I’m the Only One

You are locked into The Zoo, the freeform album-rock stream that picked up the spirit of KZEW 98 FM and carried it forward without commercials, without a playlist committee, and without anybody telling the jock to dump the deep cut for a jingle. Pull up a chair at thezoorocks.com and stay with Melissa Etheridge, because the record that opens Yes I Am is the one that finally shoved her out of the cult column and onto every rock desk in the country. “I’m the Only One” is track one, written by Etheridge, cut at A&M Studios in Hollywood, and issued by Island as the first single from the album on September 7, 1993. It did not explode on contact. It smoldered, got a second life after “Come to My Window” broke through, and in January 1995 climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, number one on the Adult Contemporary chart, number ten on Mainstream Rock, and number four on Pop Airplay. That Hot 100 peak is still her highest. The Adult Contemporary number one is still her only one.

The track runs four minutes and fifty-four seconds, and it earns every bar. Etheridge sings it in that torn, Kansas-roadhouse rasp, half blues shouter and half confession, over a mid-tempo groove that sits closer to the bar band than to the synth-pop that was still hanging around rock radio in 1993. She plays acoustic and electric guitar. Pino Palladino, the session bassist who had already put his fretless stamp on records from Paul Young to the Who, holds the low end. Mauricio “Fritz” Lewak is on drums and percussion. Scott Thurston, long associated with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, handles keyboards. Hugh Padgham, the English engineer and producer who had shaped the gated-drum sound of Phil Collins and worked with the Police and Genesis, co-produced and engineered with Etheridge and mixed the record. Assistants on the sessions included Greg Goldman, John Aguto, and Mike Baumgartner. Bob Ludwig mastered it at Gateway. That is a serious room for a song that started as a heartache.

The lyric does not beg. It dares. She tells the lover to go on and hold the other woman until the screaming is gone, to believe her when she says nothing is wrong, and then plants the hook: she is the only one who will ever drive the lover crazy, the only one who will ever make it real. Songfacts notes that Etheridge has tied the original idea to a terrible heartache, and that the feeling sat inside her relationship with Julie Cypher, whom she met in 1988 while Cypher was still married to actor Lou Diamond Phillips. The couple later had two children and split in 2000. On the record the language stays mostly open, the way a lot of her early writing did, except that the rival is named as another woman. She has said the title of the album itself was a nod to the public statement she made in January 1993 at the Triangle Ball during the Clinton inauguration festivities. The songs did not turn into slogans. They stayed about desire, jealousy, and the kind of loyalty that hurts.

The clip, directed by David Hogan in their first collaboration, puts her in a club with the band, face tight to the lens, while couples move around the room. It later won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Music Video. At the 1995 Grammys the song was nominated for Best Rock Song. In 1996 ASCAP handed it a Pop Music Award as one of the most performed songs of the year. None of that was guaranteed when Island first shipped the single. Canadian radio took to it faster, with a peak at number twelve on RPM and a retail-single showing near the top ten. The Netherlands saw it reach the mid-twenties. In the States it needed the second wind. By the time “If I Wanted To” followed, Yes I Am was a fixture. The album, released September 21, 1993, peaked at number fifteen on the Billboard 200, spent the better part of a year in the upper half of the chart, and went on to six-times platinum. Beside “I’m the Only One” and “Come to My Window,” the set holds “Silent Legacy,” “All American Girl,” the title track, “Resist,” “Ruins,” and “Talking to My Angel.” For a lot of listeners it is the Melissa Etheridge album, the one that made the earlier cult favorites suddenly sound like the preface.

The preface was already loud. Melissa Lou Etheridge was born May 29, 1961, in Leavenworth, Kansas. She was playing guitar and writing by her early teens, working the local bars, then heading for Boston’s Berklee College of Music before the road and Los Angeles pulled harder. The self-titled debut arrived in 1988 on Island and carried “Bring Me Some Water,” “Like the Way I Do,” and “Similar Features,” the songs that built the live reputation: long, sweaty, guitar-forward, no costume changes. Never Enough followed in 1989, and “Ain’t It Heavy” from that record won her the Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female, in 1993, the same year Yes I Am landed. She had already been on the Grammy telecast in 1989. What changed in 1993 and 1994 was the size of the room. Rock radio that had treated her as an album artist suddenly had a recurrent single it could not shake.

The career after the breakthrough did not settle into a victory lap. Your Little Secret arrived in 1995 and sent “I Want to Come Over” and the title track back up the rock charts. Breakdown, Skin, and Lucky followed across the late nineties and early 2000s. In 2004 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, underwent treatment, and walked onto the Grammy stage with her head shaved to sing “Piece of My Heart” with Joss Stone in a tribute to Janis Joplin. She has kept writing through the recovery years and the records that came after, including Fearless Love, 4th Street Feeling, This Is M.E., the Stax-minded Memphis Rock and Soul cut at Royal Studios, The Medicine Show, and One Way Out. In 2022 and 2023 she took the life story to the stage in My Window, a one-woman show that moved from off-Broadway to Circle in the Square. The 2024 project I’m Not Broken paired a documentary series with a live album recorded inside the Topeka Correctional Facility, built around letters from the women there. In 2026 she released Rise on Sun Records, co-produced with Shooter Jennings, a set that includes a duet with Chris Stapleton and closes a long gap between albums of new songs. The Etheridge Foundation, launched in 2020, puts money and attention toward research on opioid use disorder. The through-line is the same voice that opens Yes I Am: direct, a little raw, unwilling to sand the feeling down for the format.

On a freeform rock station the song still works as a set opener or a bridge out of something heavier. Drop it after a Petty deep cut or ahead of a Joan Jett side and the guitar tone holds the lane. It is not a hair-metal anthem and it is not a ballad dressed up as rock. It is a blues-based mid-tempo with a chorus built for a room that already knows the words. Listeners who found her on the debut still hear the bar-band girl from Leavenworth inside the hit. Listeners who came in through the 1995 chart run hear the record that made her a household name without asking her to change the writing. Either way, the dare in the lyric has not dated. Go on and hold her. I’m the only one.

Etheridge keeps the road going, and the catalog is easy to chase from the official side. The home base is melissaetheridge.com, where the tour dates, the discography, and the store all live. The official fan club, Etheridge Nation, sits at melissaetheridge.com/fan-club, with the community board, presales, and the archive. Day-to-day posts run through Facebook at facebook.com/MelissaEtheridge, Instagram at instagram.com/melissa_etheridge, and X at x.com/metheridge. If you are hunting the wider rock lane that still plays this record the way album radio used to, you are already in the right place at thezoorocks.com. Yes I Am is the proof that a slow-burn single, a raspy Kansas voice, and a co-write with nobody but herself can still own a format. I’m the only one. Turn it up.