Melissa Etheridge
When: Sunday, 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:30)
Where: Royal Theatre (805 Broughton St.)
Tickets: $59.50-$79.50 (plus service charges) at McPherson Box Office, 250-386-6121 or rmts.bc.ca
Melissa Etheridge has scored a series of professional triumphs over her 35-year music career, including two Grammy Awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But when she is discussed outside of the music community, which has happened increasingly in recent years, it is often for her activism.
The word itself still makes Etheridge skip a step. The Midwesterner, who was raised in Leavenworth, Kansas, doesn’t like to make a fuss about things, least of all issues pertaining to her personal life. She does, however, believe she has every right to speak her mind, repercussions be damned. If that makes her an activist, she is happy to live with that definition.
“I am being called an activist simply for making the choices I do in my life,” Etheridge, 53, said Tuesday from a hotel room in Denver. “I am a breast cancer thriver, I am a lesbian, I do think recreational cannabis enhances my life, I understand the environment and the effect it has on my health. These things are so clear to me I will speak about them whenever I am asked. The activist part only comes from being willing to speak truthfully about it.”
Truth is a key characteristic of Etheridge’s music. Called by some pundits the Queen of the Heartland, her Springsteen-esque songs redefined the role of women in rock during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a triple-threat skillset that included heartfelt songs, rafter-reaching voice and road-weary acoustic guitar.
Her hard-rocking debut from 1988, Melissa Etheridge, made her an instant star. At the time, few of the women artists on radio could match her abilities as a rocker. She continued that hit streak well into the 1990s and beyond. By the time 2005 rolled around, she had scored 14 Grammy Award nominations in the rock category, far and away the biggest total ever for a female artist.
Her 15th Grammy nod was for the song I Need to Wake Up, a track Etheridge penned for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007, the same song earned her an Academy Award.
Etheridge, who once told Rolling Stone magazine she is “most comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt,” didn’t always fit in on radio, which made her success in the medium feel like even more of a major accomplishment
“From the day I started doing this, there were people who believed in the music, from my manager at the time, Bill Leopold, to Chris Blackwell, who signed me to Island Records,” Etheridge said. “They believed in it. And when you believe in something, that enables you to stand in a radio station and say: ‘Are you kidding me? Don’t tell me you can’t play two women on the radio back to back.’ ”
The raspy-voiced belter — she of the short stature but spunky attitude — was once in line to portray Janis Joplin in a Hollywood biopic, a role she would have relished.
But the desire to push the boundaries of what she can achieve inside the realm of her art isn’t as strong as it once was, Etheridge admitted. She records with regularity, but the fate of each record she makes is less of a make-or-break situation.
Her upcoming recording, This is M.E., due in September, will be the first record of her career not to bear the Island Records imprint.
If you had told her a decade ago that would be her fate, she would have fainted. But Etheridge is strangely serene as she crosses North America on her solo tour in advance of her first independent album.
That’s a sign she is heading in the right direction.
“It’s not the product I’m selling anymore, it’s me. The product is helping me. An album will, too, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Those days are gone, and I’m so happy about that.
“I tour every year and to most Melissa Etheridge fans, it doesn’t matter if a new album is out. They know they are going to get a great show, with all the songs they love, whether I have an album out or not. And that’s just golden. I wish that for every artist.”
