melissa etheridge
Oscar winner. Grammy winner. Environmental activist. Gay rights campaigner. Cancer survivor. Melissa Etheridge’s personal achievements are only outshadowed by the enduring strength of her music. Her eleventh studio album, Fearless Love, is a stirring and uplifting, highway-friendly collection of rock songs. In this candid interview with Nick Milligan, Etheridge reflects on the journey that has brought her to 2010.
Fear & Now Your back catalogue spans over two decades. Have the meanings of any of your earlier songs changed for you? Yeah, the songs that I’ve written before have, of course, lost their original meaning because I’m no longer in that place. But I can always apply meaning and emotion to them. They always ring true inside of me. I still love the old songs very much. Do you ever go back and listen to your earliest records? A few years ago, when I was on chemotherapy, dealing with cancer, I sat and listened to all of my stuff from the very beginning. It took about three days. I listened to it and discussed it with my friends. I really remembered every single song. It was very healing. What triggered your decision to listen to all your past work? Was it simply what you were going through? I think sometimes we have a tendency to just race through life and try to get to the next thing without taking a moment to reflect and remember and celebrate what we’ve done, and that was a time for me to do that. What was your impression when you listened to your back catalogue and discussed it? [chuckles] That I have a lot of angst. [The songs] were stronger than I thought. Sometimes there was meaning in them that I didn’t know I was speaking about. There was a lot of things I was saying to myself that I didn’t know. How did the writing of Fearless Love compare to albums you’ve made in the past? Well, much has changed about the way I write. For one, the first few albums of mine came from
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myself as an artist. I was free, I was writing on buses and always had a guitar. I could write in my room. I was just a writer. Now I’m a mother and I have to schedule time for write. The subjects of the place I’m writing from is more mature. It’s wider in scope and hopefully in depth. Is there a place where you’ve always felt the most comfortable to write songs? I’ve always just needed to be alone. That’s mostly what I require. I have an office here in my house and I usually sit on the couch and write there. Eleven albums into your recording career, do you still feel as though your best music could be ahead of you? Well, I hope so! I want to get better. I want to learn. That’s how I approached this album. I’ve made ten albums. I have a huge catalogue of songs. Hopefully I’m getting better and I want these to be mature songs that continue to reach people. Did you have a clear idea about how you wanted this album to sound compared to your previous records? Yes, I was very clear. I met with John Shanks, the producer. I said, “This album has to be huge. It has to rock. It has to feel like those albums we grew up with that we loved. It has to be as deep as The Who and Led Zeppelin, and as forceful as Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel.” Yes, I definitely wanted it to be large. How did you go about achieving that epic quality? Was it purely in the writing or was it in the production? It was both. To get anything that you could say was epic, you have to start with a very large
plan. The songs had to be able to hold that, otherwise it would be kind of ridiculous. John was fearless in requiring me to step up to the plate, musically. Lyrically, do you see any recurring themes on this record? Yeah, there’s a few things woven in there. Of course ‘fear’ and ‘love’ are the two anchors for the album. Everything came from fear and love. There’s a lot of recurring themes, like birth and death. All kinds of things. At what point in the writing did you see those threads starting to appear? If you use the thread analogy, I had all of those threads in front of me. Then you just start creating the piece from that. I knew what the themes were. I knew they were going to be heaven, spirit, soul, fear, love, pain and hope. Those were the colours.
You know, I never thought I did. I never defined myself that way. I just wanted to make music, yet the situation would present itself to me. I would find myself with this choice — like the choice of love or fear. Whether I was going to speak my truth and push through whatever I may be afraid of. I really love the song ‘Indiana’. It’s incredibly catchy. Can you tell us a bit about that song and what it’s about? Well, my partner Tammy is from Indiana and it’s her story. It’s a tribute, I guess. It’s influenced by her story and her life. The small town American dream — which I can relate to — and the maturing into a mother and releasing past pain and finding your answer, or finding your own love and family inside youself.
Is there a set of lyrics on the album that you would say you’re the most happy with? Probably ‘We Are The Ones’. It’s very tribal. ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’ is where I feel I am at spiritually and socially.
What have been your strongest memories of your trips to Australia? Oh, I love Australia so much. I love the people — you guys are just solid. You care and you’re all natural environmentalists. It’s always been first and foremost with you. Your food is fresh and natural and your cities are so alive and vibrant. I love your country very, very much!
You’re also known for your activism and have always been outspoken on things you believe in. Can you remember what your first act of protest was — in the traditional sense? Probably as a feminist in the eighties, when I first came out here [to California] I was involved in a lot of women’s groups and some gay groups. That was probably the most political I got at first.
It’s a long way to travel for artists. How did it feel to first arrive here and perform to people? I remember when I put my first album out. My manager called me and said, “Guess what? Your song ‘Bring Me Some Water’ is a huge hit in Australia.” Sometimes in America, we really lose grasp of the communities around the world. I just didn’t think that my music could reach that far and it made me very happy.
Have you always had that streak in you to be outspoken?
Fearless Love is out now through Universal. Keep your ears out for Australian dates in 2010.