A time-honored tradition of the entertainment industry is that the show must go on. Roman De Peralta — known professionally as Kolohe Kai — will be making that happen on Saturday when he headlines the Hi Finest Summer Bash at the Hawaii Convention Center.

De Peralta, whose last Hawaii performance was on Kauai in February, said his vocal cords were damaged a few months ago, forcing him to cancel a series of graduation party gigs for the summer.

“I had to rest my voice, but I decided I was not going to let everybody down and cancel this concert,” he said during a visit to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser newsroom last week.

The Oahu-based musician shares the stage Saturday with a major lineup of island-music favorites: Maoli, Ekolu, PeniDean, the Jimmy Weeks Project, Irie Love, Kapena and the Mana‘o Company.

Some of De Peralta’s favorite bands from his early days will be among those performing on Saturday. In fact, the first song he learned to play was Mana‘o Company’s remake of “Drop Baby Drop,” originally recorded by reggae artist Eddy Grant in the mid-1980s. Danny Kennedy, a founding member of Mana‘o, is De Peralta’s manager.

Ekolu was “my favorite band growing up,” De Peralta said — and the band’s music inspired him as a songwriter. Maoli was a favorite while De Peralta was at Castle High.

DE PERALTA broke into the local music scene in 2009 when he won the Brown Bags to Stardom talent contest, performing a song he’d written, along with some friends who played with him as members of Kolohe Kai.

The name — De Peralta translates it as “rascal ocean” — came to refer to the group, even though he was the lead vocalist, wrote all the songs and made the recordings.

With his friends, De Peralta recorded the 2009 album “This is the Life.”

“I was a solo artist signed by a record label when I was young,” he said. “I brought my friends along, we formed a live band and played at all the shows.”

A decade later, backing vocalist Jasmine Moikeha remains from the Brown Bags days.

“In the studio it’s just me and a couple of producers — that’s what Kolohe Kai is on the recording side,” De Peralta explained.

As Kolohe Kai, De Peralta recorded the all-original album “Love Town” in 2011. After that, he took a three-year break from the music scene, but came back with “Paradise,” which won the Na Hoku Hanohano award for Reggae Album of the Year in 2015.

He recorded sparsely over the next few years, releasing just one single, “Higher.”

When he returned to the studio, De Peralta turned to island pop. His current Kolohe Kai single release is “Heartstrings.”

De Peralta describes it as “a really different kind of song. Very pop. Not a reggae song like the old ones. It’s my first non-reggae song that I ever had on the radio.

“I’m happy that the fans like it. I’m so grateful,” he said.

De Peralta’s manager, Hoku Award-winning recording artist Kennedy, reported that the song has streamed more than a million times on Spotify, while the music video been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.

De Peralta said he gets approximately 0.003 cents per stream, “so don’t think I’m a millionaire!”

The music video version shows two of his friends, husband-and-wife in real life (“good friends of mine for years”), living the romance the lyrics describe. Beautiful though it is, De Peralta said he has discovered another set of meanings in the lyrics, and so a new video treatment of the song is on the way.

“What I started to realize was the application to the way that parents view their children, and how children pull on their heartstrings,” he said. “The way a mom looks at her daughter can be very much the way that song goes.”

The new video includes “Uncle Danny” Kennedy’s grandson, De Peralta notes, and should be released in the next few days.

While De Peralta wasn’t thinking about anyone in particular when he wrote the song, he said he is inspired by the idea of love and loving relationships.

“It’s just the feeling, the idea,” he said. “I cultivate so much inspiration from other peoples’ relationships, or from my past or what I want in a relationship.”

“HEARTSTRINGS” HAS been released only as a download so far, but it will be included on the complete album De Peralta plans to release next year. He’s been working on it with four producers: Imua Garza, who has been with him since the beginning; Kapena De Lima, who worked with De Peralta and Garza on “Paradise”; Noah Cronin, a long-time friend; and Brian Kierulf, his studio partner on the “Heartstrings” single.

“I love recording,” De Peralta said. “To me, recording is cooking, and performing is like being a waiter and seeing the look on people’s faces and seeing how they enjoy the food. I love ‘cooking’ more. I don’t know how to cook really well in real life, but I sure like cooking in the studio!”

In January, he plans to return to the stage in New Zealand, performing at the One Love Festival, where he also played two years ago. But first he will perform at the Summer Bash, after which he is going to seek treatment for his vocal problems in Los Angeles.

The youthful-looking 26-year-old has weathered some tough times over the past two years, after an automobile accident left him with chronic back and neck pain, so intense that he had to give up his favorite pastime — surfing — as well as music, for a while.

After months of therapy, he was able to return to the water, and said that also brought him back to music.

“Music is a ventilation for me to express my feelings, but surfing helps me escape everything,” he said.

“As a kid in Hawaii, growing up in a musical family in the backyards of this island and carrying around an ukulele, it was natural. You listened to island reggae music. I just loved it — and surf culture.

“We haven’t done a show on Oahu for three years so this is a comeback show,” he said. “I’m so excited to be playing for the fans. I’m going to put on a good show for this Saturday, no doubt.”