Melissa Etheridge

Melissa Etheridge is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist who was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, and began guitar lessons at eight. She played in local country groups as a teenager and studied at Berklee College of Music. After being discovered at a Pasadena bar, she signed a publishing deal and wrote songs for films, including Weeds (1986). Her self-titled debut arrived in 1988 and its single Bring Me Some Water earned a Grammy nomination. Brave and Crazy followed in 1989, and Never Enough (1992) brought her first Grammy for Ain't It Heavy. Yes I Am (1993) became her mainstream breakthrough; Come to My Window won a second Grammy. Later albums included Breakdown (1999), Skin (2001), and Lucky (2004). She won an Academy Award for I Need to Wake Up from An Inconvenient Truth (2006), performed in the Broadway musical American Idiot, and premiered the one-woman show My Window in 2023. Her seventeenth studio album, Rise, was released in 2026.