On paper, Melissa Etheridge’s life seems like the stuff of storytelling legend.
A Midwest girl chases her dreams of stardom to Hollywood ... only to discover the empty promises of fame.
A lesbian takes a brave leap out of the closet a decade before Ellen DeGeneres ... only to find that her popularity thrives as a result.
A health scare nearly derails everything ... until a spiritual reawakening puts her on a clear path toward a career high of Oscar gold, familial bliss and rubbing elbows with political leaders.
With all of this dynamic material, it would stand to reason that Etheridge can spin one helluva yarn. She puts these skills to use on The Awakening, a stunningly candid “concept album” that takes listeners on a journey through her life, from her 1982 arrival in Southern California to her 2004 battle with breast cancer.
Now on tour to promote a live CD/DVD version of The Awakening — and hard at work on A New Thought for Christmas, coming out this fall — the 47-year-old spoke with Just Out about a wide range of subjects: medicinal marijuana, ménage à trois, Britney Spears’ meltdown, Hillary Clinton’s gaffe and much, much more.
Jim Radosta: You obviously have a huge following here in Portland. What do you think of the city?
Melissa Etheridge: I love to walk around Portland every time I’m there. It grows and grows. What I love about Oregon is it’s such a paradox: You’ve got the most liberal liberals — you guys are way ahead on all the environmental scales of everything — and then you also have the most conservative people [laughs], the ones that are sort of pulling and dragging and putting their feet in. So I’ve always appreciated the people of Portland, Oregon, especially because they seem to be trying to lift everybody up.
JR: How goes preparation for The Revival Tour? Should fans expect anything different this time around?
ME: It’s not different in that you’re still gonna hear your favorite songs — I’m gonna do what I do — but I have organized the show a little differently than I usually do. With The Awakening, it’s sort of a chronicling of my journey, so what I’ve done is arrange the show in that I’m telling a story of this journey. The show moves more chronologically than before. It’s a little bit more expository.
JR: I would like to ask you some questions about The Awakening. To start with, do you think this fearless album — and the profound messages contained within it — could have happened had you not experienced breast cancer?
ME: Well, I would like to think that I would’ve gotten where I am, but I do know that the experience of having breast cancer and going through the chemotherapy and that whole thing — I look at that as a huge gift, just an incredible gift of forcing me to be completely still, to examine my whole life in this wonderful stillness, to experience my spirit apart from my body and my mind, to really have a physical and spiritual awakening. I do credit my experience with cancer as bringing that about.
And so now, I feel I want to help bring that about in other people without them having to go through cancer. [Pauses] But don’t wait — you can do it before then.
JR: Your lyrics share a really beautiful perspective on spirituality, which is often a difficult subject with gay folks. So I’m curious: What were your views like before the cancer?
ME: People would say, “Are you religious?” I thought, “Oh, goodness, no, I’m spiritual, though.” The gay community in general — we fight these things that are telling us we can’t love, and yet we believe in love and our right to love who we love, even though it’s hard and different. So I think we are ahead of everyone else sometimes on this journey because we have had this sort of resistance to love. And you just realize as you grow up: “Am I gonna keep myself in a shell because of their fear of sexuality? Am I gonna make myself small because of their fear?”
So I kind of had that going for me anyway and really was believing in that and was having my own spiritual path, but I didn’t ever say “God” much. “God” and that whole spiritual thing I sort of left to those that wear it. [Laughs] And that’s what really changed with cancer: “Why do they own God? I have God! I am God, and you are God, and God is in all of us, and I’m going to start saying God.”
Because you know what? You can’t say you’re a Christian and then you own God. You don’t. [Laughs] God is everywhere, and that’s the message that has to get out.
JR: The album presents two very different perspectives on Los Angeles, from the hopeful “California” to the jaded “Map of the Stars.” How have your views on fame changed since you moved west?
ME: Yeah, that’s one of the things that I wanted to really get through on this album. That journey of mine was that I grew up in the Midwest, I completely believed every song and movie and television show I saw that Hollywood was this great place where everyone was there, and I wanted to be there and I could be different, I could be unusual and crazy and I could be in that, and I just really thought that it was Emerald City and we’re just all gonna be tra-la-la and happy there.
