Music is Vanita’s second language. Born into a musical family, she was handed her first guitar at an early age — and she never looked back. Her childhood days were spent in a family gospel band, and those years performing taught her to speak the language of music more fluently. She penned her first song at age eleven, and her love for words quickly caught up to her love for melodies.

Over the past decade in Nashville, Tennessee, her artistry has grown and been refined time and time again. Her voice is marked by sincerity and curiosity, and her earnest search for life’s deeper truths is evidenced in her lyrics.

Her last album, Fiction, taught her how to marry her voice and her vision to create music that’s both ethereal and rooted in human experience. Filled with haunting melodies and depth of emotion, it’s a debut to remember. As Vanita sat down to dream about her next project, she kept returning to her fascination with a film composers’ ability to reinvent a melody time after time over the course of a film, reworking the tone and timbre to match the mood of the moment.

In A Dangerous Game, she’s trying just that— a repurposed melody in three movements, inspired by the classical music and sweeping film scores she’s always revered. The first track, A Prelude, opens with the hopeful lilt of a string trio, which seamlessly bleeds into Vanita’s open-hearted lyrics in track two. Horns and trumpets bring a somber mood to A Reprise, the final cut of the project, prompting listeners to ponder the sacrifice it takes to stay in love. This creative endeavor sits somewhere between a single and a full album, and fills a space in the Nashville scene many haven’t dared to tread. With words and melody alike, she paints a picture of the lengths one will go to love and be loved.

Vanita still lives in Nashville, with her husband and their pup, Mowgli. Her love for film is more than just the inspiration for her latest work —you’ll often find her little family on the couch with one of their favorite movies.