Bloomington native rocks the park

Bloomington singer and songwriter Jenn Cristy sets up her keyboard for a free concert at Third Street Park. As she checks her microphone, the crowd moves in and sets their blankets on the grass. Children are laughing, dancing and playing with each other. Cristy’s 4-year-old daughter, April, runs around her father, Ben Strawn.\nApril, who is wearing a red cowboy hat with a “Jenn Cristy” pin tacked into it, hugs her father and smiles. She says she’s proud of her mother. As Cristy gets ready to begin the concert, April looks up and says, “Hey, there’s Mommy!”\nCristy opens her set with a new song called “Collide,” which describes waiting for the good and bad things in life to crash into each other. She transitions right into the next song as approximately 400 audience members cheer her performance. \nDrummer Dave Dwinell has been playing behind Cristy for almost two years and feels they work well together. He said he likes the kind of product she’s making and feels other people like it, too. He said the main charm of Cristy’s music is that it appeals to a wide range of audiences. \nDwinell said Cristy’s music has matured since he started working for her, and she has become more confident about her work over the last two years.\nBloomington resident Beth Smith waited near the stage with her two children. She said she knows Cristy and her music because she used to work with Ben Strawn. \n“She’s very upbeat and friendly (on stage),” Smith said. “It’s not an act.”\nCristy said she’s been singing for as long as she could remember. She never took lessons as a child, but she sang in the choir and made up songs. Cristy said she wrote her first song when she was 11 and still remembers it.\nCristy started playing the flute and piano in elementary school, but switched to percussion in high school. During her senior year, she picked up the violin. Cristy also began playing guitar, oboe and trumpet while enrolled at IU.\nShe met John Mellencamp when she was a sophomore at IU. Two years later, she met him again and recorded with him on his CD “Cuttin’ Heads.” She said she played flute and percussion on the CD, and it was a brand new experience for her because she had never before recorded professionally.\nCristy attended IU for four years on a full swimming scholarship. She practiced swimming eight hours a day, and said she had to put her music on hold while she was swimming. However, once swimming was done, she returned to music.\n“The only thing I really carried from swimming to music is the heart-work,” Cristy said. “It’s a 24-hour job.”\nCristy met her husband through IU swimming. Strawn helped with the diving team and Cristy used to say hello to him every day for five years before she finally asked him out on a date while resting between tours. They have been married five years.\nStrawn said Cristy teaches him to be a better person and he learns something new from her every day. He said each song she writes is better than the last, and she has become more socially conscious, speaking out on issues about which she has strong opinions. \n“(She) becomes more and more passionate about what she does,” Strawn said.\nDrawing a lot of influence from Ben Folds, Queen, Billy Joel and Peter Gabriel, Cristy released her second album in 2006. She said that, although her first album was jazz-orientated, her second production focused more on rock ’n’ roll.\nAlthough she said she doesn’t like to make plans, Cristy hopes to get back into the studio this winter for a spring release. She said she’s keeping her fingers crossed, but sometimes things don’t always work out the way they are expected to, so she might not get into the studio that early.\n“It’s very expensive to go through that whole process, and I don’t want to rush any stage of it,” she said. “I am eager, though.”\nDespite the difficulties involved with booking shows at local bars in Bloomington, she said she hopes that, as the band grows, she’ll be able to play more shows in town. She said she loves playing in Bloomington, and the overall response to her music has been great.\n“People come up and say the most amazing things about my playing and my singing,” Cristy said. “It’s incredibly overwhelming sometimes, but I make sure it doesn’t get to my head because I always I feel I could get better. We all make mistakes.”