Hollywood is like a machine with this big maze, and you just keep thinking, “OK, if I just get to that thing or that award or that show or that party or if I just know that person, then it’ll all make sense and I’ll be in that place, I’ll be there.” And I kept going, “There is no ‘there’ here — it doesn’t exist.” And I found out that what I created every day — my own life with my family, my friends — is the life I have!
There’s this illusion called Hollywood — and it’s only an illusion — it’s just a big machine that people keep going and churning out on television and film, but it doesn’t exist. That was a huge freedom; that was a big thing when I finally stopped sort of running on that hamster wheel. I stepped off of it.
And now I see these people that are still on it — ugh — and they’re getting skinnier and skinnier, you know, and they shave their heads and they go crazy. It’s crazy-making because it doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion, and people treat you like it does exist. You go insane.
JR: Your liner notes ask fans to stop everything they’re doing for an hour and listen to the album from beginning to end — which is so hard for some people to do in this ADD, iPod-shuffle culture. What albums inspired you to try this approach?
ME: I wanted to have an album to take people out of that — to give themselves the time to sit down: “Look, you can do this, you can take an hour. If you can’t sit, then drive somewhere. Just be with yourself and your breath for an hour!”
I remember listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates. You remember when we were much younger and we’d just sit — all you’d have to do is turn the record over. It was a journey, and it took you somewhere. All the Beatles records. The Eagles. It’s an art form, and I didn’t want to lose that art form. I wanted to say: “Look, this is an art piece. Please try to enjoy it once, the whole thing.”
JR: You also ask listeners to “help yourself to a glass of wine or a smoke.” Can I assume you're talking about weed and not tobacco?
ME: Yes, I would be on the record as a weed girl. I’m definitely not a tobacco girl.
JR: Because medicinal marijuana is already a hot election-year topic, can I ask if pot helped you through chemo?
ME: Oh Lord, yes. I have come out and talked about it to Stone Phillips! I don’t know how anyone gets through chemotherapy without marijuana, because the chemotherapy makes you so nauseous, and you don’t want to eat anything, and it puts you in such discomfort and pain. Yeah, you can take pain relievers and something for the diarrhea, but then you have to take something for the constipation, and you’re taking five or six different things with all the different side effects.
And you know what? I can smoke something straight from the earth, and I get no side effects; it takes care of every single one of those things. So I’m a big medicinal marijuana girl.
JR: I really appreciate the frank sexuality of “Threesome.” [“I don’t want to have a threesome ever again … l’d rather keep you all to myself.”] Since you’re in a very truth-telling mode, was that based on an actual incident?
ME: Well, yeah! Absolutely. I made a promise to myself with this album that if I feared anything, I would see it through, I wouldn’t back off of it. So I went ahead and did it.
I wanted to make my monogamy and my marriage and my true love for my wife — l wanted that to be as sexy as it could be. And dangerous — because I know it’s dangerous for some people to think that gay people actually get married and live normal lives. So I wanted to write a song that people could relate to, straight or gay, and realize, “Oh my gosh, I know how that feels!”
JR: You and Tammy Lynn have helped put a high-profile face on gay parenting. Obviously we’ve got a long way to go before everyone embraces nontraditional families. How have you seen things change since you came forward about the unusual nature of your family?
ME: Oh my gosh, so much. Sometimes I think we as a community need to stand up, give ourselves a minute, pat ourselves on the back and go, “Wow, we’re in the trenches right now, but look how far we’ve come!” When I was a young adult, the word marriage — no way! Gay marriage was weird! Uh-uh. We wanted to be way outside the norm. We were different, we were estranged.
And yet we have grown up, and my generation has said: “You know what? We’re gay, we’re American, we work, we want families, we want the same thing as everybody else.” And I think we’ve come a long way doing that and walking through and just staying the course and saying, “Look, we’re people, and it’s all about love.”
