After taking a break in mid-May, Melissa Etheridge resumes her extensive summer tour Wednesday, June 21, in Denver, Colorado. And while the Grammy- and Oscar-winning singer’s been a working musician since she was a teenager, she says she’ll never get tired of what it feels like to perform for fans every night.

“It is always, every single night, a thrill to walk onstage and to be welcomed by a crowd and know that they’re excited to hear your songs,” she told ABC News recently. “There’s nothing like that in the world. I used to dream about it — that’s why I never complain about doing my hit songs.”

“It’s like, ‘I’m going to play you the songs that you know and you remember … You don’t have to listen to me do anything but what you want to hear,'” she adds. “And so it is a feeling that will never, ever get old.”

What makes playing live especially fun for Melissa these days, she says, is how diverse her fan base is.

“What’s fun is my audience. My audience is such a wide range of people,” she says. “My core audience, of course, is women. And then you get men who just love the music. You get, you know, LGBTQ people of all kinds.”

“But right now, my favorites are the men and women who are the kids of the parents that played my music,” she adds. “And I love that. They’re like, ‘I grew up with you!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, right on.'”

Once Melissa’s tour wraps up August 18, she’ll get ready for the release of her second memoir, Talking to My Angels, which comes out September 5.

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