Melissa Etheridge on Why Her Concert at a Women’s Prison Was So Unique

“This is a setlist that I have never done anywhere,” Melissa Etheridge tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast of the performance captured in her new live album, I’m Not Broken: Live from Topeka Correction Facility. 

“Unexpected Rain” is “a deep track on a deep album, The Awakening,” she says. “I rarely do ‘Unexpected Rain.’ I rarely do ‘The Shadow of a Black Crow,’ which is about addiction. I rarely do ‘Into the Dark.’ I rarely do ‘Love Will Live.’ They were very, very specific to what I wanted to speak about.” 

It was a unique concert in more ways than one.

Etheridge’s performance before 2,500 inmates at the women’s prison in Topeka, Kan., was recorded for two-part docuseries I’m Not Broken for the streaming platform Paramount+. The two-time Grammy winner says she had wanted to perform at a prison for decades. Etheridge grew up in Leavenworth, Kans., within eyeshot of the prison where country great Johnny Cash performed in 1970. The 7-year-old Etheridge couldn’t hear the performance from outside the prison walls, but was struck by accounts of the show. “We just had the newspaper article, and at that point I read it, and was like, ‘Wow, prisons must be a place of great entertainment, and someday I’m gonna grow up and play a prison.’”

The idea came up again when she switched management a decade ago. About five years ago, her management team began reaching out to the penitentiary to see if a performance would be feasible. Once the idea was approved and Etheridge was given a green light by Paramount, she brought on board a production company, Shark Pig. 

The Topeka concert included many deep cuts because the filmmakers asked Etheridge to choose songs based on themes — such as trauma, motherhood, hope, redemption and consequence — that the series would address. At the concert, Etheridge introduced each song by talking about the specific themes.  

The often racuous show included many of Etheridge’s better known songs, too. The show opens with “American Girl,” a non-single track from her 1993 album Yes, I Am. The set closed with her biggest hits: “Come to My Window” and “I’m The Only One” from Yes, I Am, and “Bring Me Some Water” and “Like the Way I Do” from her 1988 debut.

I’m Not Broken also captures Etheridge’s process for writing a song specifically for the concert. “A Burning Woman” was informed by her correspondence and conversation with five of the inmates. The women opened up about their circumstances, how they ended up in prison and their lives during incarceration.

“We sat down in the prison library, and we all spoke,” Etheridge recalls, “and just hearing their stories, laughing, talking, crying, whatever you know we did, was so powerful to me that it couldn’t help but humanize them, because they are human.”

Listen to the entire interview with Melissa Etheridge in the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart or Everand. 

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