JR: To go back even further, I’d like to talk about how you felt right before coming out. The other day I heard your song “I Run for Life” on the supermarket Muzak, and now Ellen DeGeneres tops Oprah Winfrey as the most respected figure on television. Basically I’m wondering: Did you ever see this day coming?
ME: This is the someday that we always talked about. And I know we’re gonna get marriage when we all realize the equality of all of us. It’s gonna be a no-brainer.
Yeah, I felt like I was in Hollywood at a very special time when all of us gay people kind of found each other, and we were like: “You go. No, you go out. No, you come out!” And we all kind of just jumped in, one after the other. Basically, we just keep ascending, we keep moving up.
JR: You also must’ve opened many minds when a billion viewers saw you thank your wife on the Oscars. What was that experience like, and did you ever think that a song from an eco-documentary could beat the Dreamgirls juggernaut?
ME: I know! I sort of felt sorry for the gay community at that moment. Sorry, guys!
That was really something special, because I grew up, just like any good gay person, watching the Oscars every year and just loving the whole entertainment — that moment when you can say thank you and have that 45 seconds to talk to the whole world. And I had that dream, absolutely. That was sort of the epitome of Hollywood to
me.
So getting involved with Al Gore and [An Inconvenient Truth], I had no idea. First of all, he said, “Will you write a song for my slide show?” I thought, “This is going to be something in high schools.” So it truly was the furthest thing from my mind where it ended up, yet the journey was so sweet and beautiful — seeing that film change the world! Now I’m hooked on changing the world, man. That’s the biggest high I’ve ever been on.
And it culminating in an Oscar presented by Queen Latifah and John Travolta — the funny thing was I was like, “OK, I’m gonna thank my wife and my kids.” I say “wife” so often now, I don’t even think about it when I say it. So when I said it in the speech, the audience applauded, and I thought, “Yeah, she’s a great gal!” Then I realized, “Oh, no, they’re not used to hearing ‘wife’ from women, and that’s what that’s for.” I just kind of forgot for a moment there.
JR: What was it like serving on the panel for Logo’s gay-focused presidential debate?
ME: That was so crazy! First of all, I was so honored. If nothing else, our movement has informed, political, powerful people in it, yet I also knew l am a famous person, and I know that that brings people to watch things. I said: “You know what? I’m grateful for my celebrity. I realize that if it’s gotten me a place on this panel, I hope to represent my community fully and maybe ask some of the personal questions that might not get asked.” It was a really eye-opening experience.
JR: Did it sway your views?
ME: Yes, it did. I sort of went in, “Give me Hillary, give me Obama, give me Clinton-Obama, whatever.” I was very impressed with Obama. He was the only one who came backstage to my dressing room, shook my hand, gave me a book, signed it, said: “Pleasure to meet you. I appreciate everything you do.” Things like that, I think, go a long way.
Then confronting Hillary and saying: “Look, I was there in ’92. We were gonna be free, and we were the first ones you guys sold down the river!” Then I was surprised that her answer was: “Well, Melissa, you know, having gone through cancer, things just can’t happen quick enough for you.” So that kind of turned me off to Hillary.
And then hearing Dennis Kucinich just get out there and say: “Hello? It’s not equality. Period.” Why can’t my Democratic leader, who I know feels this way, why can’t they step out and just do what’s right?
I know that our movement is not about that one thing, marriage, yet it symbolizes so much, you know? You’re either really for equality or you’re not.
JR: I just saw Martin Scorsese’s documentary about The Rolling Stones in which Mick Jagger said in a mid-’60s interview that they might be around for a few years at most. I’d like to ask you the same question: How long do you see yourself performing?
ME: Well, see, I watch The Rolling Stones, and I think, “As long as they can do it, I can do it!” I watch them, I watch Bruce, and as long as I can do it and remain with my dignity intact — I mean, I’m not gonna get up there and shake my booty and try to compete with the youngsters, but as long as people enjoy the music, then I’m gonna be there doing it.
Originally published in Just Out, August 15, 2008
