"I Can Dream, Can't I"
New Album Out Now!
“A jazz album of lesser-known gems delivered beautifully.”
— Goldmine magazine
“A burnished tone pervades I Can Dream, Can’t I? It’s all-of-a-piece.”
— Cabaret Scenes
Both Sides Now
My new album resolves with the Joni Mitchell classic, “Both Sides Now,” — no accident, for Joni is the master of the introspective soliloquy. We approached this song not from the point of view of a puzzled near-teenager, but from the view of a grown adult who knows that clouds, like love, are not illusions but necessary fictions, even if they come and go with the wind.
Joni Mitchell claims not to know life, or love, at all. But of course she does. Clouds and schemes, and ice cream castles in the air… these lyrics are the kinds of illusions I wanted to explore on this album. The moons and Junes, yes, but the other side — the illusions we choose, as well. To survive this world.
Listen Here
Dave Frishberg’s “Listen Here” is a late-1970s urban nocturne, written and first recorded around 1978–79, when Frishberg began turning away from his famous satiric songs towards a more intimate address. The song feels sung into the dark—cool on the surface, charged underneath—where irony masks longing and self-command replaces romance. It is less a love song than an erotic reckoning, the moment when memory, appetite, and survival quietly negotiate.
I wanted the album to take a sudden modern turn. As if a woman awakens to see how much of her has survived love. It’s a song of conversation, as all the songs are, but it takes a sudden turn into talking not to the other but to oneself. It may be that love is what made her more alive, more capable of understanding life. I love the song because it sounds like a woman becoming stronger, wiser, fuller, even as she looks into the half-lit corners of her inner self… I wanted this album to be romantic, of course—but to trace a romance with a shape, an arc. The whole album has been the story of an entanglement. In this song, she’s talking to herself, and untangles.
The Story of a Rose
a Musical Reverie on the Great War
With her trademark smarts and sublime singing, Melissa Errico tells the story of her own great Aunt Rose and her grandmother as they came over from Italy by boat during WW1 and immediately took up work as seamstresses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard making uniforms for the war. A musical memoir full of early jazz ragtime flair & elegant storytelling, Melissa pieces together love letters, authentic songs, stories of friendships, and scraps of the memories of lovers & sons to bring another time back into focus. She will stir our hearts to recall how life, for an entire generation, would never be the same again. This Rose becomes a memorial for many.
Sondheim in the City
“A New York house tour of thrill and heartbreak”
“Premier Sondheim Interpreter.”
Latest News
Writing
Read Melissa's writing in The New York Times
