Rainbow Kitten Surprise is on a big label, playing big venues. But small town is where it’s at.

Deep in the mountains southwest of Boone lies the little Avery County community of Plumtree. And when anthemic pop-rock band Rainbow Kitten Surprise returns from tours that increasingly include multi-thousand seat amphitheaters, this is where its members call home.

Plumtree is a special place, as charismatic frontman Sam Melo puts it. It sits in a bowl at a lower elevation than the surrounding mountains, he describes. The climate’s a little warmer; the plant life a little more temperate. And, importantly to Melo, it’s in the sticks.

Rainbow Kitten Surprise, which formed in 2013 at nearby Appalachian State University, is now signed to major label Elektra Records, yet hasn’t relocated to a major city. This band of North Carolinians – OK, and one South Carolinian – prefers a rural pace. For Melo, living in Plumtree is a form of self-regulation.

“I enjoy the city, but I already run kind of at a high pace internally – I’m a let’s-get-things-done kind of guy,” he says. “It’s nice to have that check of, I’m go, go, go, and then I walk outside and everything around me tells me to stay [and] chill. It’s checks and balances.

“To live at least full-time in a city, it’s matching energies, which could be a little volatile.”

Appropriately, Melo talks fast, delivering an amped-up cascade of words with the same energy as the Flaming Lips-meets-Phoenix indie-rock on Rainbow Kitten Surprise’s latest, “How To: Friend, Love, Freefall.”

Melo doesn’t sound impatient – not really – just intense. He has just pulled into a Nashville parking lot in the pouring rain (and is perhaps feeding off the city’s energy, he infers) to pick up his phone for our interview. But in a few days he’s headed to the coast to play two sold-out Wilmington shows, the first in a run of North Carolina dates that will benefit areas impacted by Hurricane Florence.

On April 27, Rainbow Kitten Surprise headlines Red Hat Amphitheater in downtown Raleigh for such a show, with $1 of each ticket going to the Red Cross.

The decision to help originated with the storm’s landfall in September 2018.

“At the same time we were setting up these shows, [Hurricane Florence] came in. The potential for devastation was already massive,” says Melo. “We were on the road the whole time. I remember leaving Nashville and there was a leak in the roof of our bus. There were just these droplets falling from the roof. This is kind of ominous. It’s pouring rain. We’re driving into the eye of the hurricane.”

Somehow, none of Rainbow Kitten Surprise’s dates on that tour were rained out by Florence. The band either arrived just before the storm or just after. Florence surrounded them, and images of I-40 underwater and videos from Wilmington and other parts east stuck in Melo’s mind. He moved often as a kid, but lived in several spots in eastern North Carolina – Greenville, Dunn, Erwin – and he knows what it feels like when a hurricane hits the coast.

“It’s in the air. It’s in the climate. It’s in the people,” Melo says. “It changes your state of mind, almost.”

He also knows that recovery in hurricane-hit areas can extend years after the disaster has left people’s immediate attention. Melo’s sister-in-law, he said, recently helped rebuild areas of New Jersey hit by Hurricane Sandy – years after the 2012 storm decimated the area. Even when a young Melo was living in the Dominican Republic, where his physician father opened a clinic in an underserved area, he saw that people are much more eager to give money to a cause immediately after a disaster or crisis.

Yet communities heal like a body heals, Melo explains. It’s a slow, imperfect process requiring constant investment.

“If you love where you live and you value it, take care of it. We just wanted to make sure people are taken care of,” Melo says. “We’re just a very small part of what has been done and what continues to be done to repair.”

Details

What: Rainbow Kitten Surprise with Night Spins

When: 8 p.m. April 27

Where: Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh

Cost: $25-$68.58

Info: rksband.com