Melissa Etheridge: Finding Strength Through Song

This is it. It's an iconic Music Drives Us today. I'm J-Bo. Our guest is a music icon, a familiar name. Her songs are our friends. Come to my window. I'm the only one. I want to come over. Her new album, Rise, I promise you're going to be talking about it this year. Please welcome to Music Drives Us, Melissa Etheridge. Welcome.

Hello. Thank you so much. Hello. Hello.

Such an honor to talk to you. I got to tell you, we're going to talk about your inspirational new album, Rise. You're coming to Webster Indian Ranch here in August. And that's a great show to see you on the water. But we got to go back. We're going to start in 1993. I wrote this down. My wife says your songs are the anthems of her 90s. Come to my window is not just a song. It's an event. Are you in awe of that song as much as we are still?

That song is a mystery to me. I almost didn't put it on the album. That's how it came from. I wrote it in Europe. I was on tour. My relationship was, you know, my relationship. And it wasn't the best. And I was writing little pieces of... I would dial the numbers just to listen to your breath because I would call and we'd fight and it would be like this stuff. And just to reach you, just to reach you, all those things and come to my window, crawl inside. I just had all those pieces kind of floating around and I put them together and it was... It was a simple song to me. It felt kind of simple and in kind of a strange place. And so I remember I was like, I don't know if I'm going to put it on the album. And I was listening to all the tracks with a friend of mine. And I said, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to put that on the album. And he said, are you crazy? You've got to put that on. And he was like really, really excited about it. I said, okay. And I have seen that song just slowly grow. It took its time in 93, 94. It took about a year. It never broke the top 10 because it took that long for it to play. But it was on the Billboard Top 100. It had the the record of being on it on it for the longest time because it just took everyone so long for it to come around but that means it's sticking it's staying and and when i play that song people come up they they i can see the memories in them i can see there's like families there it's like yeah and it's this this kind of anthony thing which i'm like well look at that what did i know

It's stunning to hear you say that. I was running a top four, big number one, top 40 in Hartford and I was running an alternative station. So Konaway window started in rock. It took a pit stop in alternative next to sound garden and Pearl jam. And then it blasted over. I ran into my boss. who was the general manager, said, we have to play this right now. He goes, go for it, J-Bo. I walked into the studio and we put on Come to My Window. And that first beautiful three riff seconds, it just pops on. And you said you love making songs for the car. That's a crank up, oh my God, leave me alone. This is my song with Melissa right now. And that's the feeling we had when we popped it on Kiss. And we played that thing next to Whatta Man by Salt-N-Pepa. It was such a big hit. Yeah. And we just it's still one of these. Johnny Resnick