Melanie Martinez Trivia
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This Melanie Martinez trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and follows the whole story so far: the Long Island teenager who auditioned for The Voice with a Britney Spears song, the fan-funded Dollhouse video, the Cry Baby concept album and its storybook, the K-12 film she wrote and directed, the pink four-eyed creature of Portals, and the new character Circle introduced on Hades and Elysium. Along the way it covers her singles, samples, chart peaks, tours, perfumes and the artists she cites as influences. Early questions suit anyone who has had Play Date stuck in their head; later ones reward fans who know which coach she picked on The Voice, which song sampled Lesley Gore, and where her first Hot 100 entries peaked. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing. No lyrics are quoted, so nothing here spoils the songs themselves.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What inspired the name of Cry Baby, Melanie Martinez's alter ego and debut album?
Her childhood nickname
Her childhood nickname. She was called a cry-baby for being so emotional, and has said that building the character was her way of turning the insult into a compliment.
Q 02Which Britney Spears song did Melanie Martinez sing for her blind audition on The Voice?
Toxic
Toxic. She sang her own arrangement while strumming an acoustic guitar and keeping time on a tambourine with her feet.
Q 03Which coach did Melanie Martinez choose on The Voice?
Adam Levine
Adam Levine. He lost his whole team in one night when she and Amanda Brown, his last two singers, were voted off together.
Q 04In which New York City borough was Melanie Martinez born?
Queens
Queens. She was born in its Astoria neighbourhood, but her family left the city for Long Island when she was four, and that is where she grew up.
Q 05Melanie Martinez's parents are of which two heritages?
Dominican and Puerto Rican
Dominican and Puerto Rican. She never learned Spanish, though, and has said the one piece of advice she would give her younger self is to be more eager to learn it.
Q 06What was Melanie Martinez's debut single, released in February 2014?
Dollhouse
Dollhouse. Fans paid for its video through an Indiegogo campaign, and her friends did the filming, hair and makeup.
Q 07Melanie Martinez compared one of her songs, about a picture-perfect but dysfunctional home, to which film?
Edward Scissorhands
Edward Scissorhands. She meant its rows of perfect homes and lawns that all look alike while hiding troubled families, and Tim Burton, who made it, is the film-maker she dreams of working with.
Q 08Which record label signed Melanie Martinez in April 2014?
Atlantic
Atlantic. Its chairman, Julie Greenwald, recalled her walking in with a video she had already made by calling in every favour she could, and said it was 'all her vision'.
Q 09Which song from Melanie Martinez's debut EP was featured in a trailer for American Horror Story: Freak Show?
Carousel
Carousel. She had her manager pitch it as soon as she heard the season would have a carnival theme, then heard nothing for nearly a year until it turned up in the trailer.
Q 10In 'Mrs. Potato Head', Melanie Martinez uses a toy with a swappable face as a metaphor for what?
Plastic surgery
Plastic surgery. She pictured pulling the toy's features off and rearranging them, and wrote the song about feeling pressured to change your looks to fit a standard.
Q 11Which Lesley Gore hit does Melanie Martinez sample on the lead single from Cry Baby?
It's My Party
It's My Party. She wrote 'Pity Party' around it with songwriter Kara DioGuardi in one quick session, then had to wait to learn whether the sample could be cleared for release.
Q 12What came packaged with early physical copies of Melanie Martinez's Cry Baby?
A storybook
A storybook. Illustrated by Chloe Tersigni, it tells the album's story, and Martinez says she had to fight her label to give it to every early buyer, not just a limited edition.
Q 13Which Cry Baby track did Melanie Martinez call 'the second part' of her song 'Dollhouse'?
Sippy Cup
Q 21Besides writing and starring in it, what was Melanie Martinez's other top-billed job on the film K-12?
Director
Director. It was her first feature behind the camera, and she has described the 31-day shoot as sleepless, with 3 a.m. call times, yet says it left her determined to do it again.
Q 22In Melanie Martinez's film K-12, what is the name of Cry Baby's best friend?
Angelita
Angelita. Played by Emma Harvey, she is the one classmate as willing as Cry Baby to use her magic powers openly, which gets the pair shunned by the other pupils.
