Driving to the Beach: Mistine’s Dreamy Pop & A Career of Her Own

Jersey girls do it best.

Photography by Julia Collins

Mistine is summer personified. Dripping with enthusiasm and her untamed beachy blonde waves moving with her as she speaks – everything she does seems to be an extension of who she is. With dreamy pop sounds, denim jeans with patches, a debut EP on the way and a bubbly personality to match, Mistine is the friend we all want to have. 

Rolling up with a relaxed bag, stacks of bracelets on her wrists and a grin on her face, 24-year-old Christine Meisenhelter is ready to face the day. After we hug and make our introductions outside of the Belmar, NJ coffee shop, Mistine pops inside the shop to place her order – a plain black tea. Coffee shops are a home base for her, as she notes that whenever she’s on tour she loves to get up in the morning, find the nearest coffee shop in whatever city she’s in and walk there for her morning ritual. 

Oh, yeah, did I mention she was the touring bassist for Conan Gray, Zeph and WiztheMC? This Jersey girl turned California cool girl, and now New York City hopeful, has lived many fascinating lives. But the invisible string that’s tied all of her adventures together is music.

Mistine’s lifelong affair with music has taken her to many places: learning about rock music in Red Bank, NJ, music school at USC (where she graduated with honors), on tour across the country playing bass and most recently to her bedroom to write songs for her first-ever solo project. The fade EP releases on June 30th and two singles from the project have already been released: “Everett Park” and “Temporary Feeling.” 

Dreamy pop music is how most would describe Mistine’s sound, but she calls it “driving music.” Picturing herself in the driver's seat with the windows down driving to the Jersey Shore on the way to get ice cream is her vision of her music, and she’s not wrong. 

Sometimes, the person and their music don’t match up. A delicate face lets out a raspy voice or a young teen lets a deep bass sound fill the room. Mistine is the opposite of that. Her image reflects her sound, and not in a corporate marketing way. She is as genuine as it gets. 

Mistine’s music is also as genuine as it gets. Writing songs about breakups and situationships may be cathartic, but releasing those songs to the world can be terrifying. But Mistine just wants to give people a safe space to relate.

For someone who is new to the solo-project game, she already has her listeners at the forefront of her mind. Artists like that don’t come along every day.

Mistine is poised on the edge of her life, but she doesn’t act like someone in waiting. Doing everything with intention seems important to her. When asked if it feels weird to be releasing an EP now that she made almost a year ago and if there’s anything she wishes she would’ve done differently, she shrugged and said she did the best she could with the resources she had. She was content with her work and proud of herself. As she should be.

“Everett Park,” the lead single off of the EP, had me singing along to the chorus before my first listen was even over. Mistine clearly knows how to write a catchy tune. Her lyrics, on the other hand, are definitely open to interpretation.

“No one knows what that song is really about,” she said with a glint of mischief in her eye.

Even with a music video to pair with that song, she said she likes to leave specific meanings in her songs open for listeners to insert their heartbreaks into.

This has been a year of firsts for Mistine. First time creating a solo project, first-ever single off of an EP, making her first music video, doing interviews about the project, releasing her first EP and now she’s going to be doing her first album release gig where she plays her own music on July 2nd.

“I like to be uncomfortable,” she notes. “It’s a good challenge, and I love to be on stage so it’ll be fine.”

From being a young kid obsessed with Aerosmith to a college student playing other musician’s songs on tour to a post-grad twenty-something ready to share her own music, Mistine’s journey has been nothing short of interesting. The singer is for sure one to watch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw her headlining a tour of her own in the near future. She knows what she wants and she’s going for it.

You can follow Mistine on Instagram @mistinemusic and catch her at her album release show in NYC on July 2nd at Piano’s on 158 Ludlow St.