Melissa Etheridge at The Paramount – originally scheduled on Apr. 7th, 2020 & postponed to Sept. 2nd, 2020 – has been rescheduled for Nov. 3rd, 2021
Huntington, Long Island, N.Y. (Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 @ 10 AM EST) – Due to circumstances outside of our control, Melissa Etheridge at The Paramount – originally scheduled for 4.7.20 & postponed to 9.2.20 – has been rescheduled until 11.3.21. No exchanges are required – all tickets from 4/7/20 & 9/2/20 will be valid for 11/3/21. For any questions or concerns, you can call the venue at (631) 673-7300 or visit paramountny.com.
Huntington, Long Island, N.Y. (Monday, March 30, 2020) – Due to circumstances outside of our control, we regret to inform you that Melissa Etheridge on April 7th has been postponed until further notice. Hang on to your tickets, we’ll email you (and post updates here) as soon as a new date is announced. For any questions or concerns, you can call the venue at (631) 673-7300 or visit paramountny.com.
“I thought long and hard about the first impression of this
album,” says Melissa Etheridge about the choice of the title track to lead off
her new album, The Medicine Show.
“It’s very different from any of the other songs on the
album,” she says. “Yet it has so much to do with where I’m at right now. I just
wanted to go POW! Hit things right off. BAM!”
And hit it does. The song opens the album with power and
force, roaringly loud guitars, banging drums amassed with fire and intensity by
producer John Shanks. And in front of this, Etheridge puts out the call like a
21st century carnival barker:
Let’s all go to the medicine show!And that medicine? Etheridge is not coy. Which is the point. “Calling the album The Medicine Show puts straight up, front and center, that this is about health, wellness, cannabis, this new thought, new paradigm, however you want to talk about it, however you want to understand it. It influences every song on the album. We’re not afraid of this any more. We’ve come a long way.”
It’s an album of renewal, of reconciliation, of reckoning, of compassion and, most profoundly, of healing. “Yeah, a lot of healing,” Etheridge says. “Personal healing, national healing, human healing.”
These, of course, are themes that have run through
Etheridge’s career, core to the vision and drive that has brought her fifteen
Grammy Awards nominations and two wins, an Academy Award for “I Need to Wake
Up” from the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth and has fueled
her life’s work as an activist for human rights, LGBTQ issues, breast cancer
awareness and alternative medical approaches.
With this, her 14th studio album, she brings it all to new
levels of artistry. The songs of The Medicine Show are inspired by acts of
kindness, love, resilience and bravery on all levels. “Human Chain,” with its
Memphis soul vibe, is of people coming together to help one in need. The
album-closing “Last Hello” draws on the incredible strengths and courage shown
by the survivors of the Parkland school shootings. Other songs take a
look-in-the-mirror stance about overcoming a wide range of challenges and
adversities, of rising above with equal measures of love and fortitude.
The healing builds on the musical medicine of its two
predecessors, 2014’s exuberantly expressive This is M.E. and 2016’s joyous trip
through the cherished history of the iconic Stax Records legacy, Memphis Rock
and Soul.
“I had done This is M.E., an outward journey of myself and
then of course straight back to my roots doing Memphis Rock and Soul,” she
says. “The last few years I have loved what I’ve done, the tours with different
bands, loved each version of it. When I started this at the end of 2017,
everything in me was saying, ‘I want to do what I’ve always done, see where I’m
at, write some songs from that and go make them.”
Renewed and recharged, Etheridge dove into creating new
songs, holing up in a Nashville basement studio owned by her friend, bassist
David Santos. Working alone, she created music for 11 tracks, then went home
and wrote lyrics — “pages and pages, the way I always do” — and the songs came
into shape. Through the songs she processed the deep fears and hurting she saw
in the nation on collective and personal levels (“Shaking” about the national
anxiety, “Here Comes the Pain” personalizing the opioid crisis) and the hope
for healing she embraces so deeply (the unifying “Human Chain,” the rocking,
anthemic “Love Will Live”) with the empathic depths for which she’s known,
framing it all with songs as intimate as she’s every written.
