Melissa Etheridge sings Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” on Facebook.
As promised, Melissa Etheridge devoted the April 24 edition of her daily Facebook show — she’s done 40 of them so far — to the songs and music of Bruce Springsteen. She sang six songs — some of which she’s never performed in public before — with electrifying energy, and managed to seem both loose and intense at the same time.
She opened with “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and then sang “The River,” “Pink Cadillac,” “She’s the One” and “I’m on Fire,” before closing with “Born to Run.”
She performed with just a guitar on some songs, and with a guitar plus looped percussion on others. You can watch the approximately one-hour show below.
Before “Pink Cadillac,” she held up a picture of the two singing that song together in 1996 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.
“We happened to have gigs in Wisconsin at the same time,” she said. “He was on his Tom Joad Tour, and he was playing at the Riverside Theatre. It’s a really cool theater there. And I was playing the big Milwaukee ernomodome … which seemed really weird to me, that he was in the theater and I was in the big arena, but he was just doing his Tom Joad show by himself.
“And so he invited me over there before my show started. I went backstage and hung with him and I saw him make his …. I know how blessed I am … I saw him make his set list for the night. And we kind of talked. And it was just him by himself. And then I said, ‘Well, you know, your show’s gonna end before my show ends. Do you wanna come over to the arena?’ He goes, ‘Yeah! Sure.’ And so he did. And I could tell some people from the theater knew what he was gonna do, and they ran over to the arena and somehow got in. Because I remember, all of a sudden, I saw, there’s few more people here than there was. And all the folks that were there got a special treat, because he got up and he did this song with me, and man … it was just really fun. And that’s the kind of performer he is. There’s not a lot of performers that’ll just go, ‘Yeah … no rehearsal. We’ll just get up and play and jam.’ He’s that kind of guy. And that made me really happy.”
After she finished performing the song on Facebook, she added: “I used to do that in the bars… so getting to do that onstage with him … Come on!”
You can watch past episodes of the series, and see future ones as well, at facebook.com/MelissaEtheridge.
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