Melissa Etheridge - Neil Diamond Tribute - Home Concert, Los Angeles, CA, 5-7-2020

This is the last Melissa Etheridge home concert album I have to post before her son died in mid-May 2020. After that, she took a long break then resumed doing home concerts, but only for those who paid for a subscription service. Since then, she has posted some stuff for free on YouTube, so I plan on collecting and posting some of that eventually.

It turns out that Etheridge is a big Neil Diamond fan, thanks to her father, who played lots of Diamond's music while she was growing up. Thus, she did an entire home concert playing nothing but Neil Diamond songs. This is a relatively short album at only 36 minutes, and if you remove all her talking between songs its only 23 minutes long. But I figured it was good to keep this together since it holds together thematically.

This follows the same format as the other Etheridge home concerts I've posted. Namely, she plays and sings everything herself, live. But sometimes she sounds like a one-person band, complete with drums and lead guitar solos and such, due to her looping ability. That means she records a sample of some music, such as a drum beat, then plays other instruments on top of it. I've cut out the bits where she made the loop samples and built them up. The songs she does the looping for here are "Cherry, Cherry" and "Holly Holy." Otherwise, it's just her and her acoustic guitar.

As with all her other home concert stuff, the sound quality is excellent, and everything is officially unreleased.

Say what you will about Neil Diamond and his music. Yes, he's often cheesy and uncool. But he wrote a lot of classic songs, and naturally Etheridge chose to play some of his best ones. She also told some interesting stories about him, including her personal interactions with him.

01 talk (Melissa Etheridge)
02 Shiloh (Melissa Etheridge)
03 talk (Melissa Etheridge)
04 Play Me (Melissa Etheridge)
05 talk (Melissa Etheridge)
06 Cherry, Cherry (Melissa Etheridge)
07 talk (Melissa Etheridge)
08 I Am, I Said (Melissa Etheridge)
09 talk (Melissa Etheridge)
10 Holly Holy (Melissa Etheridge)
11 talk (Melissa Etheridge)
12 Sweet Caroline (Melissa Etheridge)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15289683/MelissaE_2020h_NeilDiamndTributeHomeConcrtLsAngelesCA__5-7-2020_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I wanted to use a photo of Etheridge and Diamond together. I'm happy to say I found out. This shows them together at a radio station in New York City in 2014. There was a radio station logo repeated several times on the wall behind them. I found those distracting, so I removed them using Photoshop.