Going into her North American tour this year, Melanie C was trying to have zero expectations. She would be performing in cities for the first time in more than two decades as a solo artist. Some of them were stops she last visited as a member of the Spice Girls during their 2007 reunion tour. Ticket sales were good, but what would happen when she actually set foot on those stages in front of throngs of people?
It turns out, the world is hungry for a star like Melanie. “I was blown away,” she tells Rolling Stone. “The responses everywhere were incredible, and people were singing all the new stuff, which, you know, for any artist is exactly what you want.”
The singer, born Melanie Chisholm, has lived a life and career that has been celebrated, studied, critiqued, and rehashed for years now. As Sporty Spice, she and the rest of the Spice Girls — Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell-Horner, and Victoria Beckham — zig-a-zig-ah’d their way to the top of the charts in the 1990s, championing a “girl power” ethos that dominated mainstream pop culture.
Today, calling from London on a bright afternoon, Melanie radiates optimism. Her ninth studio album, Sweat, released in May, and she’s just wrapped her U.S. tour. In every city — as the curtain pulled away at every venue from the Fonda to the Castro Theatre, casting Melanie in a blur of neon light — she’d take in the moment.
“The places I just literally hadn’t been to for such a long time were the ones when it really, really touched my heart to know that there’s still support out there,” she says. “It was just beautiful to meet people and hear their stories about the first shows that they’d ever seen me, whether it was back in ’98 with the Spice Girls or the last time I was doing Northern Star shows.” She adds: “There’s this beautiful community of fans. We’ve all grown up together.”
On Sweat, she reaches back to her beginnings in the Nineties rave scene and picks up where she left off on her previous self-titled album, which marked a similar, unabashed pivot. A trip to Spain on holiday during her college days spilled into nights out every weekend in London at the best clubs and the occasional warehouse party. ”I was really drawn to that unity and the joy and that shared experience and how it brought so many different communities and cultures together,” she says. “Then it got left behind because Spice Girls happened quite quickly.”
The group declared an indefinite hiatus in 2000, and though they’ve reunited a few times since then, Melanie found a new path forward as a DJ starting in 2018. “It reignited this passion that I had for dance music, and I’ve never looked back,” she says. “I’m so grateful. I was courageous enough to learn a new skill at that age.”
Mark Cant*
The new album pulls together several parts of Melanie’s story as she leans into her memories as a teenage raver, embraces her Sporty Spice persona, and non-figuratively flexes her skills as a solo artist. The LP also arrives a couple years after the end of Melanie’s long-term relationship with Joe Marshall, her former manager, and in the first months of her marriage to Australian model Chris Dingwall. The former era provided “great fuel for making music,” she says, inspiring songs “Flick of the Wrist” or “Good for Nothing.”
“I had all of these things going on, all of these phone conversations and arguments and all of this anger to get out, but then I also met somebody and I fell in love with the man that went on to become my husband,” she says. “I feel like [the album] crossed such a range of human emotions. It gave me a great journey to go on through the record.” Melanie points to “Drum Machine,” the second track, which has become a favorite when playing live. “That’s purely about falling in love with my husband and those feelings at the beginning of a relationship, where it’s such a physical feeling,” she says. Elsewhere, the music video for the title track, sampling Diana Ross’ “Work That Body,” captures Melanie going full Sporty — exercise bands, spin bike, spandex, and all.
When closely considering who she is now, Melanie, 52, recalls the fourth and most recent Spice Girls reunion tour (sans Beckham) in 2019. “When we did the stadium shows, it just finally hit home. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, how does a 40-something jump around as Sporty Spice to ‘Wannabe’?’ But as soon as we started rehearsing, it was just there: Sporty Spice isn’t somebody I become. It’s within me.”
She continues: “I really made peace with being a Spice Girl every day. Even when I’m onstage as a solo artist, I have to embrace the Spice Girl in me because she never goes away. She’s always there, and I felt so much more comfortable. I think as a young person, a lot of us make the mistake of looking outside to discover who we are when they’re always there.”
While Melanie remains elusive about a reunion with her bandmates, she does divulge which song she’d most want to sing on any hypothetical fifth reunion tour. “It’s funny because what I used to call the silly songs — a song like ‘Wannabe’ or ‘Spice Up Your Life’ — they’re the ones that really take the roof off. They’re the ones that people just go nuts for. So, I think for the experience of that and seeing other people’s joy, it would have to be ‘Wannabe’ or ‘Spice Up Your Life.’” Naturally, she also doesn’t count out “Viva Forever.”
