LYNN — The Lynn Auditorium was rocking on Sunday night as rock ‘n’ roll singer Melissa Etheridge took the stage for nearly two and a half hours performing past hits and new songs from an album released two days before the show.
Etheridge, 57, performed non-stop for two hours, singing in her signature strong, raspy voice, playing the guitar alongside her band, and cracking jokes and telling stories behind the songs and albums she released over the course of her 31-year career.
The crowd, expecting an encore, was not disappointed when Etheridge came back on stage to perform two more songs, the titular song of her new album, “The Medicine Show,” and “Like the Way I Do,” a 1988 hit from her self-titled debut album.
The encore featured Etheridge taking a turn on the drums with her drummer, Lynn native Eric Gardner, telling the audience earlier in the show that he had his birth certificate in City Hall, the building they were performing in.
“His high school music teacher is here tonight,” Etheridge told the crowd. “Good things come out of Massachusetts.”
Etheridge saved her biggest hits for the end of the show, getting the whole crowd on its feet and singing along for her 1994, Billboard Top 40 song “Come to my Window” and closing out the show with a mainstream song most people probably know her for, “I’m the Only One.”
The latter song, which hit the Top 10, featured Etheridge playing the harmonica. Both songs are off of her most successful album, “Yes I Am,” which she joked was probably an album most people there on Sunday bought, first on cassette, before losing it in a break-up and then buying it again.
“I appreciate you buying it about 10 times — I really do,” Etheridge said.
Other crowd favorites included “I Want to Come Over,” another Top 40 hit from 1996, and “Chrome Plated Heart,” a 1989 song from her first album.
Early in the show, Etheridge sang her current single, “Faded by Design,” telling the crowd she made the new album “straight from the heart,” which she described as having a ’90s throwback vibe.
It took a while for the crowd to get loud, but by the latter part of the show, Etheridge had them fully into her performance.
It seemed the singer was enjoying the show too, begrudgingly congratulating the audience on another New England Patriots Super Bowl win on what she said was her wife’s urging. Don’t you have enough, the Kansas-born singer joked with the Boston fans, citing the Red Sox winning the World Series and the Celtics making the playoffs.
“I love playing here,” Etheridge told the crowd. “It’s like a little, big place.”
