Another color in the crayon box

Melissa Etheridge says music saved her life

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From coming out as a lesbian to her political activism to talking openly about her breast cancer diagnosis, Melissa Etheridge isn’t shy to tell the world about her personal problems. Honesty is the only way, she says. But she wasn’t always this way. Openness was her form of teenage rebellion, and she quickly found an outlet for her truth — music.

“It’s the opposite of what I grew up with,” Etheridge says. “I grew up in the Midwest, in Kansas in the ’60s and ’70s — you don’t get more repressed than that. It was a very narrow scope of emotion. Everything was hidden, and you just didn’t talk about it. As I fired into my adolescence and realized I was different, I started putting it into my music and rock ’n’ roll. And music saved my life. I just started writing, and I would write really truthful and see how people would relate to it and knew that it was something.”

Etheridge brings her brand of honesty to Chautauqua on Aug. 5 in her latest solo tour, where she’ll be talking about her career and playing her newest songs, greatest hits and even taking the occasional request.

“I’m looking forward to getting back to the smaller and more intimate thing,” she says. “It’s a different shade of the music, and I like the contrast.”

This isn’t her first time on the Front Range. Boulder has always held significance in Etheridge’s career when back in 1989 she played Boulder’s Coast, a former nightclub in the People’s Republic.

“It was one of my best shows ever,” she says. “KBCO played my music so much that Boulder was one of the first few real rock shows I ever did. It was like 700 people, and it was the most I had played to [at that time].” 

Etheridge has come a long way since her debut self-titled album. On the newest album, This is M.E., she tried to pump up the creativity and venture into uncharted territories, all the while staying true to her fans.

“I was trying to just stay relevant in the music industry,” she says with a laugh. “This is my 13th album. … I’m so fortunate to keep making my music and having people interested in it. I figure my job is to make the music I love, find what thrills me and then my fans will hear that. That’s my number one goal. …

“[This album] was a time of independence for me,” she says. “This was my first album not on a major label. I left the labels and said, ‘I think I can do it myself.’ I really enjoyed that it gave me such freedom to go way outside of the box.”

On This is M.E. Etheridge teamed up with Grammy Award-winning producers who’ve worked with some of the biggest names in today’s music. Despite the many collaborators, the album retains a thread of cohesion and skirts the line between modern-day sounds and the classic Etheridge feel. While continuing to explore herself as an artist on this album, in the end she returned to her musical core.

“It’s almost like I had to go around the world to come back home,” she says. “My guitar playing, my voice, my writing is stronger than ever, and the collaborations I did really supported all of that.”

Etheridge was one of the ladies who paved the way for females in rock, never apologizing about her gender, her raspy voice or her refusal to conform to female stereotypes. This has garnered a career that focuses on the music more than anything else.

“A couple of nights ago I did a concert and it was myself, Blondie and Joan Jett,” Etheridge says. “And the beautiful thing was there was no mention of the all-girlness of it at all. It was just a rock ’n’ roll night. I think that’s where we’re at. Now it’s just an appreciation of the work, looking past the gender.”

As the playing field levels out, the music industry is now a better place for women. But Etheridge says there’s still more to be done.

“I never spent much time thinking that I didn’t get something because I was a woman,” she says. “And now when you see people like Taylor Swift, who’s a huge star, we see that women are really running the show here. It’s obvious that we’ve come a long way. It would be nicer to see more women on the inside of the music business — it’s still run by a lot of guys. But women are doing it. We’re getting there.”

It’s impossible to talk about Etheridge’s gender without mentioning the work she’s done for the LGBT community. Coming out in 1994 at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, Etheridge has since been an advocate for gay rights and never one to apologize for who she is.

“I can’t say that coming out hurt me,” she says. “If there’s someone who’s not going to listen to me or stereotype me because I’m gay, they’re not going to be digging my music anyway. I don’t think I’ve lost anything. I don’t think anybody nowadays thinks about it. It’s just a color in the crayon box. It doesn’t define the music at all. My audience is so diverse; the one thing we have in common is we all feel very deeply.”

A recent burst of emotion for Etheridge was the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision a few weeks ago legalizing gay marriage.

“That was one of the most amazing feelings I’ve had all my life. I’ll never forget it,” she says. “It’s such a beautiful ringing of the bell of change. For 20 years we’ve debated and seen the worst come out of us — fear, bigotry, confusion. We’ve worked as a society to show how we can tolerate — not tolerate but actually hold diversity, because that’s what we came from. We’re all different here. We all came from somewhere else to come here. …

“It means now it’s on the person. If you want to be the person who is afraid of sex so much that someone else’s sexuality threatens you, than that’s your burden and your issue. It won’t affect my civil right to be married to my love and the person that I want to enjoy this gorgeous American life. So, it was a beautiful day.”

And Etheridge got to celebrate it with her wife, Linda Wallem, whom she married last year.

“I felt like now I can hold my wife’s hand and walk down the street. I don’t have to worry if I’m offending anyone,” she says. “We’ve pulled this out of the shadows, we’ve looked at it and we said, ‘We don’t need to hurt ourselves over this. Let’s move on.’” 

Coming out of the darkness has been Etheridge’s goal since her adolescence. She has nothing to hide, and by sharing pieces of her life with the world she helps herself and those in need. Moving toward a more truthful world, she says, leads to a healthier world.

“I’ve had enough experience that I get how this works,” she says. “The more power you bring inside of yourself with your own truth — yeah I’m gay, yeah I had cancer, yeah I’m a cannabis smoker — the more open and honest I am about that, the more accepting and honest my world is. I don’t do it to help anybody else, yet it ends up helping other people. [Being open] is the only way to change the world.”

ON THE BILL: Melissa Etheridge: This Is M.E. Solo. 9 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 5, Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder, 303- 442-3282.