Krystle Warren’s Web site biography says her beginnings “trail back” to Kansas City, Missouri. But what’s more important in that real-life short story is the bit about her “buying her first guitar at fifteen,” after which she “immersed herself into the song book of Lennon/McCartney.”I always listen to someone’s music before reading anything that they or anyone else have to say about it, and I mean really listen; no TV in the background, no reading while I listen, no distractions. And the word that popped into my head within the first 20 seconds of “I’ve Seen Days,” one of her three MySpace tracks, was “Beatles.” (The tracks at MySpace are all from Krystle Warren and the Faculty’s EP, “Diary,” while there are two Warren solo tracks at her Web site from “Songs from the Underground; NYC Subway Artists Compilation.”)
A Boston Globe review said Warren’s “earthy, intricate songs and dusky singing herald the arrival of an exciting voice in the folk scene.” If you are coming at her compositions from the folk idiom, I suppose they might seem “intricate,” but I prefer to look at Warren as breaking out of the folk confines with smooth moves picked up in R&B and soul, with chord progressions right at home in jazz. For the seasoned listener, then, there is nothing intricate or challenging about what she’s doing. She has her own style, certainly, but is right at home in the jazzy genres, wearing them as comfortably as a broken-in pair of jeans.
Warren admits as much when she recounts her formative years. “I performed in a lot of jazz spots when I was about twenty,” she says at her Web site, “which was really helpful in my education in theory.” Luckily (for us) Warren didn’t stop at the theoretical, which has a way of producing clinical and lifeless music; she submerged the theory into her life and experiences, and thus gives us some refreshingly original tracks.
“Infinity,” 
MySpace track two, is such a tune. This is definitely more Lennon than McCartney, and is the type of multidimensional, soul-inflected folk-pop that Lennon was noodling with in the year or so before his untimely death. I have not heard anyone else pick up this particular baton and run with it any better than Warren does.
The last track at MySpace, “A Song for Holly,” is another mélange of musical multiplicity, with a dash of bossa and a slice of salsa layered over another timelessly tuneful Beatles base. Warren and her crew cook up as fine a musical melting-pot as any I’ve heard, with disparate styles co-existing nicely and no border clashes at all. In fact, their musical melting-pot is mixed sweetly and completely.
Warren and the group are working on a first full-length album under the watchful eyes and ears of two-time Grammy-winning producer Russell Elevado. They’ve been tracking at the renowned Electric Lady Studios in New York for over a year now, and the final product, “Circles,” will bring Warren’s most current, most mature compositions to a world sorely lacking in popular music of depth, complexity and passion.
Krystle Warren and the Faculty lack none of these things. “We’re just reflecting our musical taste,” Warren has said. “I personally love classic rock and learned a lot from Brit pop, as well as jazz, R&B and so many styles.”
What she has learned, Krystle Warren has returned to teach. 
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