Readers, we are starting a whimsical summer. More than cutesy crafts, airy music, and fairy tale entertainment, we want a full-on sumemr lifestyle shift focused on real feelings and joyful memories. For a change like this, we need a guide. We’ve chosen Melanie Herrera.
As the inventor of “storybook pop” and the voice behind the content that reminds us we can be silly and talented, Melanie is more than an entertainer. She’s a role model for knowing that there’s no such thing as “too much” or too many interests. Melanie moves across the performing arts from acting to singing to comedy in ways that most of us can only achieve during passionate private sing-alongs in our bedroom mirrors.
Her new music is a perfect representation of these shifts. Melanie’s latest single, “I Think I Lied” is all bop, but other recent releases like “Whatever’s Left” ask listeners to dig deep and revisit meaningul loss and change.
Melanie is an artist, but really, we’ve been thinking of her as anthology of characters and talents that we are desperate to know more about. Luckily, we had a chance to talk to Melanie about her career and her recent work, so you can get the full story too. Check out our conversation below.
Showstopper Magazine Online: You are a multi-talented performer! It’s so exciting to see work that moves between hilarious and heartfelt. How do you manage these different forms of creative expression?
Melanie Herrera: Thank you so much, that’s so nice of you! Honestly, for a long time, I was afraid to be both things–sometimes it feels like the entertainment industry wants you to be so hyperspecific that you lose complexity. But to be honest, this is just who I am! I love to laugh, and I love to be weird, and I love joy… I’m also deeply introspective and emotional. I think I just decided to dance between the two because that’s what felt authentic. I try to be intentional about making sure I integrate both things with what I share so that this comes across.
SMO: You’ve described your music as “storybook pop.” Can you tell us more about that label?
Melanie: The officially unofficial definition of Storybook Pop is: “the intersection of narrative lyrics, theatrical melody, sweeping orchestral arrangements, and modern pop production.” I invented it after a music exec told me my style was too theatrical to be pop. I disagreed—I think the best pop is theatrical. But mine has a few different influences, and I wanted to be able to describe it with one term, so Storybook Pop was born.
SMO: Many social media fans know you for your hilarious vocal warm-up videos. What is your writing process like when you’re writing for comedy versus when you’re writing your music?
Melanie: Thank you for saying they’re hilarious! This is a great question. I write a lot of my comedic scripted content with my husband, so that’s definitely difference #1 because I don’t write music with him. I also think that the warm-ups, for example, have a lot of material that we are just putting together in ways that sound funny and clever to us. If we’re basing it on a TV show, for example, we have a lot of lore, characters, and words to play around with. With music, you’re generating a story from your own experience and your own imagination. Music can feel a little bit more like excavating and a little bit less like putting a fun puzzle together—it’s definitely harder, at least for me. As well, a lot of comedy content that I do is for social media, so we’re trying to make it succinct and entertaining—we have the audience in mind a lot (will that land? is that a good hook? how will that look when we film it?), whereas writing music is more like trying to embody a truth… I’m caring less about what people think and more about whether or not it feels like I’m saying what I want to say in a way that makes me feel it.
SMO: Your work and persona embody so much whimsy. What led you there?
Melanie: Joy is the spice of life! We only have so long on this one wild planet… and the world is hard, and life is hard. I just want people to feel warm and welcome and at ease. When I was creating my brand, we thought a lot about what kind of a world would suit this type of messaging. I love cottages and fantasy and fairytales… it seemed like a natural fit… and it’s the perfect container.
SMO: How do you embrace that kind of imaginative chaos? What are its benefits?
Melanie: Ha! Please change my artist name to Imaginative Chaos. To be honest, it doesn’t feel chaotic! It feels very organized in my brain. My visual identity and brand is intentional—it helps me to have a container to create in. It gives me more ideas. As a neurodivergent person, I think that having limits can be really helpful. Otherwise, I become overwhelmed by the existence of every possibility to ever exist.
SMO: Stories are, of course, not always happy. Your most recent song, “Whatever’s Left,” is heavy with grief. How do you find your momentum in harder pieces like that?
Melanie: In my song “A Little, Always,” the bridge goes, “I hate the thought of letting memories die/wanna hang them up like Christmas lights/turn them on to ease the night,” and I think it’s a great explanation of my artistic obsession with preserving truth and memories. To me, songs feel like little jars on the walls of mind. They are ways for me to contain a story or a feeling. And certain stories and feelings feel so monumental I can’t bear for them to be forgotten. Maybe I’m an emotional pack rat, lol. So even if the song is sad, the experience of creating it is ultimately joyful because it’s so satisfying to be able to encapsulate a truth in the world of a song. This keeps me motivated.
SMO: What has it been like sharing “Whatever’s Left” with your fans?
Melanie: It’s been really amazing! I’m so lucky to be able to have access to a wider community now – people share their personal stories and feedback with me all the time. I love hearing from them. I think the child’s perspective in divorce is under-explored, and I’ve had a lot of really sweet interactions with people who felt very seen by this song.
SMO: And you already have another single (and a debut album!) on the way. What can you tell us about “I Think I Lied”?
Melanie: Yessss! “I Think I Lied” is definitely a bit of a bop—I always feel like I want to release something sexy when the weather starts to get warm. It’s a song about breaking up with someone and then regretting it—it’s flirtatious, catchy, and I’m so excited for it to be out. I forced my husband to be in the visuals with me, haha, so I hope people get a kick out of that!
SMO: How do you think “Whatever’s Left” and “I Think I Lied” coexist in your larger body of work?
Melanie: My upcoming album explores the juxtaposition of a life well-lived, which, to me, means embracing the darkness along with the light. It means going through the gray, making mistakes, being honest, failing, loving big, and losing big. I think each of these songs sit at either end of that spectrum and contribute to the larger story the album is trying to tell.
SMO: Your debut album, A Fearful & Wondrous Thing, comes out May 28. How does it represent your complexity as an artist, an entertainer, and a person?
Melanie: The story of this album is ultimately my story—which is entangled with all three of these things. For years, I told myself a narrative that said I wasn’t a person who could accomplish great things. I was fearful, I was scarred from past experiences, and I was artistically tangled up like a mess of yarn… this body of work represents both the creative freedom I found once I broke free of this narrative and the beauty in embracing that life is ultimately a wild thing that leads us to and from love. This album tells the story of a complex inner life that ultimately represents all of us: from the cheeky, silly moments, to the open weeping on a hilltop, our lives are all of these things; fearful and wondrous, outside of our understanding, and meant to be lived.