Melissa Etheridge: Never Enough : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Over the last four years, Melissa Etheridge has emerged as a bluesy, even ballsy singer-songwriter with a decidedly feminist perspective on relationships. Her 1988 debut, Melissa Etheridge, dealt with sexual betrayal; Brave and Crazy, from 1989, was more varied in its songs of love and lust. With Never Enough, Etheridge goes one step further, exploring the public issues that shape personal life.

This new emphasis on sexual politics is immediately apparent. "Tell me where can a woman find any kind of peace/When does the fury and the agony cease/How long have I got to say please?" Etheridge laments on "Ain't It Heavy," the rousing first single from the album. And on "2001," she declares, "I saw my sister/Saw the ones who twist her/A social suicide/If looks could kill/Each and every cheap thrill/Could be a homicide."

Yet Etheridge doesn't place all the blame on others. In "Dance Without Sleeping," she castigates herself for passively accepting cheerful images projected by the media and for ignoring social injustice. At the same time, she expresses ambivalence, even weariness toward fighting such battles; her response to the struggles women face on "2001" is a desire to sleep through them – a disappointing, even disturbing stance.

Musically, Never Enough is rather conventional. Etheridge's band is cut from the Bob Seger mold of heartland rock (she's from Kansas), a sound she occasionally embellishes with a cello or drum programming. Her voice is as passionate as ever but used with greater subtlety than before. The playfulness of Brave and Crazy resurfaces in "Meet Me in the Back," an amusingly halting rendition of a quest for casual sex. Alas, there's nothing as arresting on this album as "Bring Me Some Water," but taken as a whole, Never Enough represents Etheridge's best work to date.