The Tao of Etheridge

The rule in the Etheridge household is that you must remove your shoes before you enter. It's an appropriate policy for the musician's new Calabasas, California, home — an oasis of overstuffed shabby chic that Melissa Etheridge moved to six months ago with her wife, Tammy Lynn, their 19-month-old twins, Miller Steven and Johnnie Rose, and Etheridge's two older children, 11-year-old Bailey and nine-year-old Beckett. The family lives in a pretty gated community with horses grazing in residents' fields and, nearby the gates, the kind of progressive elementary school where the other kids don't think anything of the fact that Bailey and Beckett's mom is a lesbian rock star. For Etheridge, the joy of this place is the freedom it symbolizes and the new life she's embracing in the aftermath of her battle with breast cancer four years ago. "I've become a completely different person," Etheridge says, her bare feet tucked beneath her on the couch in a room that doubles as her office and studio. "I'm not 'the only one who'd walk across the fire for you' anymore."

It's amazing what a brush with death will do to one's sense of faith and purpose, and with the release of her first post-cancer album, 2007's The Awakening, Etheridge was reborn as a protest singer. Whereas hits like "Come to My Window" and "I'm the Only One" found her pleading with a lover, The Awakening addresses war, religion and politics. As she prepares for this summer's Revival Tour, which kicks off July 15th in Florida, Etheridge says the songs in her 165-minute show will narrate her life's journey, from her humble beginnings as a musician desperate to escape her hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas, past finding love and losing it (with previous partner Julie Cypher), up through the spiritual enlightenment that has given her new hope in the wake of the cancer.

"During chemotherapy, I lay there, day after day, night after night, in pain," she says. "It was as close to death as you can get. I started taking medical marijuana, and I'd lay there in the darkness for days, trying to be still and just breathe. I went through my life three or four times in my head, and when my mind's tape ran off, I got into this meditative state and discovered this connection with a higher consciousness that I'd been blocked off from."

When she gained enough strength to start working again, Etheridge yearned to find a more meaningful purpose for her music. "I got into music for the reason I think that most people do, even though they won't admit it — for the fame and the fortune," she says. "But then I got there, and I thought, 'Is this all there is?' I feel like there are greater things I'm supposed to do, but I don't know what they are."