Melissa Etheridge left CMA Fest with more than a strong set in Nashville. She came away talking about a collaboration with Chris Stapleton, a reminder that her path through country music keeps widening even as she prepares for a new run with Wynonna Judd.
The timing matters because Etheridge had just stepped off a star-studded CMA Fest lineup last weekend, where she played career-spanning songs and material from Rise, her latest studio album that arrived earlier this year. The performance, she said, went beyond what she expected. “We’re going on a really big rollercoaster right now and we don’t really know how it’s going to be,” she said of the experience, calling it “very delightful.”
That Nashville stop also fed the search interest around her name and around Stapleton. Etheridge said she has been working actively with artists she has long admired, and she traced that urge back to the music she grew up hearing at home. She said she was “literally raised on the radio,” with a local station that played everything from rock and soul to R&B and country, a mix that helped shape her into the writer and musician she is now. She also said she started writing young, came up in the '60s and '70s, and was drawn to the way country songs told stories.
That history makes the Stapleton mention feel less like a stray name-drop than part of a larger pattern in Etheridge’s career. She has already toured with Indigo Girls in 2024-25, and now she and Judd have announced the Raised On Radio Tour, a pairing built around the idea of doing something special together for the audience. Etheridge said the desire is there from both sides, even if the road schedule rarely makes things simple.
She did not pretend the process was perfectly mapped out. Etheridge said she did not know what to expect from CMA Fest and noted that timing is always weird on the road, which is exactly why the surprise of the Nashville performance landed so strongly. For now, the next confirmed step is the Raised On Radio Tour, while the question that hangs over her recent comments is which project with Stapleton will emerge from the kind of cross-genre work she says she has been chasing.
