The many shades of Ella Bleu Travolta

When Ella Bleu Travolta appears on our video call, the first thing I register is her beaming smile. She might come from lofty parentage — the actors John Travolta and the late Kelly Preston, to be precise — but right now she looks like the classic girl next door: Travolta is in a black turtleneck and her newly cropped hair is scraped back into a ponytail. In the background I can see the traditional furnishings of an upmarket New York hotel room — she’s currently in town for MoMA’s annual Chanel-sponsored film benefit, and the budding actor-slash-musician is palpably delighted to be in the Big Apple.

“I’m going to show you my view,” she says, turning her phone around to reveal the amber hues of Central Park. “It’s so beautiful right now. I love the weather, the trees changing. All of it.” There’s an almost-childlike warmth in the 24-year-old’s demeanour — an appreciation for life’s small joys that could easily be lost on someone of her ilk. Equally, it’s clear that stepping into the limelight in her own right is a welcome novelty for Travolta. When the conversation turns to her HUNGER cover shoot, she displays an earnest excitement. “We shot in Chelsea and it was just so pretty with all the Halloween decorations on people’s doorsteps,” she says. “We also shot on the rooftop of an apartment building and the view was just incredible. It was such a fun time.”

Despite Travolta having many strings to her creative bow (and the fact we’re here to talk about her debut EP), she’s refreshingly open about acting being her primary venture. Having already worked alongside seasoned industry stars like Morgan Freeman and Robin Williams in Eye for an Eye and Old Dogs, respectively, she also starred as the lead protagonist in the feature film Get Lost, a modern-day exploration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

“Acting is the first thing that I knew I wanted to try to do,” Travolta says. “But the only opportunity I get to act is when I’m auditioning or have an actual project going on. It’s not much of a one person process creatively.” In part, it was this need for a self- sufficient creative outlet that led her to music. “The two worlds, for me at least, go hand in hand,” she continues. “I’ve always loved singing, but I didn’t think I could write a song. I just had less confidence in that.” When Covid hit, however, the “Dizzy” singer began fiddling around with her chosen instrument — the ukulele — and putting demos together. “I’d be doing something random, like walking or driving, and a melody or a few lyrics would pop into my head and I’d record it on a voice memo,” she says. “Then I’d sit down with a ukulele and start playing chords and make it more into a song.” These were the humble beginnings of Travolta’s EP, Colors of Love.

In a way, this three-year-long project has been as much of an emotional time capsule for Travolta as a professional endeavour. “The whole EP represents chapters in my life — it’s really nice to bookmark it that way,” she says. As the title suggests, Colors of Love spans the various facets of human affection. “Each song is a different feeling, so it could be loss of love, betrayal of love, unrequited love, true love — all the different things that I’ve gone through.”

While the singer-songwriter notes that creating the EP as a whole was “therapeutic” and “a great process emotionally”, she pinpoints “Lost in Your World” — which speaks to her first experience of deep romantic love — as one of her standout tracks. “As soon as I was going through it I wrote the song, which was really cool because it was made in real time. It was very personal and it’s still a very special song to me.” The other song Travolta highlights is “Little Bird”. An ode to her mother, the single acts as a rare opportunity for Travolta to tell her own story independent of public assumption. “When you lose someone, at least for me, even though there’s so much love and support from other people, sometimes other people’s emotions or feelings can get in the way of yours,” she explains. “You don’t always know how you’re feeling or what kind of message you would want to give that person, but it was really nice to get that out there in the form of music. I feel like music is one of the best forms of communication.”

Further to a means of exploring her relationship with others, creating Colors of Love has provided a way of looking inwards for Ella. “Throughout the whole process I’ve learnt about who I am and the kind of person that I want to be — and that, actually, I can accomplish this. I can do music and sing and create things.”

Travolta’s humble nature is apparent throughout our chat and when the subject of fashion comes up — another of the actor- musician’s passions — she’s refreshingly candid about her image being a journey. “I have no idea what my style is,” she volunteers. “When I was a kid, my parents were always so good at leaving what I wore up to me — always just completely letting me be myself, which is just a testament to their parenting. And I think that really shaped how I view everything now. There’s always going to be so much negativity out there. For me, it’s important to focus on the positivity.” As with most people, that can be easier said than done for Travolta — but she remains strong in her convictions nonetheless. “As long as you’re confident — which I have a hard time being sometimes — it’s going to work,” she says. “As long as you feel good, you’ll look good.” It’s also opportune, she notes, that living in 2024 means there’s no one version of what can be perceived as ‘cool’. “What people like to wear or listen to or look at is always changing,” she says.

Travolta’s multifaceted view on life is, perhaps, nowhere more (at least physically) evident than in her EP. Each song — and, therefore, each version of love — is expressed by its own colour in the artwork, which Travolta determined with an almost synaesthetic sixth sense. “I was sitting with a friend of mine and we hadn’t even figured out the name of the EP or anything, but we were kind of like, well, it’s like a rainbow of emotions,” she says. “So it started off with ‘Dizzy’, and it was just a feeling — it felt blue to me. It’s hard to explain. It was just an instinct.”

Tying the wide colour palette of the album together is the tagline that accompanies the EP’s cover art of a hand-drawn cherub. “The tagline,” Travolta explains as our conversation draws to a close, “is, ‘But Cupid, she asked, which love is for me?’ It’s about finding yourself — finding your way through life.” Before we say goodbye, I can’t help but ask her if there’s one colour that she has a particular affinity with. “Blue,” she answers earnestly. Given her middle name, it feels like the only appropriate answer. But that isn’t to disregard any of the other shades that make up Ella Bleu Travolta’s kaleidoscopic life.