“Like The Way I Do” by Melissa Etheridge

"Like the Way I Do" was the second American single from Melissa Etheridge's 1988 debut album, and by the time she cut it the song was already an old friend: she'd written it years earlier, and it was the first of her own tunes that concert crowds kept shouting for. Even the intro was a happy accident, born when she ran another of her songs, "I Want You", backwards on a cassette recorder.

What follows is a full-throated barnburner, Etheridge tearing into every line while the band churns harder with every verse. She's called it one of her best, a song full of passion, agony, desire and raw pain, and she treats the record as only a sketch: onstage she stretches it out with so much improvising that it can run 15 to 20 minutes.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.