Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter-musician MELISSA MANCHESTER will mix songs from her current WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD album and her classic hits like “Midnight Blue” and “Come In >From The Rain” with deep album cuts for her special club tour launching October 10 in San Francisco. The rare and intimate trek will include a nine-night run in New York City and five nights in Los Angeles, where MANCHESTER hasn’t played a solo show in nearly a decade. “When I get to stay put in a city for a few nights,” she explains, “it seems that extra magic happens. The songs and the music get deeper and tighter.”

WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD (Koch Records), MELISSA’s first album of all-new material in 10 years, was described by Performing Songwriter (May 2004) as “a brilliantly understated intimately soulful 12-track collection of tunes.” The album’s personal quality inspired MELISSA to hit the road backed by a four-piece band that includes WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD co-producer Stephan Oberhoff on keyboards. MELISSA notes: “This will be my first time playing with just a quartet. I’m really looking forward to performing in the same stripped-down way we recorded the CD.”

The club tour’s set list will include highlights from WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD such as the top ten radio hit “After All This Time” (#8 on FMQB’s AC chart) and MELISSA’s current iTunes exclusive “It’s The Light.” The Dallas Morning News (7/22/04) has hailed the new work as an “Absolutely beautiful return-to-form for singer-songwriter Ms. Manchester, who quit recording a decade ago to raise her children. She writes all the songs, plays the piano again and sings in the rich, sultry tone that characterized her early albums. Everything sounds so organic, so inspired.” Fans can expect to hear a new arrangement of “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” recently covered by American Idol finalist Diana DeGarmo. MELISSA will perform her classic Grammy-nominated song “The way I originally wanted to do it…the way I’ve always heard it.”

MELISSA will also revisit some gems she hasn’t performed in years, such as “Easy” (from her 1973 debut Home To Myself and chosen by Bob Fosse for his Broadway hit ‘Dancin’”), “So’s My Old Man” (from 1976’s Help Is On The Way) and “I Got Eyes” (from 1975’s Melissa), which Karrin Allyson just recorded for her new acclaimed CD (Wild For You).

MELISSA MANCHESTER TO RELEASE
WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD,’
MARCH 9 ON KOCH RECORDS

“AFTER ALL THIS TIME” SET AS ALBUM’S FIRST SINGLE;
ALBUM MARKS HER FIRST OF ALL NEW MATERIAL IN NEARLY A DECADE AND FEATURES COLLABORATIONS WITH BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN AND KEB’ MO

“ I walked away from making records ten years ago. But I never, ever lost faith that singing and writing songs is what I was put on this earth to do.”

Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter-musician MELISSA MANCHESTER returns March 9 with WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD (Koch Records), her first album of all new material in 10 years. The first single “After All This Time” reaches radio February 9, with special guest Keb’ Mo’ on slide guitar. Look for MELISSA to announce a North American concert tour in the coming weeks.

The album reinforces MELISSA’s commitment to a new creative method of stripping aside the extraneous elements in order to get to what really matters: the heart of the song. WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD is a stripped-down affair that forgoes heavy production to reveal the warm, intimate side of MELISSA’s voice that highlighted her early hits like “Midnight Blue” and “Come In From The Rain.”
MELISSA had tried doing it the other way, with success, but her last few projects wound up alienating her from her own authentic voice. “I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me,” she explains. “I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.”

She stayed busy, doing concerts, winning praise from Stephen Sondheim for her performance of his songs in the show Sweeney Todd, writing a musical (I Sent a Letter to My Love) and a film score (Lady and the Tramp II, on which she also sang), and scheduling her professional life around raising her children--“my priority number one!” But she stayed away from the record business, feeling like an outcast from a place where she once felt at home… A fortuitous writing trip to Nashville--her first to that city--resparked her creativity. "Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song. It was there I began WHEN I LOOK DOWN THAT ROAD. It was there I found my voice again. And for that, I will be eternally grateful." It was, in other words, as organic as the process MELISSA had brought to writing “Midnight Blue,” “Whenever I Call You Friend,” “Come In From The Rain” and the other songs she had made classics years before. The same aesthetic guided her, along with co-producers Kevin DeRemer and Stephan Oberhoff, as they began assembling this material into album form.
Lyrically, these songs cast spells that linger after the music wisps into silence. Few singer/songwriters can carry listeners to places this far away or deep within our own hearts. With a twist of a single line, she brings life to people drawn from history (Gertrude Stein, in “When Paris Was a Woman,” was “my shepherdess, my Pyrenees,” Melissa writes, “with eagle eyes, a mountain range was she”) or from the streets in our own time (the character Pearl--crazy but maybe also enlightened, buried in a funky comforter and haunted by miracles in “Angels Dancing”).
Fewer still can come up with material that’s sometimes playful (“Hey, baby, you’re no saint, even with a new coat of paint,” she teases in “Lucky Break,” written one upbeat day with Beth Nielsen Chapman) and sometimes anguished (“Give me the strength to lead the way/Send me the words I need to say,” she pleads, for her children and ours, in “A Mother’s Prayer,” written with Karen Taylor Good just hours after the Columbine tragedy).
Each track is distinctive, yet all unite into a single listening experience--another nod toward a time when context was as important as the merits of the songs themselves.