Melissa Etheridge was teetering on a musical rut in 1993.
“I sort of felt like I had plateaued,” she recalled during a phone call from a Las Vegas concert stop late last month. “I had done three albums and they all kind of did the same. I was played on rock and roll radio, but rock and roll radio was changing. There was this thing called grunge coming in and it was alternative. It was this kind of weird time period.”
So Etheridge, 57, returned to her rock music comfort zone, the place that birthed her career just a few years earlier in rock clubs around Boston and Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, and recorded “Yes I Am,” an album that turned her career upside down.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I just got to go back to my roots, rock and roll. I’m going to write some songs, play ‘em’,” she said. “That’s why ‘I’m the Only One’ comes from a rocking, bluesy, old Muddy Waters sort of rhythm. That was really my intention, to get back to my guitar, my 12-string, and just play.”
On Sunday, Sept. 16, Etheridge will open her “Yes I Am” 25th anniversary tour at Fox Tucson Theatre, a tour that will take her to a dozen cities through mid-October. Her Tucson show is her only one in Arizona.
“Yes I Am” was the turning point in Etheridge’s career. The record propelled her into the mainstream with a Top 30 hit from the first single “Come to My Window,” which earned her a Grammy for Best Female Rock Performance in 1995; and a Top 10 hit with the followup, “I’m the Only One.”
The record happily exceeded Etheridge’s expectations, selling 6 million-plus copies to date.
“You hope that it will do well,” she said. And when it did, “I truly enjoyed that.
“You celebrate that. My old record company, Universal, said they are releasing a remastered ‘Yes I Am’ and then they are going to release some of the demos, the songs that didn’t make it on the album. It’s kind of a fun new thing. It’s good to celebrate.”
Etheridge said she will perform every cut off “Yes I Am” — “There are only 10,” she noted — starting with the second song, “If I Wanted To.” The album opens with “I’m the Only One,” and “that’s too big to start the show,” she said.
She’ll also weave in cuts off from some of her 14 other studio albums including her sophomore record “Brave and Crazy” and 1995’s “Your Little Secret” . She likely won’t draw from her most recent album, 2016’s bluesy “Memphis Rock and Soul.”
Performing “Yes I Am” doesn’t resonate the same today as it did 25 years ago, but Etheridge said there are still songs on that album that take her to another place and time.
“I can just absolutely jump up and have so much fun with those songs. They become memories. They are a moment we are remembering, key memories. It’s so much fun to do those songs with the audience,” she said.
