As you approach Universal Studios from I-4, you’ll see Volcano Bay’s Ko’okiri Body Plunge. The drop-slide is impossible to miss, and serves as a marker of sorts while sitting in traffic.
Ela Melo, lead singer of Rainbow Kitten Surprise, will see Ko’okiri Body Plunge too when her band comes to the Hard Rock Live Tuesday. But she has her eyes set on something more thrilling right now: a do-over.
“It feels like a second chance that we are getting,” says Melo on getting to perform in Orlando. “I’m very grateful to be able to come back and perform there and I’m just excited.”
Orlando is a part of Rainbow Kitten Surprise’s story as a band and the place where a difficult but necessary decision was made to postpone their 2023 tour for medical reasons.
“We had to cancel our last Orlando show right when we were down there because I was not in the capacity to perform,” explains Melo. “That is my main memory of Orlando right now, making that decision with our band and management on the bus to bring down the tour.”
There will be new memories made soon enough. The band has new music: a new record, Love Hate Music Box released back in May. The genre-defying band’s fourth album and the first in six years was a mash-up of previous projects of Melo’s. “It started off as this dream-state of projects that I had shoved away and had them in a box and brought out,” Melo says.
The journey to making the record was a long and difficult one. Melo has been open about her transition, receiving a diagnosis for bipolar disorder and overcoming writer’s block. With the help of producer Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves), Melo learned how to use her quiet voice to sing about powerful topics.
“Getting to making the record was the strangest thing,” Melo says. “I had writer’s block for the longest time. It was years of making aimless projects and manic. It was a dialogue I was having with my computers about music. It was unveiling some things I was insecure about, and it came alive in the studio. Our producer, Daniel Tashian, called it ‘finding the quiet voice,’ which is whatever the thing that is persistent yet soft. That’s the vulnerable stuff we want to dig into, and the hardest stuff to open up about.”
Melo is opening up to audiences on this tour with these new songs, and it’s an experience the western North Carolina native finds to be a cleansing.
“It’s cathartic,” says Melo about singing songs from Love Hate Music Box. “I believe that as songwriters we build up skeletons in our closet that at some point have to be cleared if we want to grow and move forward with our craft. You can’t just skip along to the good stuff.”
One of those songs seeing the light of day live is “Superstar.”
“I wrote ‘Superstar’ at my parents’ house, singing into a microphone that was partially in the closet,” says Melo.
“I lifted the microphone to the point where I had to stand on a chair to sing into it because I thought that was going to get the best acoustics. The last thing I felt like was a superstar, but that is the irony of it.
“I feel that everyone feels like they have to make people laugh or they gotta make people happy,” Melo continues. “Everyone wants to be a superstar for someone in their lives, not for the glory, but you want to be a positive creative force for the people in your lives. I feel that pressure all the time, but I don’t let it get to me.”
Melo also had an assist from a “superstar” on this record as well. “Overtime” has a feature from rising country music star Kacey Musgraves. Musgraves and RKS share a producer in Daniel Tashian. Melo was pleased with how the song came out.
“We shared a studio at the time,” says Melo of Musgraves. “She was like, ‘Let’s do something sometime,’ and I was like, ‘Here’s this song on the record.’ I didn’t know if she wanted to do a whole second verse by herself or if she wanted to do harmonies. Taking the second verse is a big thing in country music. I just remembered when she laid down that verse and sent me a voice memo. We were in Paris, and I listened to it and fell in love with it. I was like, wow, she really nailed this. I go outside and my whole band is like, ‘We heard you have the goods!’ I was really happy that it all transpired.”
Even though Melo is looking forward to coming to the Sunshine State, she still has her eyes on the Tarheel State. Our conversation took place as Hurricane Milton was exiting Florida. Days previously, Hurricane Helene had devastated the RKS home base of North Carolina. The band from Boone, N.C., will be donating ticket profits from their North Carolina shows to Helene relief funds.
“I’ve been trying to stay out of the news about it,” says Melo about Hurricane Helene. “It’s hard to watch, and I’ve seen some videos. We got friends and family on the mountain, and some of them are now getting water and power back on. … I have a lot of memories of Boone and it is a place I hold in my heart. It hurts to see what is happening now. All I can picture now is the images I’ve seen of the flooding. All I can think of is the place that I know and love still there? [But] I do have confidence in people’s capacity to rebuild and get back on their feet.”
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This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.