Melissa Etheridge at the ACL Moody Theater in Austin, Texas. Dec. 4, 2014
We had the opportunity to see Melissa Etheridge in concert last Thursday night at the ACL Moody Theater in Austin. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen her in concert. No, actually I can. I can tell you exactly how many times. Like many of the women I know–and millions of others–I can also tell you vivid details about moments of listening to Melissa Etheridge’s music. I wasn’t a rabid fan, following her every move, attending every appearance. But when I have seen her live, it is consistently and remarkably edifying.
I’ve seen her at Atlanta’s Lakewood Ampitheater, at the Frank Erwin Center at the University of Texas, and once, she was pulled up on stage from the crowd by the Indigo Girls during “Earth Jam 1995” at Stone Mountain Park. They gave her a guitar and they all sang together. Other artists in that show included Eddie Vedder, Foo Fighters, Luscious Jackson, Band de Soleil. Melissa Etheridge was not on the bill.
At Lakewood, I was out in the grass, the cheap “seats” where most people sat on blankets. It was raining. We wore garbage bags. I was there with a new friend from graduate school and her crowd. My recent ex, a corporate manager, was there in the front, the covered section, with a date; they had taken a limo. At the Earth Jam event, it also rained. I had been there with a work colleague and another grad school colleague. At every concert, we danced and sang our hearts out. We wanted to be as bold and brave—and as talented. She marched across stages and belted out anthems. On occasion, she sat at the piano and played ballads. We featured her songs on mix tapes to send to people we were dating, or wanted to date. She spoke for us, both intimately and societally.
My second girlfriend, J, had a great Melissa Etheridge story. She and her mother were driving from Newport News, Virginia, to vacation in Kitty Hawk North Carolina. They were to stay at the Orville and Wilber Wright Motel. It was raining. Her mother was a smoker. J wanted to listen to, as my music-aficionado stepson would say, “the self-titled debut album.” The album includes the now-iconic songs Bring Me Some Water, Similar Features, Chrome Plated Heart, and Like the Way I Do, among lesser-known but equally emotionally raw tunes. J and her mother listened to the whole thing–on cassette tape–driving in the rain, her mom smoking. Finally, her mom drew on her cigarette, blew out a long stream of smoke and said, “That is One. Miserable. Woman.”
My friend Trent Allen’s band, Dreams So Real, opened for Melissa Etheridge at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1990. He said they toured with her some but not much, probably, he said, due to “too many Y chromosomes.” I just learned about this, in late 2014. In 1990 I was, albeit in Atlanta, working at a suburban newspaper and pretty much exiled from everyone I had known before I came out. (I’ve been back in touch with Trent and many others for years and acknowledge that my exile may have been largely self-imposed, but that’s a longer story for another narrative).
Atlanta’s Fox Theater Marquee, 1990. Photo courtesy of Trent Allen.
Why do we emote so much around Melissa Etheridge’s music? Partly because she sang gender-neutral songs with lyrics we all felt were drawn from our private lives. But something in the way she did it tapped the universality of what it is to be human and in relationship with another person. Gender neutral, relationship is relationship. Love is love. Pain is pain. Loss is the same for all of us and, after a loss, as she told us, we will never be the same.
She was her own self, unapologetically lesbian, butch even, with long hair. And we loved her. For once, we saw ourselves reflected in society; I’m reminded of the image in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood of a man with no arms or legs who lay on the sidewalk in a velvet-lined box with a mirror suspended over him…it was the only way to see himself reflected in society, his face in the mirror with all the motion of the city in the background. But Melissa Etheridge did not emerge as a carnivalesque creature of the night; she was an all-American girl, with a guitar, and boots, and a voice that resonated every chamber of our souls.
On stage, under the bright lights, she represented us, whether she initially meant to or not. First, she is an artist and it was her music that catapulted her to fame–and her talent and hard work that have kept her career going longer than Janis Joplin was even alive. What she did for us was to be visible–and vocal. In the early aughts, a website that tracked lesbians in entertainment and media, appropriately named AfterEllen.com, had then as its tag line: “Because visibility matters.”
There’s all this and, the music is good. Or, the music is first and then there’s all that stuff we listeners bring to it. The lyrics are smart, the guitar work is amazing. She writes her own songs. She performs them like she means it.
James Perone, in his book The Words and Music of Melissa Etheridge , says that “Her real significance as a songwriter lies in part in her craft as a composer, but even more so in her work as a lyricist.” (119)
He goes on to say: “Whatever the listener’s preferences with respect to rhetorical style, it probably is safe to say that on a purely musical level, or in considering the intersection of music and lyrics, one of Etheridge’s greatest strengths is in composing easy-to-remember music, with singable melodies and harmonizations that draw largely on the traditional tonic (I), subdominant (IV), and dominant (V) chords but that frequently include motion to the minor chords within the prevailing key.”
Does she electrify and rock you?
Music theory mystifies me. (Also, there is nothing more humbling as an adult student of guitar than coming home all wound up from a Melissa Etheridge concert and picking up your guitar only to plummet back to earth with an ignoble plop. #buzzkill) But as my guitar teacher has patiently explained, composing music with diatonic chords does impact emotion and resonate with listeners. This requires the listener’s participation and imagination in ways that movies and TV, for example, do not. The chord structure moves from I to IV in comfortable ways. Then Melissa Etheridge adds a minor chord taking it to an unexpected place, not to V or back to I. This creates tension which is then resolved when the final V or I chord is played.
One reason we love Melissa Etheridge’s music is that she composes music that engages us with stable, comfortable chords and moves us to chords that build tension, and then brings us back, while matching this movement with lyrics that resonate just enough to let us interpret the songs relative to our individual experiences. More, she is a compelling performer.
This connection of music and emotion to one’s lived experience is profound. Music is what makes religious and sexual and patriotic experiences so powerful and, sometimes, manipulative. It is in our western-culture DNA to be comfortable with tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords, to feel tension with the unexpected movement to minor chords, then feel the rightness of that final diatonic chord.
With her visibility, her talent, her chord movements, gender-neutral lyrics, and powerful performances, Melissa Etheridge brings the hero’s journey to harmonic music. We are edified because she not only sings to us, she sings for us and she did it for me early on, as I was thrashing around in search of my own voice, my own self.
UPDATE:
I am thrilled, and humbled, that Melissa Etheridge (apparently) liked this post. Social media turns out to be a lightning-fast network which made Tuesday, Dec. 9, a fun day; 3.5 hours after this post was published, Melissa Etheridge–and several of her fans–had “Favorited” and “Retweeted” the link. Wow. Just, wow.
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