Raffaella’s debut album is a labor of love
by Cecilia Johnson and Zoe Prinds-Flash
August 12, 2022
Raffaella Meloni heard the warnings.
You shouldn’t let your boyfriend produce your album, her managers said. We’ve seen this before; it won’t end well.
It’s not bad advice, generally speaking, but Raffaella is a child of divorce. Her parents split when she was 10, and she recognized the risks of working with a romantic partner. “I really need you to believe in this, because I really do,” Raffaella told her managers. They couldn’t see the potential, so she fired them. Two years later, her perseverance is about to pay off.
Raffaella, a singer and songwriter who performs under her given name, has released the first half of her debut album Live, Raff, Love, with “Act II” soon to follow. Jake Luppen, a member of the beloved Twin Cities band Hippo Campus, produced Live, Raff, Love and shares a home and relationship with Raffaella. Together, they created an endlessly repeatable pop album with poetic depth.
Act I
Raffaella, 26, has led an unusual life — especially for someone based in the Midwest. She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, did a stint as a Southern California sorority girl, and studied French literature and philosophy at Columbia University’s extremely selective Barnard College. She dated and broke up with a movie star. More than a quarter-million people listen to her music every month on Spotify, and she has opened for artists including Liz Phair and Alice Merton, but she has never headlined a show.
Raffaella started singing around age 13 to cope with her parents’ divorce. “A lot of my anxiety attacks focused on not being able to take a full breath, and I would spiral,” she says in a coffee shop near her home in Minneapolis. “I learned how to sing jazz because of the breath technique.” As a child, she learned songs by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Melody Gardot and soon started working with a vocal coach.
Raffaella released her 2019 EP Ballerina through the New York-based indie label Mom + Pop. Some of the EP’s songs are excellent, especially the sardonic “Nasa’s Fake.” But even that song’s production overplays its childishness, leaning on drip-drop, tick-tock sounds and a carousel-lurching chorus. The lyrics’ observational humor is all Raffaella’s, but the sweet, acidified music echoes the repressed ultra-femme characters developed by Marina and Melanie Martinez.
Act II
Raffaella’s life and career changed on “a very serendipitous night” in May 2019, when her friend Samia opened a Hippo Campus concert in Brooklyn. In the greenroom, “Jake and I locked eyes,” Raffaella says, “and I suddenly was telling him about my parents' divorce, and he was showing me photos of his bunny, and then I didn't see him for like seven months.”
Raffaella and Luppen reconnected early in the pandemic over FaceTime. “We were like, ‘Whoa, that was really fun,’” she says. “And then we [talked] for eight hours every day.” She boarded a nearly empty flight to Minneapolis in the spring of 2020, originally planning to stay for two weeks, and she has lived here ever since.
“I think it makes sense that [Minneapolis] is in the middle of New York and LA, because it is this middle ground,” Raffaella says. “It feels like my space, and I built this home with Jake, which has been lovely.”
The couple share half of a Northeast Minneapolis duplex that Luppen purchased in late 2021. Its proximity to restaurants and parks is essential, since Raffaella — raised in New York — does not drive. The attic holds a home studio, where the duo worked on Live, Raff, Love.
Recording the album demanded long nights of work from both artists. “We would fight,” Raffaella says, especially about the quality of her vocal takes. “But it all worked out in the end, because we trusted each other and respected each other.”
Live, Raff, Love
Each half of Live, Raff, Love illustrates a different shade of Raffaella’s healing from her parents’ divorce. “The first act is really hyperpop: happy, hopeful,” she says. “Brushing over any feelings of heaviness.” Act II travels through “the more dark experiences that [she] had in learning how to love,” including an underage assault (“Rowan”) and a friendship’s demise (“Fcking Smiling”).
“Blonde,” the first single from Act I, is a perfect pop song. Raffaella wrote it after reading about Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalized Marilyn Monroe biography. Again, the lyrics have a bite (“You’d be a lot sluttier if you were blonde”). But the music shines much brighter than it did in Raffaella’s earlier releases. Distorted guitar and Joey Hays’ dramatic drums build tension, then release in a proud, triumphant bounce.
Like “Blonde,” the rest of Live, Raff, Love magnetizes levity and darkness. Raffaella is inspired by the happy-sad dualities in the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 album Golden Hour. “That's what we are as humans; we're walking contradictions,” she says. “So [that contrast] is going to be poignant.”
The album’s lyrics display Raffaella’s immaculate command of language. “Boys on the Couch” fizzes with alliteration (“Fortified fortress for the fantasy fans“). In “Hydrate with beer/ I feel my face getting rounder,” the penultimate vowel literally roundens Raffaella’s cheeks.
“On ‘Buick,’ she talks about driving down to Point Dume,” Luppen says from their home over Zoom. “I don't know what the f*** that is, but I can see it so vividly, because she sets that scene so well. I noticed it affecting my own writing style when we were making the [Hippo Campus] EP [Good Dog, Bad Dream].”
