Christian grew up in Georgia in a family where music was always present. His parents met at the Battle of the Bands. His grandparents brought jazz, R&B, and classical sensibilities into their lives. His late grandmother was the one who first showed the Kemp siblings how joyful and beautiful music could be when created, and that stayed with him.
He started playing the violin at six, and he spent years gravitating toward the piano, never formally trained but always drawn back to it. His older brother and sister had grown up playing, and he grew up watching them. His sister became an actress, and the two of them spent much of their childhood listening to film scores together as they would study.
Through his time as a kid with his family in local theatre and into high school, he kept imagining stories to score and then sitting at the piano to figure them out. He wasn’t in a band or music program during high school, but he scored backing tracks for his school's theatre program, and that eventually led him to Georgia's Governor's Honors Program. A songwriting course there changed the way he thought about music entirely. Working with other people for the first time, he felt what music could do between people in a way he hadn't before.
From there, the path became clearer. He auditioned for Berklee College of Music on piano, received a scholarship, and attended Berklee as a student, studying film scoring. Playing live music with bands around Boston was an important time in his life, but as he did more arranging for them, it sharpened his focus more than anything. He kept coming back to the question of how music makes people feel, and film scoring was where that question lived most fully for him.
He has since completed scoring work across a wide range of genres, from animated and fantasy to horror, thriller, and drama. He is now based in the Los Angeles area and is actively taking on new projects.