Melissa Etheridge's Personal Best
With the release of a new live album recorded in a women’s prison, Melissa Etheridge is fulfilling a dream she’s held since childhood. She talks to Alan Pedder about the concert, the accompanying film, and the five songs she’s most proud of writing.
Melissa Etheridge was just shy of her ninth birthday when Johnny Cash visited her hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas, in May 1970, to play a concert at the federal prison a couple of blocks from her family home.
She was too young to attend of course, but the buzz surrounding Cash’s advocacy for prison inmates across the United States left a lasting impression. Etheridge had already started learning guitar by then and went on to perform in the public for the first time aged 11, at a local talent contest hosted by ventriloquist Bob Hamill. Soon after, she joined Hamill’s touring variety show, giving her firsthand experience of what it was like to step inside a prison as an entertainer. Performing at the Leavenworth federal penitentiary as a teenager, she says the audience “made her feel like a female Johnny Cash,” and it’s something she’s never forgotten.
Now aged 63, and a multi-million selling artist in her own right, Etheridge is honouring those formative experiences with a powerful new live album recorded last year at a women’s correctional facility in Topeka, Kansas. Speaking to Best Fit from a hotel room in Vail, Colorado, where she's on tour, the two-time Grammy-winning artist explains that she grew up thinking that playing at prisons was something that every great performer did. “This project was so near to my heart and is something I have wanted to do since I was a kid,” she says, proudly.
In an accompanying two-part documentary screened on Paramount+ around the album’s release last month, we learn that the population of women’s state prisons in the US has grown by more than 800% in the 40-odd years since Etheridge started gigging in lesbian bars around Los Angeles. It’s a shocking statistic, particularly when it’s pointed out that the number of incarcerated women is increasing at twice the rate of men.
In the 9 months leading up to the concert, Etheridge and her documentary team (including Amy Scott, director of the recent Sheryl Crow doc) visited a small group of inmates at the prison to get firsthand knowledge of their lives and reasons for being there. Some of the inmates also began to send her handwritten letters, which would often bring her to tears.
Etheridge had known from the start that she wanted to write a new song specifically for the women at Topeka, and this correspondence was the key. It became quickly apparent that the women’s convictions were often drug-related, and that their troubles spoke to their deep-rooted personal pain and feelings of worthlessness. Having lost her 21-year-old son Beckett to opioid addiction a few years earlier, she speaks of being acutely aware that it’s not always possible to save people. “I haven’t encountered a lot of people who believe in their ability to break the cycle,” she says, thoughtfully. “I just want to be a light that tells people that they matter.”
The resulting song “A Burning Woman” is one of five tracks spanning 25 years that Etheridge has chosen as among her Personal Best. The other four also appear on I’m Not Broken, but none are ones you’d necessarily expect. “The hits are on the album, and that’s fine and great, because I wanted to do those songs for them,” she says. “But I also wanted to speak to them, and the songs I’ve chosen very specifically relate to that. Each of these five songs is united by the theme of trauma, and the feelings of guilt and shame that go with that.”
"Into the Dark" (1999)
BEST FIT: Let’s start with the oldest of the songs you’ve chosen, from 25 years back. It’s not one you chose for your 2005 greatest hits album The Road Less Traveled, but it clearly means a lot to you. What earns it a place here in your Personal Best?
MELISSA ETHERIDGE: This song was written in 1998, for my Breakdown album. It was a time in my life when I’d had five amazing years that had been the biggest highlight of my career up to that point, but I was really unhappy at home. My relationship was falling apart, and there were things that I was still fearful of. But what I finally realised then was that this fear really had no purpose. It wasn’t helping me at all. It was only keeping me from doing things.
I was 37 years old at the time, and I finally felt ready to go ‘into the dark,’ and face up to the things that I had run away from. I’d left my family, my sister, and all the messed-up stuff that life in the Midwest could do to [a gay person] at the time, but I had never properly addressed it. I had never let it go. I was carrying all that fear with me like baggage, and I knew that I couldn’t do that anymore.
