If a music event promotes breast cancer awareness, the most-desired stars have to include Melissa Etheridge.
The Grammy-winning singer/songwriter joined other female artists in the first “WomenRock!” special, but she’s virtually the entire show as Lifetime airs the sixth annual edition — this time titled “WomenRock! Our Journey With Melissa Etheridge” — Tuesday.
Taped in late September at Los Angeles’ Wilshire Ebell Theatre, the program also is executive produced by Etheridge, who augments a large dose of her hits (“I’m the Only One,” “Come to My Window,” etc.) with very personal stories of her own fight against breast cancer.
Although friend Patty Griffin joins in on a couple of numbers, the special’s focus stays on Etheridge, whose greatest-hits compilation “The Road Less Traveled” was released at the start of October.
Now cancer-free, Etheridge recalls that when she did the inaugural “WomenRock!” show, “I thought, ‘Oh, isn’t that nice of me, doing something for all those women with breast cancer’ … never thinking I would be in that position myself. To have gone through it, this just seemed like the perfect way to marry everything. Not only can I be an artist contributing to it, I can tell my story in an entertaining way.”
The hourlong Etheridge showcase also includes “I Run for Life,” a new song she was commissioned to write as a theme for the “Race for the Cure” initiative that raises breast-cancer-related funds and awareness.
Etheridge has performed only rarely since undergoing “the cancer episode,” as she calls it. “The songs I play on this show have real meaning. Each one is a part of my breast cancer experience. I certainly don’t relate now to most of my songs being what I first wrote them about. With some of them, I look back and read the lyrics and think, ‘Wow!’ There was foreshadowing of some things in that sort of collective, subconscious way.
“In ‘Come to My Window,’ the line ‘Nothing fills the blackness that has seeped into my chest’ makes me go, ‘Whoa! Wait a minute!’ It starts to take on a little different meaning. I find that sort of thing happens in the moment. When I was on stage at the Grammys singing ‘Piece of My Heart,’ I hadn’t thought about the line, ‘I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.’ I kind of rolled my eyes when those words came out, but I always want to stay open to those kinds of meanings.”
Last February’s Grammy show was a milestone for Etheridge in many ways. “The path of that whole thing,” she reflects, “I think it’s once in a lifetime that things line up that way. (Grammy Awards producer) Ken Ehrlich called and said, ‘We want you to perform with Joss Stone to honor Janis Joplin.’ I remember thinking, ‘(The influence of) Janis was such a huge part of my career and my life.’ My second thought was, ‘Ugh. I’m bald and weak.’ Well, I decided that I could either stay small or take the opportunity that was in front of me, walk that path and see what happened.”
