Melissa Ferrick

Club Cafe, South Side

7:30 p.m., $10, 21+

(412) 431-4950

We don’t have… Melissa Ferrick

Club Cafe, South Side

7:30 p.m., $10, 21+

(412) 431-4950

We don’t have to wait for another Lilith Fair to come our way to hear the voices of talented women with a passion for their work. Independent acts, just as talented, don’t need a summertime festival to make headlines.

Singer/songwriter Melissa Ferrick began her career with Atlantic Records; after releasing two studio albums, she broke away and went on a professional recording hiatus for seven years. But don’t think that during that down time she was mulling around and waiting for opportunities to come to her.

After forming her own label, Right on Records, she has released seven albums, the latest professionally recorded. Listen Hard is self-produced and released with the help of her partner in musical crime, Brian Winton. Ten of her strongest tracks were chosen for the project and oodles of ideas helped fuel it.

The result is her signature acoustic coffeehouse music that runs the gamut from soft and mellow to rocking guitar riffs. Her powerful voice belts and croons out the lyrics with a hint of country twang.

One of the few noteworthy females in a genre dominated by males such as John Mayer, Howie Day, Rhett Miller and Jason Mraz, Ferrick holds her own. She is in the ranks of lesbian folk-rockers Melissa Ethridge and K.D. Lang, but this doesn’t mean her songs are penned for a particular or narrow audience. Ferrick knows that the music industry is no place for discrimination and enforces this by refusing to perform at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, which doesn’t permit men and male-to-female transsexuals to revel in music that is made for everyone.

Keeping this in mind, men, women and those in between are sure to attend tonight’s live indie performance by this brilliant folk singer.