text: Melissa Etheridge rocks solo performance at New Jersey Performing Arts Center | NJ.com
  Melissa Etheridge rocks solo performance at New Jersey Performing Arts Center
  Updated June 26, 2009 at 4:40 PM ; Posted June 26, 2009 at 4:22 PM
  TONY KURDZUKMelissa Etheridge performed Wednesday at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on her Live and Alone tour
  During her Wednesday night concert at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, Melissa Etheridge debuted a new song, "Away," that she is thinking about including on a new album she will begin recording in a few weeks. It's a ballad, but the album itself will have "a lot of rockin' songs," she assured her fans.
  This was a solo show, where Etheridge accompanied herself, mostly, on acoustic guitar, and occasionally on electric guitar or piano. Yet it, too, had a lot of rockin' songs.
  When she stomped out the beat on "Chrome Plated Heart," for instance, or strummed muscular power chords on "Your Little Secret," or sang with throat-shredding intensity on "I'm the Only One," she proved you don't need a band to rock. Etheridge, 48, has built her career on her belief in the redemptive power of rock 'n' roll, and she wasn't about to let the lack of a rhythm section stop her.
  It was an intimate evening as well, though, with Etheridge -- who also has solo shows booked for August in Red Bank and Atlantic City -- casually chatting, between songs. She talked about her wife and her growing children: "I don't know how to parent eye-to-eye," said the mother of four, including a 12-year-old daughter. She talked about music: She played harmonica on a few songs, she said, "because if you are a rock star and you do a solo show, you have to play a harmonica."
  Mentioning her battle with breast cancer, and the fact that she has been cancer-free for five years, she inspired the night's loudest cheer.
  Two of the evening's best numbers found her on the piano, playing tribute to two of her influences. First she sang Joan Armatrading's introspective cheating tale "The Weakness In Me," after talking about playing it in noisy bars, early in her career, and dreaming about presenting the kind of show she was presenting at NJPAC.
  Four numbers later, she returned to the piano to perform a slow, heartfelt version of Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" ("Since we're in New Jersey ...," she said). She hadn't played it in public since Springsteen sang it with her on her 1995 MTV "Unplugged" special, she said, adding that that was "one of the finest moments of my life."
  Elsewhere in the show, she played signature songs like "Bring Me Some Water" and "I Want To Come Over" and her Oscar-winning "I Need to Wake Up" (from the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth") as well as relatively obscure compositions like "Ruins," "The Prison" and "I've Loved You Before."
  She performed "Away" with the caveat that it may end up being radically changed on the new album, or could be left off. She also joked that she was free to mess it up, since nobody would know she was making a mistake.
  It sounded pretty perfect the way it was: a sweet, sad song about a relationship that is in trouble ("It feels like everything is broken") but is not necessarily beyond healing.
  "You don't have to find an answer/I don't have to get it right/We can fix this in the morning/You don't have to go away tonight," Etheridge sang, in the stubbornly hopeful chorus.
  Melissa Etheridge, "Live and Alone"
  Where and when:Aug. 25 at 8 p.m. at the Count Basie Theatre, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank; Aug. 28 at 9 p.m. at the House of Blues at Showboat Casino, Atlantic City.
  How much: $69.50-$125 for Red Bank; call (732) 842-9000 or visit CountBasieTheatre.org. $42-$102 for Atlantic City; call (609) 236-2583 or visit HOB.com/AtlanticCity.