Melissa knows no fear after illness
Outspoken on gay rights and having battled cancer, Melissa Etheridge is a true survivor, writes Barry Egan
Melissa Etheridge has been called -- by People magazine -- the female Bruce Springsteen. You could probably just as easily call Bruce Springsteen the male Melissa Etheridge.
Her rock style is muscular and compelling and emotive, as is evident on classic Melissa tracks like Come to My Window, I Want to Come Over, and Nowhere to Go, replete with a voice that can only be described as smoky, but it is hardly Springsteen-for-girls. Still, the spirited singer, who plays the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on Tuesday, was cool enough a few years ago to say that in the mid-Seventies when she was in high school in Kansas -- "and just figuring myself out" -- she felt like she had experienced "that same American longing, that American dream and American dissatisfaction" as the Boss in New Jersey.
"Bruce's music gave me fuel to move forward," said Melissa, who was born May 29, 1961, continuing that she'd listen to Born To Run and just stare at the radio "because it had so much meaning for me. There had already been rock and roll in my life. I was a big fan of The Who and Led Zeppelin already, but this was an American poet writing about my world in a way I could recognise and feel". She added that Bruce's 1978 masterpiece Darkness On The Edge Of Town resonated with her because she grew up in a town in Kansas "with a giant prison, and that song always connected with me. When you grow up in one town and your life revolves around it, you are very aware of any darkness on the edge of town. That's because it's scary and it's inviting. There are a lot of feelings wrapped up on this song".
There are, similarly, a lot of feelings and emotions wrapped up in the songs of Melissa Etheridge. She is not one to bite her tongue. In our still generally homophobic world, Melissa has been one of the first rock stars to be openly gay. Lest we forget, the rock star from Kansas 'came out' publicly at a 1993 inaugural ball for President Clinton. Etheridge revealed to Rolling Stone magazine that the biological father of her and then-girlfriend Julie Cypher's children was none other than rock superstar David Crosby. (In 2008, she came up with her own way of protesting against California's ban on gay marriage. She said she wasn't going to pay the state's taxes.)
Even allowing for exaggeration, Melissa Etheridge is both a survivor and a fighter. In 2005, she won her battle with breast cancer. She underwent a lumpectomy and went through five rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. "We all have this sense of invincibility. Even though my father, aunt and grandmother passed away from cancer -- it was all over my family -- I was surprised to hear the diagnosis," she said recently. "The possibility might have been somewhere in the back of my head, but I wasn't walking around thinking this would happen. I had been running along in my life at a fast pace. When I heard it was cancer, I just stood still. My life passed over me like a big wave, and after, I was left there standing. This turned out to be a very good thing. I stopped. I looked at my life, I looked at my body and spirit. I got a new perspective. That's brought me incredible clarity and a lot of peace."
Asked if she was afraid she would die, Melissa said: "Once I overcame breast cancer, I wasn't afraid of anything anymore. I now have a different relationship with fear. There are only two things in our reality, love and fear. I try to make my choices out of love."
Her inspired and inspirational new album, Fearless Love, her 11th studio album, is a testament to that belief in love. "The album is about being fearless. It's about choosing love over fear. It's a way, a philosophy of living life that suits me well."
Originally published in
