Still Thirsty

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by: Mary Jenen

Curve Magazine 2019

Read the entire article at Curve Vol.29 No.02 Summer 2019 – Curve Archive – Curve (curvemag.com) 

Bring Me Some Water, the hit single from Melissa Etheridge’s self – titled debut album earned a 1988 nomination for best female rock vocal performance. Over the past three decades she had fifteen Grammy nominations with two wins, sold over 25 million albums with five platinum and 3 multi -platinum. In 2006 she won an Oscar for best original song in a motion picture for I Need to Wake Up from the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. 

Melissa has not slowed down and shows no signs of it. She continues to tour extensively world – wide playing her hits including Come to My Window, I’m The Only One and I Want to Come Over. She is happily married to actress, writer, producer Linda Wallem, has four amazing children and she’s an advocate for the LGBT community and the legalization of marijuana. 

Her latest album released this past April titled The Medicine show resonates with who Melissa is and what she’s all about. The music and the lyrics are powerful. They rock you to your very core. Produced by John Shanks, who previously worked with Melissa on Fearless Love, Breakdown and Lucky, once again shines through. “He is like a brother to me and he knew I had very specific sound in mind and a very specific purpose for this album. He stayed right on method with that,” said Melissa.

Referring to the album she says, “It’s about hope, healing, pulling together and there’s a new thought about our health and our wellness and our own responsibility to it and that sort of change in thought changes the world.”

The title track is fun and upbeat. Melissa sings, “Let’s all go to the medicine show High-ho high-ho!” She loves to get the audience involved, “E-I-E-I-O.”

“I’ve been advocating to end the prohibition and I’ve been a big believer in the healing medicinal properties of cannabis. I’ve also been arrested in North Dakota for possession of cannabis and I also realized there are a whole lot of people’s lives that are being ruined and spent in jail because they also had possession of cannabis so I thought I’d write a song of rising up and let’s get together and change this.” And that is how the album begins.

I asked Melissa what emotions led her to the first single, Faded by Design. She began writing it in her bassists, David Santos, studio in Nashville. “I started with the chords,” she sang over the phone, “I’m feeling all my angels. Oh yea, I’m faded by design.” 

“I just started singing,” she says, “I thought what is this? I started kinda going down this corridor of feel good and ya know hey don’t worry about me. The idea that we have to police other people and their own journey of their own extension, own consciousness and exploration of their own consciousness is ridiculous and so Faded by Design was born.”

Wild And Lonely is the second single from the album. “It’s about life, love, that’s just me on the road; feeling wild and lonely. That’s just a lust song,” she says laughing.

This Human Chain, the eighth track, was inspired when Melissa saw on the news a man in France caught in a riptide and was drowning. People on the beach linked together and made a human chain to pull him out. “The song is about people pulling together and helping each other,” said Melissa. “I wrote the music first in a day and then I took that music and went back in the studio and sat down with it. Then the lyrics came really easily.”

The album really is an inspiration. Here Comes the Pain is about the opioid crisis and the hope for healing, Shaking is about national anxiety, Last Hello was inspired by the incredible strength and courage of the survivors of the Parkland school shootings.

Melissa says all eleven tracks resonate pretty hard with who she is, “but probably Faded by Design is closest and then I Know You because that’s such a personal grown-up love song.”

The Medicine Show tour runs through the summer so “Let’s all go to the medicine show! High-ho high-ho!”

Melissa was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. Fifteen years cancer free, Melissa is doing better than ever. She talks of how surviving breast cancer has changed her life. “It affects everything, my whole personality. Going through all of that was a real life changer. It changed my attitude about my own body because I realized I am what I think. If I think that I’m not well and not good enough then I’ll be not well and good enough. I really started working on my thoughts and my inner strength, working on what my priorities were, and I started making joy more of a priority than stress. It really inspired and ignited me so I put that in my music and everything I do.”

Read the entire article at Curve Vol.29 No.02 Summer 2019 – Curve Archive – Curve (curvemag.com)