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When Casi Joy first came to national attention as a contestant on The Voice in 2017, it would have been easy to mistake her fresh-faced excitement for that of a newcomer,  but the reality is that she had already spent the greater majority of her life on stage. Casi performed publicly for the first time at age five, singing “Angels Among Us” at a  local Kansas City talent show after discovering a karaoke version of the track on the B side of her parents’ cassette tape of an Alabama album. “I just got really obsessed with  that and the performance side of it,” she remembers, “and begged my parents to let me join the local talent show. They had no idea why because I was pretty bad. They had no idea why I wasn’t terrified to be on stage.” Nevertheless, they helped find  performance opportunities for their daughter throughout the Midwest — Karaoke bars,  talent shows, anywhere that would take her. “There’s so many recordings of me that should never see the light of day,” she laughs.  

 

Now based in Nashville, Casi has built a reputation as one of the most affable and  dedicated performers in her field, growing into a formidable songwriter while  maintaining the keen sense for performance that had been evident even from that first  talent show performance. “Live music, for me, has always been a life-altering  experience,” she explains. “I cry at every single concert I go to. I cry the whole time.”  She's harnessed that passion into a notoriously rigorous touring schedule, regularly  bringing her show to fans in every nook and cranny of the country. By 2019 Casi was  spending so much time on the road that she and her husband Bryan decided to turn  her tour bus (“The Joyride”) into a mobile home.  

 

Over the years, that dedication has won Casi one of the most warmly loyal fanbases in  the industry. Years before the COVID-19 pandemic would force musicians to embrace live streaming as mere concession for live performance, Casi was finding Facebook Live  concerts to be a much bigger opportunity for openness and accessibility with fans. An  early highlight came in mid-February 2018: “Bryan and I decided,” Casi recalls, “for  some of the fans who are by themselves or don’t have a date, let’s give them a date to  spend Valentine’s Day with us.” After the performance, the couple continued  streaming as they cooked fajitas for 27,000 total viewers who were more than happy to  offer tips and suggestions on their chorizo prep. “That helped me as much as they would say it helped them,” she admits. “I can be my  fully weird self and I think that’s maybe what they like about me, so it’s okay to be me.  And that just really helped me come out of my shell a lot. And I think it shows on my live  stage performances now too; if I trip on stage, best believe I’m announcing it on the  microphone and we’re going to have a good laugh about it.” That vulnerability and openness might be surprising for an artist with Casi’s resumé, but it  mainly goes to show that despite putting on a great show, Casi’s onstage persona has  never even remotely been a performance. Her standout 2021 single “The Money,” for  instance, openly discusses her own challenges trying to make ends meet during a “dry season” for the music industry. But she resists the easy trap of melodrama by talking  about money trouble the way real people do, with a sighing sense of humor (“Well cash  talks they say / But all mine ever says is goodbye”) while mounting a very real discussion  about how the cliché that “life doesn’t revolve around money” might fail to address the  realities of most people’s day-to-day relationship to expenses and debt.  



Its follow up “Namaste,” on the other hand, uses a sense of personal detail to find a  path less traveled in the long history of breakup songs by honing in on the specific yet  instantly familiar scenario of an ex-couple’s custody battle over a local bar they once  frequented together. “Everything’s Fine,” her first single after signing with Vere Music in  2022, paints a portrait of a bad day by incorporating similar real-life specificity, like  waiting for a cable guy who could show up any time during the provided seven-hour  window, or discovering your car’s been booted when you’re already too short on cash  to cover parking. “I think I live here now / Cause this dollar’s all I got” Casi jokes drily in  an opening line inspired, she explains, by “the time I went to an audition, didn't get the  gig, and then my card got declined trying to get out of the parking garage. I was  actually trapped and had to call my mom. Sometimes all you can do is laugh.”  



That unmistakable firsthand detail, along with a careful ear for the earnest and often  irreverent tones we tend to take in talking about our lives, allows Casi to spin these  stories — often about day-to-day frustrations — into something wider-reaching and  almost celebratory of those frustrations and the small absurdities we all share in our lives.  Her keen understanding of music’s expressive power and its potential to make those  connections has been a driving force in her curious and dynamic career path.  



After graduating Summa Cum Laude with a bachelor’s degree in education on a track scholarship, Casi  spent her young adulthood fronting a Warped Tour rock band and teaching lessons at  a local music school. At one point she played in and helped stage a performance of  Pink Floyd’s The Wall in full with her students; a few years later she actually had the  opportunity to choreograph another group of students for an appearance at the  Kansas City stop of Roger Waters’ solo tour of The Wall. Just a few years earlier, from ages fourteen to sixteen, she had opened for major acts like The Baha Men as a core  member of The Commotions, a pop vocal group assembled and scouted by a Radio  Disney executive who saw Casi at a Kansas City mall talent show performing LeAnn Rimes’s “Big Deal,” complete with choreography.  

 

Almost exactly ten years later she auditioned for The Voice with a performance of  another LeAnn Rimes song — her breakthrough 1996 single “Blue” — which was later ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the show’s ten all-time-best blind auditions and managed to turn all four judges’ chairs, prompting a friendly bidding war between the  four stylistically-distinct coaches vying to add Casi to their teams. Ultimately, she went  with country stalwart Blake Shelton, whose comments reflected a nuanced  understanding of “Blue” and its significance in the music world and in LeAnn Rimes’  career.  “She has this electric energy when she’s on stage,” Shelton later praised, “and has  these unique things that she can do vocally… she’s old school but has a youthful  energy about her, There’s no stopping Casi Joy.” Her own comments echo that  sentiment: “I’ve always just had, like, really big goals and really big dreams ever since I was five. Even after some of the biggest moments of my life, it’s always like I’m chasing  that feeling that I had and chasing the next one that’s even bigger.”  



But Casi’s rise to attention in the music world has never been marked by even a whiff of  careerism, remaining laser-focused on the excitement about music that inspired her to  get on stage the first time and which, in turn, inspired even her hesitant parents to  support her pursuit of performance despite having no musical background themselves.  That same contagious excitement would later inspire her husband Bryan to leave a  corporate job in Kansas City to move to Nashville and become Team Casi’s Swiss army  knife, handling live sound, photography, videography, and scheduling on tour. 

 

Through each excitement and needle-moving moment, Casi’s open and unpretentious friendliness seems to insist that fans, family, and friends alike feel excited with her, not for  her. She seems fundamentally uninterested in pursuing that next, bigger feeling on her  own, or even just for herself; instead, it feels like we’re all invited along for the “Joyride.”

https://www.casijoy.com/