Writing this song, I was inspired by the terrible recurring nightmares that I used to have as a child, and into my young adulthood. I decided to write each verse as my dreams. There was one nightmare I used to have where I’d be falling down the stairs outside of my childhood bedroom. Just falling and falling and never stopping. Another one was a dream where my sister would be freakishly, terrifyingly small. Scary, tiny monster small. And those two dreams became the first verse: “There were stairs, they were steep / I was falling, falling deep / You were there, you were small / There was screaming down the hall.” In my childhood I would always hear this screaming and I never knew what was really going on.
The second verse talks about fire and death, and that comes from a recurring dream I used to have of a monster that was trying to get me. In Kansas, in the ‘60s, there was no trash collection. Each house would have this metal thing that you’d throw your trash in and it would burn up. In my recurring dream, I’d somehow manage to catch this monster before it got me, and then throw him into this burning trash. Only I’d turn around and watch him getting back out of the trash bin, still coming for me. I remember I would wake up completely terrified.
The third verse talks about there being a wave over the house. Now, don’t ask me why in Kansas, where we were 3000 miles from the ocean, I would have a horrible fear of tsunamis, but I did. Yes, it was a ridiculous fear, but I would have these dreams of giant waves of water coming over our house and destroying it. What I realised later is that these nightmares were kind of safety valves for my psyche. They were just products of my own mind trying to get past the fear that I had of being hurt.
I think we all know that there comes a time in our lives when we have to look deeper into our souls, into our hearts, into the dark, and into our own power, and that’s what I wanted to try and convey to these women. Yeah, there are things that mess us up from our childhood, but we can’t move past them unless we deal with them. By dealing with them, I’m not saying that everyone has to go to therapy and talk about these things over and over again. We all just have to come to a place in ourselves of settling things. Like, ‘Okay, I know that happened, and I know why it happened and why that led to this situation. I’m going to just leave it there. I’m not going to put any more energy into it.’ For me, that’s the way that I have moved past all the old fears I had for so long and that I don’t ever think about now. I haven’t had a nightmare in decades.
Is “Into the Dark” a track that you’ve played much over the years?
I played it quite a lot when the album first came out, but I see it as a bit of deep cut. Fans like to hear it every now and then, but it’s never been a staple, you know? Even the album, Breakdown, is not one of my big albums, so it’s kind of a deep cut on a deep album, which a lot of the songs I’ve chosen are. It just comes from a place in my life where I was really learning about myself, about life, and learning about joy in life, and how we are meant to be joyful.
"An Unexpected Rain" (2007)
BEST FIT: This track was written after you’d been through a major health scare with breast cancer, and you were looking back over your life and your choices, which seems very relevant to what you were saying earlier.
MELISSA ETHERIDGE: Yeah, I chose this song here and for the setlist because I wanted to bring up the topics of guilt and shame, and consequences too, because I wanted to speak to these women who were in prison as the consequence of their choices, to the point where they needed to be arrested to change.
I wrote this song based on a memory of mine from the early ‘80s that had been kind of haunting me, because I was ashamed of the way I’d behaved. There was a woman I had been staying with for a few weeks in her house, because I didn’t have anywhere else to stay, and one day I just left without a proper explanation, just a short note. A couple of weeks later I saw her from across the street. She had cut her wrists and been in an institution, and I was like, ‘Oh Jesus.’ I felt the consequences of what I'd done, and it haunted me for years afterwards.
There’s a couple of lines in the chorus that say “I know I did my best / I never meant to hurt no one,” and that comes from me really looking back at my life and who I was at that time. What I was trying to say to the women in the prison is that when you look back on your life, you have to learn how to forgive yourself for your mistakes. You have to give forgiveness to yourself and let yourself off the hook, otherwise you can develop a really bad habit and run your life from feelings of guilt and shame. That’s a really rough path to go down, so I wanted to take those women inside the story of what this song is about: consequences and forgiveness. At the end of the song I’m singing “Good night ladies, I’m gonna leave you now,” and that’s speaking to me wanting to relieve all the guilt that I was carrying around about the bad choices I’d made in my early life. I just left it behind me.
