Carah Faye Charnow

Carah Faye Charnow (born August 3, 1984, Santa Barbara, California) is an American singer and songwriter, former member of Shiny Toy Guns (2003 - 2008), currently the lead singer of the band Versant.

Shiny Toy Guns

In 2003, Carah joined the electronica/indie/rock band Shiny Toy Guns. They released in January 2005 their first album, We Are Pilots (UNI-MOTOWN), and began touring across the United States. The album’s best-known tracks are You Are the One, Le Disko (both released also as singles) and We Are Pilots. Shiny Toy Guns gained popularity in California as well as through their MySpace page. On December 6, 2007, We Are Pilots received a Grammy Award nomination in the category of Best Electronic/Dance Album. She remained the lead female vocal of Shiny Toy Guns until she was released in August 2008.

'Versant

By the end of 2008, Carah Faye Charnow started a new band, named Versant, together with Richard Ankers (Drums), Johan Grettve (Guitar/Keys), Daniel Johansson (Guitar/Keys) and Nicholas Oja (Bass). The name is pronounced ver-SONT, even though the proper pronunciation would be VERS-nt. Charnow said the word is defined as either a mountain slope, or having knowledge of something. On January 8, 2009 they released the demo version of Push Away, a song to be included in their first album planned to appear in autumn 2009.

Personal life

Carah Faye was born in Santa Barbara and moved to Newbury Park at age 5. She started taking voice lessons at an early age and sang in a professional show choir called Fresh Chances for America for about four or five years (with performances at events and venues like the Reagan Library and Amway Diamond Convention).

She said that her main influences were Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James and Nancy Sinatra, and also Whitney Houston and Björk, among the contemporary singers. Carah Faye's earliest muse was her grandfather, Arnold Moselle, a World War II fighting captain who sang in a "big band-ish" group called The Nightingales. He used to sing lullabies to her like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and he encouraged her to pursue a musical career.

After high school, her dream was to go to New York and attend Julliard School. Instead, she went to Moorpark College and "did some garage band stuff that didn't go anywhere". Through a friend she met Jeremy Dawson, who needed a vocalist to record dummy versions of pop songs he was writing for other artists. One of these early dummy versions was made in the vein of "maybe this will go to Paris Hilton". Later, in autumn 2006, after Paris released her first album, rumors in the celebrity-gossip blogosphere supposed that the voice on the album would have been that of Carah Faye, allegation denied by Carah in a September 2006 interview at MTV.

Jeremy Dawson invited her to sing with Shiny Toy Guns, which he'd formed with Chad Petree in 2003. She remained the lead singer of this band until 2008, when she was released. In a February 2009 interview, Carah says that she lives most of the time in Sweden (Vänersborg), together with her bandmates working on her latest project, Versant. In Sweden, Carah attended classes in child care psychology.