"It's convoluted," Melano says about the meaning behind the EP's title. "No one would ever pick this. The title track to the album is Blue Veins and it's kind of like my dedication to Michael Jackson. I wrote it in response to when he passed away, and I just happened to be doing a gig at that time, an MJ covers gig, sort of a tribute to him . . . and I got really moved thinking of him."

"It was a way to try to describe the humanity that is in him, that is in everyone as well, but also his greatness," Melano says. Explaining that blue veins are something that we all have, given Jackson was also called the King of Pop, "it's kind of like he's got blue blood, like royalty," he says.

It was Melano's guiding principle during the making of the soulful EP to be led by Jackson's willingness to take creative risks. This meant taking ideas and pushing them as far as he could. "There's some deliberately out-of-tune synthesisers on the album, segues and different styles of music," he says. "Those kind of things you wouldn't say are safe choices on a poppy recording, committing to those instead of hiding them on the recording, putting them out the front."

The album is an exciting listen, with Melano's musical confidence and experience shining through to create a vibrant, warm, bold release. Melano started learning the piano when he was five and says he hated it "with a passion". He took it up again as a teenager and wound up going to the ANU School of Music to study jazz. It was from here that he joined Casual Projects, a band that enjoyed plenty of love locally and beyond, but it disbanded because of its members' competing musical interests.

"We were writing for a new album and kind of realising that we had these strongly different musical opinions, and maybe it was better to split the project and push those musical concepts and make two separate or three separate projects," he says.

Other than his own work, which has also produced three-track EP Running Round, another project to come from the ashes of Casual Projects has been nu-grass outfit Mustered Courage, for whom Melano has also written songs. One of them, called My Hometown, has received a lush reworking on Blue Veins.

The song originally appeared on Mustered Courage's Golden Guitar-nominated second album, Powerlines. "I wrote the song deliberately for them," Melano says. "Then when they came back with their version of it, I thought, `Oh man, they've got something different out of it to what I saw in the song.' I feel like theirs is maybe more a sentimental, old-timey thing, and I wanted to strip away a bit of the nostalgia and make it more of a, kind of like sad, triumphant thing."

Sitting well with the four other tracks on the EP, the song is accompanied by a film clip made from historical 8mm film footage deposited with the National Film and Sound Achieve by a drummer named Leon Isackson. A glimpse into life on the road for an Australian band during the 1960s, the film clip, directed by Sari Braithwaite, premiered before 3000 people at the opening night of the St Kilda Film Festival.

Munro Melano

With: DT Gill

Where: The Front

When: December 21, 5.30pm

Tickets: $10 at the door