I also wanted to write a song for lead guitar. I felt that in the 2000s we were losing the art of the lead guitar in a song. You know, I had grown up with lead guitars on everything, listening to people like the Allman Brothers and Peter Frampton, so I wanted to bring that back in some way and write a song that has, like, three guitar solos in it. I wanted the guitar to be another voice in the song too. I wanted it to sing.
For me, one of the most moving parts of the documentary was when we heard from the woman who had killed a young person while drunk driving, and the way she talked about the guilt she felt was such a powerful moment. This song makes me think of her specifically.
Yeah, it was a powerful moment for sure. The guilt just weighs on her so much. It’s always just right there under the skin. I know that she’s been trying to reach the family and that they are all trying to heal, but it’s a long, long road.
Going back to what you were saying about writing for lead guitar, I remember that The Awakening album, which this song comes from, was made with the deliberate aim of doing things in a similar way to the way you wrote and recorded when you first started out. Your older fans seemed to resonate with it, too. How does the album hold up for you?
Oh, it's one of my favorite albums, because, after cancer, I did not give a fuck about anything. It didn’t matter to me what a record company or anybody else said about what I was making. I was determined to make my music in whatever way made me happy from then on.
Making this record was a really special time for me. I felt like I was really getting my power back, especially in music. I loved the recording of it. We all stayed together in a place in Malibu, right by the ocean, and I just wrote whatever I wanted. The songs on this album are all little pieces of my life and my experience up to that point, because I’d had a sort of spiritual awakening and felt like a new person. Okay, yeah, there were no hits, but I really love this record.
"The Shadow of a Black Crow" (2012)
BEST FIT: The next song comes from your 2012 album, 4th Street Feeling, and, as you say in the documentary and during the intro to it on the live album, it’s an incredibly personal one for you.
MELISSA ETHERIDGE: Yeah, and that album is probably my most obscure. It was my last album for Island Records and it just kind of sat there. It didn’t do much, but, again, it’s an album that has some of my favourite songs I’ve written on it.
“Shadow of a Black Crow” was a hard one to write, because I was writing about addiction. At the time, my son Beckett was just in early adolescence and had started to exhibit signs of being troubled. It’s a song about realising that something inescapable is now in your life. The lyrics are written as a first-person account of someone driving a car, trying to get away from a bad situation but having that shadow them and follow them around.
For me, the black crow represents the feeling that you could die at any minute, and that’s the place that addiction can take a person to. I realised that so many of the women at the prison are in there for drug abuse or crimes to support their drug abuse. It’s all brought on by addiction, and that, in many cases, is brought on by early-life trauma, so I wanted to relate to them in some way with “The Shadow of a Black Crow”. It’s a very different song for me. It’s written on the baritone guitar, for a start, so it has this really bassy, hollow and haunting sound.
You're very honest in the documentary about the way you have been dealing with the loss of your son, and how you have, as you said earlier, come to place where you know you did your best. You don’t have to feel guilty.
When I wrote this song, he was still a young teenager and I knew it was going to be a rocky road for him, but I certainly didn’t expect him to die. It wasn’t until a few months before he actually died that I thought, ‘Wow, there’s really nothing I can do about this now. It’s up to him, and I don’t think he’s got it in him.’ If I was living with all that guilt, I think my life would have stopped too, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted that.
In your statement when Beckett passed away, you talked about how singing has always been a way for you to heal. Is that something that you’re trying to pass on to the women at the Topeka facility? To give voice to all their pain as a way of moving past it?
Yes, I really wanted the concert to do that. It’s like, ‘Look, we have this moment here where we can let the whole world outside go away. It has nothing to do with where you are. Let’s just enjoy music. Let’s really love music, celebrate it, and let go of everything else.’ That’s what I hoped for and it was really great to see them getting into that spirit. Music has always, always helped me, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.
