Singers with Unique Voices: Gina Zo (The Unique Voices Club #32)

Every Friday, I write a post about singers with unique voices not commonly heard in mainstream music in an effort to educate emerging artists and music lovers and inspire them to embrace their own quirks. This week I'm writing on Gina Zo.

Feminist music blog Loud Women covered her and her 2025 album

In honor of the recent release of my friend Dorothy Littell Greco's new book For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America, this week's unique voice will be a queer woman known as Gina Zo. And having dealt with enough mansplaining and sexism in the last week and a half in the theatre world that makes me want to pull out my own appendix, I'm all for it. Rant post on that coming soon. Back to Gina.

Pennsylvania native Gina Zo was a victim of the double montage (sorry, Conrad Khalil) when she appeared on The Voice as her birth name Gina Castanzo when Curly Sue (er, Alisan Porter) was on, and was one of the original implementations into the first iteration of the Unique Voices Club. Gwen Stefani apparently called her lame during her Battle Round rehearsal, which is totally tone-deaf since the album she put out shortly thereafter, Free Your Soul, contained one of my favorite bops "Grouplove." You can't find that album or any of the other old stuff because she's gone through a reinvention recently, so I'm attaching it here:

You see, right? Is that lame, Gwen? My momager and I are always commentating on your outfits.

Anyway, Gina doesn't care about that or the fact that she barely got any screen time now, even if the pressure of conformity had her leave the industry for a while. She wasn't singing music she liked on the show or even after when she signed a small record deal in Philadelphia.

"Men in the music industry made me feel like, as an 18 and 19 year old, that I had no power."

-Gina Zo, "JBL Emerging Interview: Gina Zo on Life After the Voice and Velvet Rouge," Headliner

Now she's determined to make music her own way and stick it to the man, fronting the gypsy-soul rock n' roll band Velvet Rouge. Listening to the band's stuff while writing this, it has a more early 2000s rock sound and more vocal range compared to her recent solo stuff that where she sings primarily in her lower range in tunes that sound more subdued. The solo stuff came after the band stuff though, inspired by her need for authenticity and connecting to people from who she truly is. (She's more dramatic/pessimistic on stage and in the songs than she is in real life so she wanted to reflect that.) Happy for her, even if I liked her old solo stuff 😢.

It kind of feels like sticking my foot back in my mouth for comparing her voice to Gwen Stefani, but they have similar tones but obviously Gina has more range than Gwen's contralto slurring. Kind of like in musical theatre (which is partly her background), Gina overpronounces a lot of her words, but in a kind of a jazzy/country fashion. She could probably even cover Cher without the stuff in the basement. I don't believe Gina needs to prove anything in the music world since she's already earned her stripes through the journey of discovering and owning her voice and sound.

So sing however you like, firebirds. Gina fights against the masculine powers in the creative world, just like I'm doing, and my friend Dorothy Littell Greco with her new book. So go follow what Gina's up to now, see if you can find some of her earlier stuff from Free Your Soul, and order the book. Get misogyny out of art for the love of women.

And that is that for this week on The Unique Voices Club! If you have any artists that you love that you believe deserve to be written about on this blog for the education of others, go subscribe to my Patreon. And check out the rest of the posts (would also help if we were social friends too)!

Stay educated,

Alexia