Melissa Etheridge 35th/ Yes I Am 30th Anniversaries
Emotive dynamo Melissa Etheridge celebrates two significant anniversaries with me In the Studio: the thirty-fifth anniversary of her surprise two million-selling debut Melissa Etheridge in 1988, and her star maker five years later, Yes I Am. We all know how powerful first impressions are. So regardless of the thirty-five years that it has now been since we first met for a live Q102 Dallas/ Ft.Worth radio interview on the occasion of the release of her debut, Melissa Etheridge in May 1988, the image of the diminutive singer standing across from me in my broadcast studio, clutching a black acoustic guitar that she had just been given by an adoring fan, remains burnished in my memory.
“I got a $1000 car and headed West”, says Melissa Etheridge, revealing her first step like a real-life Dorothy leaving Leavenworth Kansas and landing in Oz, which in Melissa’s case was Southern California, a full five years before she would top the charts with her fourth album, September 1993’s Yes I Am . “Wow,” I’m thinking as she told the story, “she even talks in verse. ‘Thousand Dollar Car’, there’s a song title right there.”