Track 4 from Never Enough (1992)

Tracks 5 and 6 from Yes I Am (1993)

I remember Melissa Etheridge becoming a big deal with Yes I Am, her first album after coming out publicly as a lesbian in 1993, but I was a kid so I didn't really know how much of a career she'd had before that. Her first three albums had gone gold, spinning off three Hot 100 entries and eight rock radio hits, and she won her first Grammy in early '93, before Yes I Am. But that album really blew up and went platinum six times, and pushed her first three albums to platinum as well, her debut even going double platinum. So she just sold a massive amount of records very quickly in the mid-'90s. K.D. Lang also came out the same year she released her biggest album in 1992, and the Indigo Girls were thriving then, so I suppose that was a real gamechanger era for queer women in music, . 

Melissa Etheridge is from Kansas, although they're something so Canadian-coded about her that I wasn't surprised at all to see that she won a Juno for International Entertainer of the Year in 1990. She's objectively a great singer and has written some great songs, but I never really gave her catalog a whole lot of thought, although I always liked her hits, and her enjoyed 2024 docuseries "Melissa Etheridge: I'm Not Broken" and got to know a bit more of her story then. 

Younger artists with classic rock and blues influences could be saddled with some pretty unflattering production in the '80s and '90s. But once I started digging in, I appreciated the sound of Etheridge's records, which are full of great sidemen and session players like Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino, Jon Brion, Matt Chamberlain, Waddy Wachtel, Scott Thurston, Josh Freese, and Kenny Aronoff. Actor Dermot Mulroney plays cello on "Place Your Hand," I had no idea he's actually an accomplished cellist who's played on the scores of more huge movies than he's acted it. Meg Ryan and Laura Dern also sang backing vocals on "Heal Me." 

This Is M.E. is a very good, clever album title for someone with Melissa Etheridge's initials, but her next album's title  was MEmphis Rock and Soul , which just looks stupid. The album after that was called The Medicine Show and not, thankfully, The MEdicine Show. A pre-fame Brandi Carlile sang backing vocals on 2004's Lucky. And Etheridge's new album Rise is her overdue pivot to stripped down country rock/Americana, produced by Shooter Jennings with a Chris Stapleton collaboration, it's pretty good.