About a month later, Shanks happened to hear Etheridge
singing in a special event at the NAMM music gear convention in Anaheim and
after a little chat backstage invited her to his new studio. When she played
the new songs for Shanks, who had produced her Breakdown, Lucky and Fearless
Love albums and remained a close friend, the two quickly decided to work
together again. Etheridge is up front not just with her signature emotive vocal
power, but plays all the lead guitar parts, from tender on “Suede” (“a good
old-fashioned love song,” she says) to funky on “Human Chain” to explosive on
“Love Will Live.”
Shanks teamed her
with the tight, lean trio of drummer Victor Indrizzo, bassist Chris Chaney and
keyboardist Max Hart. The sessions were done largely live in studio, capturing
the intimate immediacy and crisp vibrancy of the material, the performances
sparkling with bold colors. Shanks extended the arrangements on many of the
songs with his guitar and for the ballad “I Know You Know” brought in
electronic strings orchestrated by David Campbell, whose hundreds of acclaimed
credits include work last year with Barbra Streisand and Paul McCartney, as
well as past works for Adele, Garth Brooks, Beyoncé, Billy Joel, Maroon 5 and
Beck.
Campbell’s touches bring out the depths of the song. “You
will forget everything that we whispered, you will forget everything that we
screamed,” Etheridge sings as the strings mix with piano.
“It’s a grown-up relationship we’re talking about!” she
says.
For many of the songs, Etheridge found herself exploring
themes of her past, but with new perspectives. That’s profound on the album’s
second song, “Wild and Lonely,” a song about wanting to break out of routines,
to reach for the extraordinary — “an angry craving seeps into my skin,” she
sings.
“That was like Old School Melissa,” she says. “It’s fun for
me to play with ‘me’ now, for 57-year-old Melissa to play with the angst. The
whole song is about being on the road, being hungry, wanting.”
Paired with the title song, it fully sets the tone for the
album, sonically and emotionally.
“I wanted the album to have a sound, a feel,” she says.
“‘Wild and Lonely’ really dialed that in for me. When I was doing the demos in
Nashville, I wanted drums like Mick Fleetwood, you put the wallet on the snare
and it’s thud thud thud. John and Victor came up with that, and the song is a
perfect example of the sound I wanted.”
And with that, things are off and running. “Then you start the show,” she says. “Let me set the emotional table here. We’re uneasy. We’re digging, we’re deep.” She cites a couplet from the lyrics: Don’t you wanna save me? Don’t You wanna stone me? “Let’s open our consciousness and look at the last two years we’ve been living and talk about it one on one, talk about the similarities we all have,” she says. “That’s where you jump off into the album.” The jump goes right into the angst and anxiety of the age. “A laugh or a scream, everything’s extreme,” she sings in the vertiginous “Shaking,” the song ending with her having to remind herself, and us, simply to breathe.
“It’s about a bunch of things,” she says. “What it’s like
after the election, to wake up every morning and go, ‘AHHHH!’ This feeling I
thought I’d be all done with by now. ‘Oh my God! What’s going to happen?’ All
the way down from our politics into my own personal business and life. So I sat
down and wrote ‘Shaking.’ I thought, ‘I’m going to get all this out and if
nothing else I’ll get a song out of it.’ I wrote that in one afternoon!”
But again, the album is about both pain and healing. About
finding balance, finding hope. That’s most profoundly embodied in “Human
Chain,” clearly showing the impact of her Memphis foray, its churchy funk and
elevated spirit powered by a boisterous guitar riff and Etheridge’s unflagging
belief in hope and redemption.
“Right as everything started going crazy in 2017, with the
division and racism and hatred coming to the surface, I would find these little
stories on Twitter and everywhere,” she says. “There was one with a man in
France, I think, stuck in the ocean in a riptide and the water was about to
take him, and the people on the beach noticed him and made a human chain and
pulled him in. I thought, ‘That’s who we are! I wrote in my notebook, ‘The
Human Chain.’ Then I kept it simple with the feel and lyrics. You see something
like that and it breaks your heart. We are so much more loving than we are
fearful. It’s time to come together.”
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