After wrapping her U.K. and European tour run and her Asia and Australian shows, Melanie says she’ll be returning to North America soon enough. “It’s been such a wonderful experience getting back out playing live in America, and I just feel so welcomed back as well,” she beams. “I kind of felt guilty that I’d left it so long, and I suppose I just want to say, I will not leave it that long until next time.”
Taylor Swift at the Curb Event Center at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Here’s to 20 Years of ‘Taylor Swift’
It’s strange to think the songs we used to sing from one of the most famous self-titled debut album’s turn 20 years old today. You know the ones I’m talking about. The song in the car, my favorite song, the whispered songs, “Mary’s Song,” “Our Song.” Twenty years ago, Taylor Swift invited the world into the one she built with these melodies.
Taylor Swift wasn’t just the singer-songwriter’s first album that turned her into a rising Nashville star. It was also the first chapter that sealed Swift’s future success as a superstar musician. Within a year of its release on Oct. 24, 2006, the LP debuted at Number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned platinum status, and made hits out of singles “Tim McGraw” and “Our Song.” It’s the reason we’re here today, reflecting on two decades into a career so massive, even the curly-haired mess of a dreamer couldn’t fathom it at 15 years old. That teenager grew into a pop goliath, but it’s easier to fathom when you remember that it’s always been about the songs.
With Taylor Swift, a precocious teen met listeners in their own teenage heartache, their deep-seeded loneliness, and that overarching, painful desire to fit in with a collection of country-pop gems. Who hadn’t cried over an unrequited love the way Swift did on “Teardrops on My Guitar” or felt the chilling rejection apparent on “Cold As You,” or the thrill of finding a best friend who lets you show your true colors like on “I’m Only Me When I’m With You” or even known a friend who suffered from eating disorders as discussed on “Tied Together With a Smile”? Here was a voice singing these stories she’d written, each sigh and imperfect note, making the keen observation of the worlds that much more sincere. That’s what connected with audiences and began the success story that we know so well today.
Throughout her self-titled debut, Swift tapped into the country music songwriting tradition of reminding listeners she’s the one with the pen. On the banjo-driven jaunt, “Our Song,” she laments the fact that there is no song to sum up her rosy romance — until she “grabs a pen and an old napkin” and cements the slamming screen doors and surreptitious late-night calls into her own song. With the help of producer Nathan Chapman and co-writer Liz Rose, Swift learned to master this trick.
Her debut single, “Tim McGraw” is the real shining example of this. On its face, the track chronicles a fleeting summer romance, but the wistful tune turns into a knockout that cemented Swift into country music history when she offers a prescient promise, “I hope you think of me.” With that simple line, the musician showed the transportative power of music.
Taylor Swift is also the first time we heard of the tropes that still run through the singer-songwriter’s catalog. The little black dress in “Tim McGraw,” the front seat in “Our Song,” the rain scattered across multiple songs, the photographs in “Picture to Burn,” the numbers 89 and 87 on “Mary’s Song (Oh My, My My).” With every nano-specific detail, Swift built out her own cinematic universe.
You can hear Swift map out the world-building that would turn into her next 12 albums on the self-titled centerpiece, “A Place in this World.” Over an acoustic guitar, she quips, “I don’t know what I want, so don’t ask me” before declaring, “I’m just a girl, trying to find a place in this world.” That’s the kind of sassy, yet uncertain attitude she brought to her very first album. But really, she always knew what she was doing in some capacity, especially if the hidden or “A Place in This World” is any indication. The uppercase letters in a lyric booklet of lowercase ones spell out: “I Found it.”
In a fitting twist of fate, 2026 not only marks a major anniversary for Swift’s self-titled debut album, it’s also the first year she’s eligible to be recognized in two very prestigious institutions: the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. By Monday, the girl who cried all those tears on her guitar will be both the youngest woman to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall, and youngest-member of the Nashville edition.
During her Songwriters Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Swift reflected on the power of her craft. “As writers, we can only hope to meet people where they are in their lives,” she said. Since 2006, when she was just a high school freshman with a habit of writing songs on her bedroom floor or in math class, she has done exactly that.