Melissa Ferrick's 12th album is titled Never Give Up but she may as well have named it Never Let Up. The woman must be equipped with a bonus battery pack, relentlessly touring and making the festival rounds, and releasing a new album almost every year from 1993 to 2004.
Ferrick spent the better part of the past year producing Decade, a documentary on the first ten years of her storied career. She put it together from her ragtag collection of concert and backstage footage. “I really just needed to get rid of all those Hi8 tapes,” she says.
The 35-year-old singer/songwriter is always pushing herself, and her boundless energy is never more evident than when she takes to the stage—something she does with great frequency. She's a fervent vocalist and bad-ass guitarist whose live performances aren't complete without at least one broken string.
She began playing violin at age 5 and is also a longtime bassist. She picked up the trumpet in elementary school and her proficiency with that instrument later secured her a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, alma mater of Patty Larkin, Paula Cole, Branford Marsalis, and that other Melissa.
Ferrick works hard to cultivate a relationship of mutual devotion with her fans, the most loyal of them calling themselves “Ferrick heads.” She is also adamant that everyone feel comfortable and welcome at her shows, whether it's “the straight couple in my crowd that wants to grind and drive like the dykes in the front row” or the women getting amorous with each other: “You gotta be able to make out with your girlfriend in the crowd and not get slapped in the back of the head,” she points out, adding that “really it's about inclusion.” She has a tattoo that reads “acceptance is the answer.”
This past summer Ferrick was invited to perform with the band Moe.—something she found especially rewarding given the new audience it brought her. She is accustomed to playing before a relatively small, mostly queer, predominantly female audience, although her shows are increasingly packed with larger numbers of people from all walks of life.
But Moe. put her in front of a crowd of 6500, most of them young straight guys. “Moe. loves it because they get to put what to them is a very strong, independent woman on stage,” she says. “It's important to them to support a queer artist and important for their crowd to see.”
It's also important to Ferrick, “because when those guys have never seen me before and they freak out after I play a song, and they start clapping and hooting and hollering, it just makes me feel like I'm still winning fans over.” She's grateful for the new fans she gains when she headlines, but she's especially inspired when she commands the esteem of audience members who have only stumbled upon her as an opening act, as happened when she was the last-minute opener for Morrissey in 1991 and was promptly invited to join his tour.
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