Melisa Young at her Chicago apartment. (Tribune photo by Nancy Stone)
Melisa Young --- better known in the pop world as Kid Sister – has just gotten off a plane and stepped inside her North Side apartment for the first time in weeks. Winter has descended, and the apartment is cold, so she slips under the covers of her bed with her coat on.
“It’s nice to be home,” Young says with a laugh as she picks up the phone to start an interview, her last bit of business before she goes to sleep. She’s just completed an exhausting month of promoting her debut album,
“Ultraviolet” (Downtown/Universal), one of the most talked-about albums of the year with its cutting-edge merger of hip-hop, dance music and pop.
“Last night I had dinner with Questlove of the Roots, and he played a little DJ set in the meat-packing district [in New York],” she says. “It was very yuppie, but a lot of fun. I danced around in my underwear.”
For some performers, an underwear dance might connote something provocative. But Young makes it sound anything but, more like a bunch of girlfriends enjoying themselves at a slumber party. “I am a nerd,” she says. “I’m not a celebrity. Being a celebrity is an attitude, but Chicago is way more low-key about that. People don’t grow up here thinking they’re going to be the next big star.”
Yet in the last few years she’s become one of the brightest new faces in club music. She’s collaborated with artists such as
Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green, all of whom requested to work with her. She made her first network TV appearance a few weeks ago on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” showing not a hint of stage fright as she frolicked in the audience while performing an energetic version of her single “Right Hand Hi.” Already a veteran of main-stage appearances at festivals such as Coachella in California and Lollapalooza in Grant Park, she is now preparing for a new year of heavy touring worldwide.
Through it all, Young remains unfazed, a budding pop star who still remembers very well where she came from: a blue-collar upbringing in south suburban Markham and years of trying to squeeze music-making between shifts clerking at retail stores. At one point she was holding down three jobs and catching cat-naps on breaks, while fending off warning notices from utility companies because she couldn’t afford to keep up with her bill payments.
“I don’t think I realized this was my full-time job until about nine months ago,” says Young, 29, of her music career. “I was going to release my album last year, and then I took it back to work on it some more because it wasn’t exactly the way I wanted it. That’s when it sunk in: This is what I do. It took a long time. I’d always played it off as, ‘These are my little songs, it’s not a big deal. It’s just a hobby.’ ”
Young was born in 1980 to biracial parents; her mother of Irish and German descent, her father African-American. Her brother Josh was born three years later. Both parents worked various day jobs and kept the family fed and sheltered, but could afford few frills.
A relative of Young’s mother made sure the kids were exposed to the arts. “Our parents instilled a work ethic in us, and our Aunt Rose, my mother’s aunt, was a big supporter of us going to plays and concerts, and paid for Melisa to attend Piven Theatre workshops [in Evanston],” Josh Young says.
Melisa Young played a number of lead roles in school musicals while attending Rich South High School in Richton Park, and briefly lived out her childhood dream of becoming a performer. Those plans were deferred as she studied film while attending Columbia College in the South Loop. She worked behind the scenes on a couple of Hollywood movies, doing everything from fetching coffee for Sigourney Weaver to building props. She didn’t have enough money to move to New York to find steady work, and found the movie industry even less lucrative in Chicago. A “tedious and repetitive” stint as an assistant on an ill-fated reality TV show for $100 a day convinced her she was in the wrong business.
Meanwhile, her brother Josh was ripping it up on the DJ and dance scene in Chicago with his friend Curt Cameruci. Their inventive mash-ups of hip-hop, pop, rock and electronic music brought a measure of underground fame in the duo Flosstradamus. Melisa Young started tagging along to their parties, bringing her friends to dance the night away.
“I was broke and my brother was making money doing music, doing something fun,” Young says. “I took notice of that.”