"Love Will Live" (2019)
BEST FIT: The next track you’ve chosen is one that was strongly influenced by the #MeToo movement in 2016, and, again, it’s a very powerful and personal song. How was the writing process for you? What were you tapping into there?
MELISSA ETHERIDGE: Well, it was pretty easy. I was just tapping into certain experiences from my childhood. You know, just touching on them. I didn’t need to go into the details, but I did really want to emphasise the fact that, as I say in the song, “I did not shatter, did not crumble, didn’t die.” I chose differently. I made the choice to leave all that behind.
I remember I originally wanted to call the song “Me Too” but I got such pushback on that from everyone on that, from the record company, management, the producer and even some of my friends. Everyone was telling me, ‘Oh no, no, no, you don’t want to get into that,’ so I stepped back from that and decided to call it “Love Will Live” instead. That was probably the weirdest part of how this song came together.
I wanted to play the song for the women at Topeka because, my goodness, probably 99% of them suffered some kind of abuse, especially when they were a child. In giving them this song, I was hoping to give them not just hope but a voice they can use to say, “I have chosen to live,” “I have so much to give,” “It’s not my fault, it’s my time,” and “My love will live.” Also, I love that it’s just a real hard rock song that fits the defiant mood of the words.
When you were reading all the letters over such a long period, did it ever feel taxing for you to continually take on board all this painful information?
It did, in a way, but I had to sort of put myself in a place of understanding that I couldn’t save these people and that all I could hope to do was to inspire them. To put spirit inside of them and lift them up so that they can feel supported enough to make choices that can start the momentum towards making even better choices, to make their way to better health and a better life. That’s what I had to tell myself, almost constantly.
On the live album, when you’re introducing this song, you describe holding on to feelings of resentment as “like drinking poison hoping someone else will die,” which I think is such a brilliant way to put it. How do you think this song went down with the women?
I was surprised to see that a couple of women actually knew it! I saw them singing along and that was a wow moment for me, because this track is really a deep cut from my album The Medicine Show. I think the rest of the audience who didn’t know the song got caught up in the music and, you know, that’s always been my evil plan. To get people caught up in the music and then all of a sudden they’re hearing something that’s like, ‘Oh, what now? Wow, this is really powerful.’ That’s how I like to do things.
"A Burning Woman" (2024)
BEST FIT: This is the song we see you composing in the documentary, and you played it for the first time in public for the women at Topeka prison. One thing you say in the film is that you wanted to give them something to respond to, and they really did. How did it feel to hear them singing those lines back to you so powerfully?
MELISSA ETHERIDGE: Honestly, it was amazing. I was thinking beforehand, ‘Okay, I want to go out on a limb here and hope that I can get this audience to sing with me,’ and it only took a few songs to know that they were in it with me, and that they wanted to sing.
The song was inspired by their letters, and inspired by other things that people said, from the residents to the warden and the other people that work there. One thing they kept saying to me was that so much of the experience of these women comes down to the idea that ‘hurt people hurt people.’ When I heard that, I thought, ‘God, if I can really convey that then I can really do something to help break the cycle. It’s possible to decide that the chain stops here. It’s possible to decide to not keep hurting people just because they were hurt, because then that person is going to hurt people because they were hurt, and so on down this horrible chain.’
I use strong language in this song, I drop the F bomb, and I thought it was so funny, as a rockstar, that I worried about doing that in this context. I felt it was appropriate, but I wanted to ask the warden if it was okay. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to get anybody too riled up, but I want them to feel the power in this.’ She was so supportive. She said to me, ‘Do what you want, do what you need.’ So I did, and the call and response was amazing. In the film, I actually do the call and response twice, but we shortened it to just the once on the record.
As we see in the film, you’ve put so much work and love into this song. Can you see yourself performing it far into the future?
I hope so, because I do love playing it live. It’s so much fun. I’ve been playing it every night on this tour, and even if people don’t know it at first, by the end of the song they know it. Everybody’s very happy to sing “I’m a burning woman / I’m not broken!”
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