however, having over a decade of experience as the singer and guitarist of Paralandra under her belt.

“George was going in to do the second Dirty Shirley record, and they knew that Dino Jelusick was not going to be singing on it”, Carson explains. “So we knew that he was kind of looking for singers, and had potential options, but nothing had really been decided yet. The week before George went in to record some things, I had gone to one of Lynch Mob’s shows, because my boyfriend (Jaron Gulino) plays bass for him. So I was just going to hang out and support the guys, and I ended up getting on stage and singing ‘Street Fightin’ Man’ with them that night.

After the show, George was just raving. He said he had so much fun performing with me. And I said: you know, we could do some Dirty Shirley next time, that’ll be really cool. He was surprised I even knew Dirty Shirley. The conversation went from there, and he said: well, I’m actually looking for a vocalist to do this record, and you should do it. If you want to do it, it’s yours! It was very serendipitous.

Once all the songs were written, everybody just kind of agreed that it sounded nothing like the first Dirty Shirley record. It was really its own project, and it has its own sound. George had the idea of naming it Casandra’s Crossing. I was taken aback. I was like: why? Haha! But everybody really liked it. It’s starting to grow on me.”

Just as Much of a Hook

Despite the fact that Carson is a very skilled guitarist, she only sings on ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. “I would have loved to have recorded guitar for the record”, she admits. “But I had nothing I could have contributed to make it any better than what George already did. He sent me basically all of the songs, just guitar tracks with a little basic drum loop, and I wrote all the lyrics and melodies on top of that.

He said it all happened so fast. He was already planning on going into the studio to record an album, and it wasn’t until the week before that I was chosen as the vocalist to be on the record. He told me that once he went into the studio, he had my vocals in mind for the songs, which was really nice. Everything was recorded in E-flat, and with Paralandra we also do everything in E-flat now. It’s more comfortable, a little heavier, and really fun to write to.

Something George actually told me was that he feels like a singer who can’t sing, so he has to play guitar, haha! It makes so much sense, because there’s so much melody in his playing, and his guitar solo is often just as much of a hook as the chorus of the song. You sing along with it. It gets stuck in your head. It takes a really amazing musician to be able to distract from the vocals, that’s for sure, haha!”

A Little Bit of Back and Forth

“To write the record and deliver all the final vocals, I had about five months. That might already seem like a short period of time, but keep in mind that I hadn’t even heard a single note of the record, and then all of a sudden, you get it, and you have to create the best possible thing out of all of these songs. Record them, then do it for real, and hopefully I’ll be happy with that. A little daunting, but I just took it one song at a time, and tried to give every single one its fair share of love and time.

Every time I would finish a song, I would demo it at home, and then I would send it to George immediately, and just say: let me know what you think! Every once in a while, he would say: how about you change this line? Or: this line could maybe be better. ‘Devastating Times’ originally had a different chorus. He said: I don’t know, I’m not really hearing the chorus yet, maybe you should work on it a bit. Then I considered what else I could do, and I came up with the one we have now.

So there was a little bit of back and forth. That collaboration was very much there. It was really fun. He had a lot of great ideas. He is clearly a top-notch musician. I greatly sought out his opinion, and valued it.”

Fingers Crossed

“There are a whole lot of songs that I would actually love to perform live. Being that it’s not really a live project – it’s more of a studio thing. That kind of makes me sad. Because I would love to tour these songs. And I would love to play these guitar parts with George. There are so many cool harmony guitar solos. It very much feels like a live album to me.

This was really just intended as kind of a one-off thing, but I would not be mad if we went in to record another record after this. It wouldn’t suck, haha! My door is open. I would actually love to collaborate with George again.

We’ll see what happens! Right now, Paralandra is actually doing a bunch of tour dates with Lynch Mob coming up in January through March of next year, so I’ve got my fingers crossed. Maybe I can twist his arm into doing some of these songs live, haha!”

A Surge of Music Fans

Casandra’s Crossing might actually serve as a springboard for Paralandra outside North America as well. “We’ve always kind of had a good following from Europe on Spotify”, Carson poins out. “Whenever we look at our top countries, it’s always Germany, Finland, Sweden… And we’ve never even been to Europe! It’s so crazy that people over there are finding our music, and they’re even some of our top listeners.