Q 23In Melanie Martinez's film K-12, what does Cry Baby discover the principal is doing to students?
Medicating them to control them
Sippy Cup. She called it the bridge between her first EP and the album, a look at what really goes on in the kitchen of Cry Baby's family home.
Q 14Which song's video closed Melanie Martinez's Cry Baby visual story in September 2017?
Mad Hatter
Mad Hatter. She called the effects-heavy clip 'the finale' of the album, and it completed her promise to make a video for every one of its songs.
Q 15Which two Melanie Martinez songs shared a double-feature music video in August 2016?
Tag, You're It and Milk and Cookies
Tag, You're It and Milk and Cookies. The songs sit back to back on the album, and the video joins them into one story in which Cry Baby is abducted by a big bad wolf who drives an ice-cream truck.
Q 16Which 2015 Melanie Martinez song went viral on TikTok in 2020 through a Timothée Chalamet fan edit?
Play Date
Play Date. A slow-motion clip of the actor in Call Me by Your Name set off a wave of copycat celebrity edits, and the five-year-old track pulled Cry Baby back up the Billboard 200.
Q 17Which song did Melanie Martinez post on SoundCloud as a Christmas present to fans in December 2015?
Gingerbread Man
Gingerbread Man. She says it was never meant to be a single, but fans asked for it on iTunes and Spotify, so it got a full release weeks later.
Q 18What was the name of the fragrance Melanie Martinez released in 2016?
Cry Baby Perfume Milk
Cry Baby Perfume Milk. The milk is in the packaging: the scent looks milky white but sprays on clear, and it comes in a vintage-style baby bottle with a rubber top.
Q 19Which cosmetics brand released Melanie Martinez's 'Cry Baby' blue and 'Teddy Bear' brown lipsticks?
Lime Crime
Lime Crime. The electric blue shade was inspired by the colour of a cartoon tear, and it went on sale the same week as the album it was named after.
Q 20Which platform partnered with Melanie Martinez to premiere her 90-minute film K-12 online in 2019?
YouTube
YouTube. The film passed a million views in its first nine hours there, and the platform followed it with a companion mini-series set in the same world.
Medicating them to control them. His staff are in on it too: in one dance number the school nurses drug and restrain Cry Baby, using their stretchers as props.
Q 24In Melanie Martinez's film K-12, which song has Cry Baby strung up as a puppet in front of her class?
Show & Tell
Show & Tell. The song is about fame being less glamorous than it looks, so a teacher works Cry Baby's strings while her classmates clap, laugh and cheer for more.
Q 25Which 2020 single was the first Melanie Martinez song to feature another artist?
Copy Cat
Copy Cat. Rapper Tierra Whack guests on it, and it was announced as a taste of her next EP, yet it was missing from the track list when that EP finally came out.
Q 26What is the title of the 2020 EP that Melanie Martinez released as a deluxe extension of K-12?
After School
After School. She set out to add three bonus songs and ended up with seven, and called the result more personal, a step outside the Cry Baby character for a moment.
Q 27Melanie Martinez opened Australian shows in January 2016 for which American Idol runner-up?
Adam Lambert
Adam Lambert. He lost the 2009 final to Kris Allen but went on to tour the world singing lead with Freddie Mercury's old bandmates, and Martinez warmed up the crowds on his own Original High Tour.
Q 28How did Melanie Martinez start teasing her album Portals in February 2023?
Archiving all her Instagram posts
Archiving all her Instagram posts. With her old look cleared away, she posted teasers of eggs incubating in a forest, then announced the album with a clip of herself hatching from one.
Q 29What form does Melanie Martinez's alter ego take in her Portals era?
A pink, four-eyed fairy creature
A pink, four-eyed fairy creature. It bursts out of a giant egg in the album's announcement video, and Martinez wore the full facial prosthetics on stage as well as on screen.
Q 30Which two Portals singles gave Melanie Martinez her first Hot 100 entries with her own songs?
Death and Void
Death and Void. They reached numbers 95 and 61 in spring 2023, and until then her only Hot 100 entries had been two cover versions from her 2012 run on The Voice.