Her career as a vocalist didn’t always look so promising for this young Australian. At an impressionable age of 7, she was kicked out of her Catholic-school choir. “When they told me I couldn’t sing, even instinctively back then, I still knew I was an artist,” she says. “You don’t choose music; music chooses you. You can’t repress that.” After the discouragement from her school, she did repress the urge of pursuing music for a few years. Not till her teenage years, when she dabbed on piano and the saxophone, thankfully, did the spark again arise. “I was just trying to find ways to connect with music,” she says.
Fast forward 27 years, the little girl, Vasiliki Karagiorgos; known in EDM circles by her stage name Vassy, has found unexpected international acclaim within the EDM world. It’s safe to say that 2014 marked a major turning point in Vassy’s career graph, when she featured on the song “Bad” by David Guetta and Showtek, which reached #1 in many countries. In 2015, she won the IDMA Award for Best Featured Vocalist for the same single. Vassy now collaborates with some of the biggest names in EDM, Tiësto, Benny Benassi, KSHMR.
Though she calls her collaborators “awesome to work with,” the Aussie admits it’s not always easy to be a vocalist in an industry dominated by DJs. And she describes how difficult it can be for a vocalist to earn a following among the ocean of producers out there. Speaking during the recent Miami Music Week, she lets her thoughts go free. “DJs tend to be the brands,” she says. “They can play for hours on end, perform for so many people, and play so many different songs in single set. A vocalist can only sing for so long and can only connect with so many people in one night. But DJs can connect with so many more people. They end up putting in most of the work, though,” she says, “so they deserve most of the recognition. And sometimes, as a vocalist, you have to check your own ego.”
However, instead of playing victim, she chooses to move push her own aspirations forward. Speaking to wegothiscovered.com, she says “I think now things have shifted, and for someone like myself as an artist, I’m not doing a lot of collaborations. I’m only doing a couple specific ones, because I also have my solo project. I think if you really wanna push that you can. A lot of these things are about the right song, the right personality, the right front person, the right collaboration, the right timing – but definitely, I think people have shifted to where fans love a good song and they wanna hear the lyrics.”
Vassy furthers reveals she has an artist album in the works, which is almost finished. When asked for the name for the purported album, she simply laughs.
Watch below her recent collaboration with Benny Benassi.
