Melissa Etheridge - Medicine Show

The Medicine Show finds Melissa Etheridge doing what she's always done best, turning a decade's worth of anxiety into something you can crank the amp up to.

This is Etheridge's fifteenth studio album, and it arrives with the sound of someone deliberately walking back toward the guitar-forward, arena-sized rock that made her a household name in the early 1990s. After a run of records leaning into soul and blues, she reached for distortion again, and the reason was personal: Etheridge has spoken about the record as being built around health, wellness, and healing, a theme that widens out from the personal to the national. The Medicine Show landed in 2019 in a country she saw as sick in more ways than one, and she wrote toward that diagnosis rather than away from it.

Shaking rides a nervy, tightly wound riff straight out of that anxious cultural moment, Here Comes the Pain turns the opioid crisis into a slow, grinding blues without flinching, and Last Hello is the record's quiet gut punch, written for the Parkland students who turned grief into activism. The Medicine Show itself sets the tone early, a swaggering, half-sardonic prescription for a country that won't stop bleeding.

Etheridge never needed a comeback, she never left, but this one still sounds hungry to prove it.

Tracklist

Side A 
1. the medicine show 
2. Wild and Lonely
3. Shaking 
4. Woman Like You
5. Faded By Design
6. I Know You

Side B
1. This Human Chain
2. Love Will Live
3. Here Comes The Pain
4. Suede
5. Last Hello