Melissa Reese is a musical powerhouse. She began singing and playing piano classically at age four, was writing her own songs by 14, and at 17 taught herself Pro Tools, Reason, and Logic to write, arrange, produce, perform, engineer, and mix her own recordings.

The youngest of three girls, Melissa was born into a racially mixed household — Chinese, English, Spanish, Japanese, Filipino, Irish, Scottish, and Danish — in Seattle, Washington. While her sister pursued a classical path and now sings opera, Melissa moved toward songwriting, leaning pop, R&B, and hip hop. In high school she joined the Roosevelt High School Vocal Jazz Ensemble, taking 1st place at both the Reno and Lionel Hampton Jazz Festivals. In the two years after graduating, she wrote hundreds of songs in her home studio — producing, arranging, programming, and performing every note herself.

Television was quick to notice the cinematic quality of Melissa's music. "Ooh La La", "Pretty Please" and "Old Skool" — three tracks from LISSA (her first media EP, made with industry veterans Bryan "Brain" Mantia and Pete Scaturro) — earned placements across Showtime's "Inside the NFL", ABC's "Mistresses" and "Cashmere Mafia", E!'s "Keeping Up With The Kardashians", The CW's "Gossip Girl" and "Privileged", and FX's "Dirt". Her song "Girlfriend" became the theme for the Just Fab Shoe campaign. She has also recorded with funk legend Bootsy Collins, sung backing vocals for Chuck D and Vanessa Carlton, co-written and produced for Taylor Swift, Goapele, and Universal artist Allan Kuo, and written, composed, and performed vocals for Sony Playstation, EA Games, and Xbox.

Melissa's longest creative partnership is with drummer "Brain," with whom she forms the composing duo "Brain and Melissa." Together they've scored major titles across gaming — including Bloodborne, The Last of Us, Twisted Metal X, Mod Nation, and Playstation HOME, plus game themes for Sony Playstation — and earned an Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) nomination for "Outstanding Achievement in Original Composition" for Infamous 2, going on to score its sequel, Infamous: Second Son. Their feature-length score for Joseph Kahn's "Detention" premiered at SXSW and released nationwide through Sony Pictures/Samuel Goldwyn, beginning a long collaboration with Kahn that includes the viral Power/Rangers short (over 18 million views) and the Grammy-winning Best Music Video for Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" (now well over 400 million views). Their commercial work spans campaigns for Nascar (including 3 Super Bowl spots), Trust Bank (starring Bruce Willis), Seat (VW/Audi), Johnnie Walker Blue (featuring Bruce Lee via CGI), Qoros (Range Rover), and Budweiser, alongside Disney's Fantasia: Music Evolved and the E3 Xbox media briefing for Microsoft, scored four years running.

The duo's feature scores include BODIED (directed by Joseph Kahn and produced by Eminem), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018 and now streams across all platforms, and ICK, which premiered at TIFFin 2025. They served as composers on the "Redraw Your World" campaign featuring Nandi Bushell for Cartoon Network, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision), the HBO/Naughty Dog series The Last of Us, and the documentary Giannis: The Marvelous Journey for Amazon (2024), and scored the Emmy-nominated docuseries Growing Up (executive produced by Brie Larson, streaming on Disney+). Recent and upcoming work includes the Pokémon 30th Anniversary Super Bowl short film (2026) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (releasing October 2026).

As a performer, Melissa has sung the national anthem for teams including the Seattle Seahawks, LA Clippers, Cleveland Indians, Sacramento Kings, Chicago White Sox, Oakland A's, and Houston Rockets, and performed halftime shows for the Houston Rockets and LA Clippers — her first live shows as Brain and Melissa. She was also invited to perform at the 34th annual UNICEF Gala in Germany as a recording artist and U.S. ambassador, and has co-written songs with Mannie Fresh and Grammy-winning producer Drumma Boy.

In 2016, Melissa joined Guns N' Roses as the band's first-ever female member — playing keyboards, samplers, and singing background vocals on the record-breaking "Not In This Lifetime" tour, one of the highest-grossing tours of all time. Now a decade into her tenure, she remains a member of the band and contributed to the singles "ABSUЯD" and "Hard Skool," both of which feature Brain on drums.