Luppen and Raffaella co-wrote that EP’s “Bad Dream, Baby,” which chronicles Luppen’s own parents’ divorce, his thoughts on Britney Spears’s conservatorship, and his experiences being hit on by older men. The lyric “My girlfriend’s at Coco’s house” is so plainspoken that it seems like it should have ulterior motives. But nope, Luppen is simply reporting on the present moment, which alchemizes the observation into something profound. Raffaella uses a similar technique in “Blonde” when she recommends, “My neighbor Gus can [dye your hair] for pretty cheap.” “The reason I use specificity is to connect, almost paradoxically, to a universal thing,” Raffaella says.
“There's a playfulness to her lyrics that I admire — that I've felt like I was missing,” Luppen says. “The early Hippo Campus stuff was so serious, and Raff could portray humor in such a real way.”
Live, Raff, Love often references pop culture from the early 2000s — Raffaella’s school-age years — which feels right for an album about healing from childhood trauma. Act II’s “Millennial” opens similarly to Ashlee Simpson’s 2004 hit “Pieces of Me,” and Raffaella wears nearly the same pink crop top and blue pants in the “Blonde” music video as Lizzie McGuire does in the proto-Disney Channel show.
Sara L’Abriola, a Brooklyn-based guitarist who has known Raffaella for years and recently supported her on tour, connects Raffaella’s Y2K homages to her avid vulnerability. “Raff is extremely personal onstage, to an extent where I kind of make fun of her for it,” they say over Zoom, “but I think it's really, really sincere and sweet.” They’re particularly impressed by Raffaella’s “Millennial” lyrics: “I wonder if I was successful/ Would my friends call me more?” They say, “That's a real feeling that especially people in our industry feel all the f***ing time … And that was a very moody emo song. Felt very Y2K Avril Lavigne vibes, and I loved it.”
Selected works
L'Abriola, whose solo project is called Hank, recorded their first EP at Raffaella and Luppen’s home in January. At 23, L'Abriola had written songs before but hadn’t shown them to anyone. “And Jake and Raff [were] like, ‘When are we gonna make your music?’” L'Abriola remembers. Luppen produced the EP; Raffaella co-wrote most of its songs; and Twin Cities musicians including Zak Khan and Ben Farmer played on it while hanging out at Luppen and Raffaella’s house. The EP, titled Call Me Hank, will go public in September.
“Raff is the ultimate supporter,” L’Abriola says. They were on tour with Raffaella when they released their first Hank song and video. “It was so nice that Raff was there to be like, 'Don't worry, you look cool. Put that out.'”
Raffaella and L’Abriola have also collaborated in the band Peach Fuzz, which they share with Samia and the indie pop artist Ryann. The quartet recently released an EP called Can Mary Dood the Moon?, produced by Luppen, his Baby Boys bandmate Caleb Hinz, and Sachi DiSerafino from the group Joy Again. All seven collaborators converged in LA in the fall of 2020 and wrote more than a dozen songs. The four that made the EP are willowy, guitar-based tunes that layer together Raffaella, Samia, and Ryann’s vocals.
Peach Fuzz will likely not be touring anytime soon, but Raffaella is planning a trio of release shows — one in New York, one in LA, and one in Minneapolis — for the near future. Earlier this year, she opened on the road for Maude Latour and Del Water Gap.
“I love live performance, because it feels very validating,” she says. “We had this grocery store across the street called Fairway growing up in New York. And whenever we brought grocery bags home, we would call it ‘Fairway hands,’ when our hands were really tired. I want to feel my Fairway hands on tour, from carrying all the gear … Having been bored for so much time [during the pandemic], it really makes you appreciate the Fairway hands.”
Raffaella has also performed at a few Minneapolis concerts, including December’s Blossom showcase at the Fine Line and Why Not’s release show at the 7th St Entry. Her experience as an actor and musical theater fan seems to inform her onstage persona: a bubbly, intense version of herself. While singing, she dances on tip-toes and spins her hips.
Raffaella commends other Twin Cities acts including Why Not, Papa Mbye, and Huhroon. “It's really awesome to be able to be near them and feel even more inspired through sheer proximity,” she says. “This community of artists here is unlike anything I've ever experienced, especially in New York. In LA, people are like, ‘Who's your booking agent?’ But here, it's like, ‘Where can I stream your secret side project on SoundCloud?’”
Raffaella’s Minneapolis era has boosted her confidence, according to L’Abriola. “It would have come anyways, but I think she just found the right creative partner and partner in life,” they say. “I was definitely a fan of her music before, but when she sent me the new stuff, I was like, ‘She's much more herself’ … There's this confidence. And I think that made us closer as friends, because I was seeing this other person than what I knew from [when I was] 18 to 21.”
Before making Live, Raff, Love, Raffaella says, she felt ashamed by her need for collaboration. “I was internalizing this narrative of self-sufficiency and [that] doing everything yourself makes you more legitimate,” she says. “I'm learning, at least for me, it's the opposite. A lot of strength lies in an artist's ability to respect and collaborate with people that they love and love to work with.”
Luppen calls Raffaella an extremely talented collaborator and one of his biggest musical influences. “I'm very intrigued by the way that she perceives life and communicates it to others,” he says. “[With Live, Raff, Love], I want to highlight her and put her on that pedestal and have people really hear her for the first time.”
