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Music

Audience request? Sure, she obliges

By JANET ZINK
Published August 19, 2006

CLEARWATER - Melissa Etheridge definitely gave her fans their money's worth Friday night.

Etheridge performed for two hours and forty-five minutes straight for a sold-out crowd of more than 2,000 at Ruth Eckerd Hall, cracked jokes during between-song patter, and as a breast cancer survivor in her 40s, for most of the show rocked as hard as any 20-year-old in a punk-pop band.

Best of all, in a true show of devotion to the people who packed the hall, she diverted from her set list to do an audience request, something practically unheard of in these days of tightly scripted rock concerts. When a woman near the stage held up a sign requesting Four Days, a song Etheridge wrote about a woman rescued from the floods that followed Hurricane Katrina, Etheridge obliged with an impromptu a cappella version.

"I thought once I found true love, my career would be over. But it seems there's a lot things to write about these days," she said after the number.

Indeed, Etheridge delivered her love-and-relationship-themed hits, including I Want to Come Over, Come to My Window, Like the Way I Do and Bring Me Some Water.

But she also offered songs about her experience with breast cancer, including This is Not Goodbye and I Run For Life, which she wrote at the request of co-sponsors of Race for the Cure.

After I Need to Wake Up, which she wrote for Al Gore's movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, Etheridge said her tour buses and trucks run on biodiesel fuel.

Though the stage belonged to Etheridge, her guitarist Phillip Sayce was a standout, providing the singer with a powerful rhythmic backup, creative embellishments and thick, distorted lead breaks as muscular as his buff bod.

Throughout the concert, Etheridge displayed a charming sense of humor.

Before launching into Don't You Need, she poked fun of her closely cropped, spikey hair, saying it had "enough hairspray to choke a cat." She talked about visiting the beach in Clearwater, and stumbled over the words "We rented Waverunners," noting how hard that phrase is to say. And it really is. Try it three times fast.

[Last modified August 19, 2006, 05:38:14]