Etheridge keeps the old fire alive
ROCK LEGEND BRINGS PASSION TO SONGS SHE WAS ONCE AFRAID TO SHARE
IN the songwriter’s code, there is no statute of limitations on writing songs about your exes, according to revered American rock star Melissa Etheridge. “I think, as an artist, we’re allowed to write about whatever we want. It’s art!” she says.
When she was compiling a retrospective box set in 2013, the songwriter unearthed a treasure trove of works she wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s as her career skyrocketed around the world off the back of her breakthrough selftitled debut album.
It was a time when she was finding her voice as an artist and before she came out and committed to being a loud and proud advocate for the LGBTQIA community.
“When I found them, I wondered why I didn’t put them on my records back then. What was wrong with me?” she says.
“And I realised that there was a lot of fear involved. These were written before I came out. And I just had a whole lot more fear about speaking up strongly than I do now.
“The songs I found like As Cool As You Try and Save Myself, those feminist songs, I just wasn’t as comfortable to share them back then. And now it’s, like, no problem.”
Etheridge decided to bring her old songs to new life with the band members and studio team she worked with in those early years for her new record One Way Out.
She was lucky to find the tracks in the first place. Countless master tapes and digitised archives of films and records were lost in a devastating fire that swept through Universal Studios in Los Angeles in 2008.
“I went into the vaults at Universal and thankfully mine didn’t burn,” she says.
“I was able to find my old tapes and digitise them. Going through all the old songs was such a cathartic experience.”
The One Way Out project, along with her livestreaming shows for fans, kept her sane not only through lockdown but also after the overdose death in May last year of her 21-year-old son Beckett with former partner Julie Cypher after a long battle with opioid addiction.
“Music saved me. When Covid first hit, I thought I’d just do these 15-minute things on Facebook for fun until this is over. And it went for 58 days straight and I was really enjoying it because I was reaching back through my whole
catalogue,” she says. “And then my son died. So I had to take a bit of a break and rethink everything.
“During that time, I decided I really wanted to learn more about streaming and the technology, the cameras and sound.
“After my son’s death, that really healed me, getting out of bed every day to build the studio, and when we started back up again in late June last year, fans subscribed to it and we built up this community of people singing songs together.
“I was here with my wife and my kids but so many people were alone and bringing music to them helped take their minds away for an hour and made them feel part of something.”
Listening back to songs like I’m No Angel Myself and For The Last Time – written at a time when the music industry wasn’t exactly encouraging artists to publicly
declare their sexuality out of a fear of alienating prejudiced fans – made Etheridge want to give her younger self a big hug.
“And not only about coming out but the frustrations in my relationship at the time, all of that,” she says.
“I wanted to say: ‘Oh, no, you’re going to be OK. You’re going to be just fine. Just hang in there’.”
Etheridge remembers exactly why she put one of the album’s standout tracks, Wild Wild Wild, on the shelf in the late ’80s.
“I remember exactly why with that one because I was not out yet, I wasn’t known as a lesbian, and I felt that I was writing it from such a point of view that the other person I was singing to was obviously a woman,” Etheridge says.
“And just in the last minute, I was like ‘yeah, I can’t do that’. And I stepped out of it.”
The sonic time capsule is also infused with the dynamic, searing rock energy that propelled hits including Bring Me Some Water, Like The Way I Do and I’m The Only on to the global charts three decades ago.
Etheridge was determined to bottle that lightning in the studio when they were reimagining the songs for the 2021 record even though her own emotional state – courtesy of wife Linda Wallem and their family – is in a much healthier condition than when she first wrote them.
“Yeah, I wanted that passion, that fire.
“Look, I’m 60 now and I’m not wound up at all in any bad relationship, I’m very happy, and I’m not writing those kind of songs any more.
“It was cool to go back and live with them.”