Melissa Etheridge - Le spectacle de médecine

The Medicine Show finds Melissa Etheridge doing what she's always done best: turning a decade's worth of anxiety into something you can ride hard on.

This is Etheridge's fifteenth studio album, and it arrives with the sound of someone deliberately returning to the guitar-driven, arena-sized rock that made her famous in the early 1990s. After a series of records leaning toward soul and blues, she once again sought distortion, and the reason was personal: Etheridge spoke of the album as being built around health, wellness, and healing, a theme that extends from personal to national. The Medicine Show was released in 2019 in a country she considered sick in more ways than one, and she wrote based on that diagnosis rather than distancing herself from it.

Shaking leans on a jittery, tense riff straight from this anxiety-inducing cultural moment, Here Comes the Pain turns the opioid crisis into slow, grinding blues without batting an eyelid, and Last Hello is the album's quiet one-two punch, written for the Parkland students who turned heartbreak into activism. The Medicine Show sets the tone from the start, an arrogant and semi-sardonic prescription for a country that never stops bleeding.

Etheridge never needed to come back, she never left, but this one always seems to want to prove it.

Track listing

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. Sweden
5. Last Hello