Milyssa Rose: It’s Milyssa Rose (spells name) and my real name is Milyssa Rosenson what I’ve done is switch up how I spell my name and cut my last name. And I have different nicknames, like Coco Rose, that’s my parent’s dog actually so I liked that name.

UCA: How long have you been entertaining people?

MR: I’ve always like entertaining and I’m an only child so I would always keep myself entertained by like performing for my parents and my family and my stuffed animals and then of course when MTV was out, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were huge and I was like “Wow, I want to be like them when I grow up!” so that’s what kinda of really inspired me to dress a little differently and just be like this, I guess, larger than life kind of performer. When I was in middle school, I sang Don’t Rain on my Parade” by Barbara Streisand and like all my friends were they were and they were very supportive and they were clapping and I just loved all of the applause and attention and I just knew, like this is what I wanted to do.

When I was going into college, I was like you know what I think I want to be creative and get a production team and start writing and really being able to have more creative control as appose to having people tell me what to do cause I’ve always had this issue with people telling me, like “This is what you need to do!” you know to be, to sell or to be marketable so I kinda felt like I was just take that and control my own end.

UCA: What is it about singing that really inspires you?

MR: For me, singing is very therapeutic cause I get to be creative and it’s a way for me to vent about different things that go on in my life whether it be, you know, relationships I have with people, the big thing is for a lot of people I meet in the music or they “say they are in the music industry”, are people that are up and coming just how they behave towards women and how they’re just pretty much full of it. They’re always promising, you know, like over promising and under delivering, that what a lot of my music is about, it’s just about going through those struggles as an independent artist and as being a woman.

UCA: So, tell me a little about tonight’s event.

MR: For my friend’s birthday party, she’s making like a huge deal of it, which I, she’s working herself to death which is what she’s doing basically but, you know, I’ll do it for her; make her happy.

Milyssa singing “Dream”

I’m going to do an original of this song called “Dream” which she really loves and it means a lot to me to sing it for her because its really inspired her and got her through some difficult times and she’s told me that like time and time again throughout  the years I’ve been friends with her she’s like that song meant something to me so I think it’s kind of, like an honor for me to sing that song for her and that it has put such an impact on her life.

UCA: What’s the future hold for Milyssa Rose?

MR: I use to want to get like a big record deal. At this point, I don’t really care about that cause I think the music industry is full of shit anyway so I’m just going to go ahead and build my own paths and hopefully, you know those people will come to me cause that’s really like kind of my goal is to keep doing what I’m doing, become bigger and better you know become more seasoned, you know, learn as much as I can through ought the business and own my craft then hopefully, they’ll all just come to me.