The legendary Melissa Etheridge joins our Zoom call fresh out of the shower in her sunny hotel room in Palm Springs. Her damp hair rests on her black Norman’s Rare Guitars t-shirt.Though we’re eight hours apart and the sun has long gone down for me, Melissa’s warm smile is enough to brighten up my evening.
Growing up in Kansas in the 60s and 70s, Melissa’s family loved music. “We had this one radio station for our whole area around Kansas City called WHB. It played everything when I was a child. Led Zeppelin, then Tammy Wynette, then Marvin Gaye,” Melissa recalls fondly. “So I was exposed to all that and I really enjoyed it.” Can she remember the moment she knew she wanted to pursue music professionally? “That’s something that just grew and grew,” she says. “When I was about eight, I started playing the guitar. I played it and played it. When I was about 11, I was like, ‘I like this, I think I can do this.’ I just started from there.”
Fast forward to 1987 and Melissa proved that she could certainly rise to the occasion whenBut the band she was working with said, “He just wants that raw you. Ask him if he’ll give you four days in the studio and we can give him a record.”
