Karen Johns

Karen Victoria Johns (born 23 November 1978) is an award-winning New Cambrian folk-pop singer-songwriter. The daughter of Doug Johns, a former professional hockey player, Johns was musically active from a young age. Johns had already achieved success as a singer-songwriter in New Cambria and abroad when, at the age of thirty, she won the 2008 New Cambria National Song Contest.

Early life
Born on 23 November 1978 in Downey, St. George's County, Johns is the eldest of the three children born to former Arvant Islanders right wing Doug Johns and his wife Maureen Johns (née McGowan). She grew up in Downey and attended Park Point School, Atlantic Junior High and Downey Senior High School, graduating from the latter in 1997.

Johns took piano lessons between the ages of seven and seventeen. She started writing songs at twelve and taught herself the acoustic guitar at fifteen, although despite her singing success she has never taken singing lessons. She performed at Toward The Sun, an annual New Cambria Christian music festival, and did so for several years, beginning in 1995.

She began writing for A Place in the World, a small Arvant-based Christian magazine, at age fifteen, and was promoted to the position of editor in 1996. She gave up her job as editor shortly after moving to Arvant in 1998 in order to pursue her music career.

Musical career
In 1998, while Johns was living in Arvant, a musician family friend organized a meeting with a record producer for her. From this meeting, Johns secured professional management and began working toward a record contract. Before deciding to sign a multi-album deal with EMI, Johns had offers from four other international record labels.

The Edge of Reason
Johns' first album, The Edge of Reason, was released in New Cambria in October 1999, debuting at number one and achieving gold certification in the same week. The album eventually went seven times platinum, selling over 70,000 copies in New Cambria alone. It remained on the album charts for sixty-one weeks. All five singles from the album reached the top twenty in the New Cambria Singles Chart. Her album also topped the New Cabria Top 50 Albums of 2000.

Following the release of The Edge of Reason, Johns toured New Cambria and Canada, then spent four months on a tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Whilst on tour in Ireland, she met drummer/keyboardist Ian Carmichael, whom Johns later enlisted to play on her albums and in future concerts.

Invited
In 2001, prior to writing and preparing her second album, Johns took a trip to the Balkans as part of the non-profit Sava Project, which works to build friendships between Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian children and teenagers. This trip moved her such that six of the twelve songs on her second album were written either during or shortly after returning from her trip.

In May 2002, Invited was released in New Cambria, achieving double platinum status less than a month after its release and remained in the top 20 for over eighty weeks. The album was released in Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland in October 2002. In Ireland, it charted at number twenty-three in its first week of release, and eventually achieved Gold sales status in that country.

Invited was also Johns' U.S. debut, released in August 2005, and entering the Billboard 200 at number ninety-seven in September. Her album propelled in success with online sales after being chosen as Editor's Choice on the U.S. iTunes store. The enduring popularity of Invited has led Johns to take multiple tours in support of the album, the most recent being a fourteen-city U.S./Canadian tour in 2006.

Images
Johns' third album, Images was released in New Cambria in July 2007, debuting at number two on the New Cambria Albums Chart. Although Images took the top position the following week, it was her first album not to directly debut at number one. Images was certified gold within three weeks of release in New Cambria, and has since gone three times platinum. Four singles were released from Images, all of which topped the domestic singles chart.

National Song Contest
Johns surprised many in the summer of 2008, when she announced that she had submitted an entry for the 2008 New Cambria National Song Contest. In previous years, most of the contest's entrants had been aspiring or up-and-coming artists, not nationally- and internationally-renowned performers such as herself. Johns remarked in an interview that the National Song Contest was something she'd wanted to do since it began, but conflicting schedules had made it impossible in the past.

Johns performed the self-penned Keep on Moving on 29 November, at the fourth Semi-Final in Averytown. Collecting a total of 134 points, she placed second out of the six acts in the Semi-Final, directly qualifying her to the Grand Final two weeks later. At the Grand Final in Arvant, Johns was the odds-on favourite to carry the contest outright, and earned the maximum 10 points from four of the eight jurors. Keep on Moving went on to carry both the overall jury vote and the public vote, and won the contest with 188 points, a 20-point lead over runner-up Sarah Jađehe.

Following her victory, Johns' has embraced her association with the contest, and has made multiple appearances on New Cambrian television during the 2009 contest to offer her opinions and reprise her winning song. For its part, Keep on Moving earned Johns another number one single to her credit. It was also one of the fastest-selling digital downloads in New Cambria history.

Personal life
After the success of her albums and her National Song Contest win, Johns moved to Toronto, where she has lived since 2009, and commutes back to New Cambria regularly. On 11 April 2006, she married Emanuel Howe, in Arvant, changing her name to Karen Howe. "Karen Johns" has remained her stage name for her activity as an EMI recording/touring artist, however she writes and contributes music and articles for various non-profit organizations under the name "Karen Howe."