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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."
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Enter Al Gore, who asked the singer to write the theme song for An Inconvenient Truth. "I was working with someone who was at the front of the whole wave," says Etheridge. "I saw Al Gore stand up, and in a summer, I saw the world change." The song she wrote for the film, "I Need to Wake Up," not only won her an Oscar, it reinforced Etheridge's developing belief in the concept of "intentional reality," a theory with which she has become absolutely fascinated. "I've read hundreds of books, everything from physics to Buddhism to Pleiadians — you know, outer-space extraterrestrials — and they're all talking about the same thing, which thrills me. They're talking about intentional reality. If you can get to that truth, that everything that happens to you is because you've intended it, then you realize how powerful we are."
Growing up in Kansas, Etheridge enjoyed going to church because of the music. "I was in the choir in these Baptist churches," she says. "As a matter of fact, in high school I had dreams of maybe having a career in Christian music." Etheridge's first real gig was opening for Christian contemporary artist Phil Keaggy in her hometown, and after the show, she asked him what he thought of her set. "He basically said, 'I don't think there's a place for people like you in Christian music,' but he said it very nicely. I thought, 'OK. They don't want me, I don't want them.'"
Nowadays, for the first time, she's willing to say she's "into God": "Religion is an oppressive form of crowd control," she says. "But what I understand now is the idea that we are all one, that we come from this one higher consciousness and that we are here to create the kingdom of heaven here on Earth." She says she'll keep the philosophizing to a minimum during her shows, but she's certain to touch on the political and the spiritual. "There's a reason that I'm calling it the Revival Tour," she says. "I want people to know that you're getting more than just the songs."
In the political sphere, Etheridge — a supporter of the Clintons in the Nineties — backed Barack Obama in the primaries. "I was involved with the Clintons deeply," says the singer. "But I could not reconcile myself with some of the choices that I saw them make, and now the corporations run 'em. I think Obama is further outside of that. Do I think he's all the way outside? No. But with trepidation and great hope, I throw him my support." In May, she even signed on as one of 14 co-chairs — alongside Dave Matthews and Usher — of Obama's "Vote for Change" voter drive. "You have to believe not just in the man but in human spirit," she says. "In four years, we can have a totally different world."
But just for this summer, Etheridge has a more modest goal: "I realized the greatest thing that I can do is incite feeling in people," she says. "Maybe it's just 'I want to scream and holler, and this is a safe place to scream and holler.' Go. Scream. Holler all you want. That's what I do. That's why I'm doing it now."
[From Issue 1056-1057 — July 10, 2008]