On her new CD, The Awakening, Melissa Etheridge faces her past and ponders her present with characteristic grace and grit.

By Lawrence Ferber

Melissa Etheridge has mastered the art of turning lemons into lemonade, morphing pain and life’s challenges into transcendent music. Her new album, The Awakening, is the first since her 2004 breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent battle with the disease. Boasting a purity and truth she attributes to the ordeal, her ninth album is one of her strongest, most accomplished works to date. She recently spoke to IN Los Angeles magazine about the album and its themes.

The Awakening is a concept album; how would you like listeners to approach it?

I would hope the listener would start at the beginning and listen all the way through … Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, their albums were pieces of art, and you wanted to know what the artist was saying. I hope people will approach this album that way.

In “Message To Myself,” you sing: “I’m sending out a message to myself/ So when I hear it on the radio/ I will know that I am fine/ I will know that I am loved.” Do you want people to adopt that song and say, “This is my message to myself”?

I would. It’s just as cheesy and Up With People as you can get, but I truly believe that change starts right inside yourself, and you’ve got to start loving yourself before anything else. Every single choice you make all day long, it has to come from that. And if this song can inspire anyone to start on that journey, I’m proud to have been part of it.

Tell me about the story behind the bluesy epic, “An Unexpected Rain.”

It’s me playing in the bars for five years and all the trouble one girl can get into. ... I gathered some pretty bad karma in my early 20s. That’s kind of what I’m stating; it’s a large apology. I really made some bad choices, and I’m so sorry for the unexpected rain and sadness.

On the country-rocker “Threesome,” you sing that you don’t want to have a threesome “ever again,” which implies you’ve had some.

(Laughs) Well, you know, they’re interesting. But when you find the relationship that fills you up emotionally, physically, and makes you a better person and doesn’t tear you down—that you can build a family or a life around—you don’t have time or the need [for anything else]. You’re not aching and looking for that drama.

You touch on the concept of time travel on the album; is time travel a good idea, and if it was possible, would you go back and meddle?

I think if we ever got to the point, the place in our consciousness and society, where we truly understood the concept of time, then time travel would be understood—that it’s all in the mind, and you can go back and fix or meddle or make right the wrongs of the past by what you do right now in the present and in the future. It’s not like science fiction and you’re gonna climb in a machine and turn a knob and go back to 1952.

You address Hollywood superficiality on a couple of songs. Conversely, what do you find most real about L.A.?

I came here 25 years ago with that golden dream of California; rich and famous me, I’m gonna be a rock star. And my favorite people are the ones who come from the Midwest or South or anywhere to try and make their dreams come true. That sort of innocence and dream, that wanting a better place, a better life, to create something, to be a writer or singer, that is what I like about this city.

For more information on Melissa Etheridge and her new CD, visit www.melissaetheridge.com.