Even more so now that Casandra’s Crossing is coming out, and we have all this press going on. With an Italian label. It’s really cool seeing this surge of music fans from all over the world finding Casandra’s Crossing, finding Paralandra, The L.I.F.E. Project… Mind-blowing! Really cool!

We’ve been talking about trying to do something, trying to play overseas. But Paralandra is independent, so it’s really a matter of what we can do with the things we have at our fingertips. But it’s a real conversation. We’ll see what happens. Clearly there is a demand from people who are fans that would potentially come to see our shows, so I don’t see why not!”

Sprinkling in Original Music

“Paralandra plays a lot of clubs in the United States. Typically around 500 capacity. Sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger, depending on who we’re playing with. When we played with Lynch Mob, the venues were a little bigger, maybe a capacity of around 1000, sometime like that. Kind of around that mid-range, I guess you could say.

The scene in Missouri, where we are from, seems to be very cover band-driven. You go to a venue, and you see all these posters of these shows, and you see a Queen tribute, a Taylor Swift tribute, a Van Halen tribute… All the tributes you can imagine. But you don’t see as much of the original stuff. For whatever reason, it just isn’t quite as popular.

That’s actually also how we got our start with Paralandra. We were doing four-hour, nine-to-one shows at casinos. We would sprinkle in our original music, even though sometimes we weren’t allowed to, haha! We would just do it anyway. What are you going to do? Unplug my amp? I guess you could… But yeah, that’s kind of how we grew our following.

It was just a very grass-roots style thing of just playing as often as possible, and playing music that people have heard before, but doing our own versions of it. People started becoming fans of those covers, and then becoming fans of our original music. And now they’re lifers!”

Still Developing

“I see myself as a guitar player first and a vocalist second. Because I wouldn’t really sing in front of anybody until I was about eighteen years old, and I started playing guitar when I was eleven. I came from a musical family. My mom’s side of the family were all singers. They would just bust out a four-part harmony all the time. It was very normal to do that.

I felt like everybody could sing. I knew that I could sing, I just didn’t want to do it in front of people. But I knew how to find harmony, those types of things. When I was in high school, I did two years of choir, because my best friend forced me to, haha! So I learned a lot of vocal techniques and breathing techniques and stuff like that from those two years of experience. But beyond that, it’s been a lot of just learning myself, what works for me, and trying out things that people recommend. Trial and error.

Many times I blew my voice out, and would completely lose it the next day. Because I just wasn’t doing it properly. I didn’t really know how to do it just yet. And it’s still something I feel like I am still developing. How to hit the note with the least amount of resistance possible. Using vowel shapes, and obviously breathing, to be able to make the note come from a different place, to give it that sound. It’s almost like doing vocal tricks or vocal gymnastics or something, haha!”

All the Difference in the World

In Paralandra, Carson is often heard singing fairly demanding vocal melodies over quite intricate guitar parts. “Definitely a matter of practice”, she assures. “Most of my background is just playing guitar. So what I try to do is just trying to find a way to put on auto-pilot whatever the riff may be, and then I can kind of think about what I’m singing. Making sure that I’m breathing. These are important things.

A lot of thought goes into it. Maybe you would think: just go ahead and sing! But no, I’m thinking about it a lot. I guess that’s why it’s good that I can kind of put my guitar on auto-pilot, because that’s just like second nature to me. With the singing, I really have to focus, and I have to make sure I’m doing it properly, so that I can do it again tomorrow night.

Also, I’ve been playing with in-ear monitors for a couple of years now. Being able to hear my voice has made all the difference in the world. Who knew that would be such a big thing? Haha! I have a hard time giving less than 100 percent. Like… Ever. Of course I’m going to hit the highest harmony possible in this song at some point, haha! Every song has got to have its epic moment.”

Although Carson is a very outspoken fan of Alter Bridge, that had no bearing on her choice of guitars. “That’s just like a happy coincidence”, she smiles. “I worked on the sales floor of a music store for about seven years. I was constantly playing guitars. We got new stuff in every single day. So I really got to PRS through trial and error, and just realizing that they make the most comfortable guitars for me.”