Eighteen months after she lost her son to opioid addiction, the singer-songwriter has released a new album. She talks about her troubled childhood, the happiness she has found with her wife – and her refusal to grieve
‘Helloooooh! How are you? I’m good, I’m good.” It takes me about three seconds to warm to Melissa Etheridge. The
American singer-songwriter has been through hell in the past few years, but you won’t find her moaning. For someone who has endured so much – Etheridge lost her 21-year-old son, Beckett, to opioid addiction last year – she has a remarkable ability to accentuate the positive. And over the next hour and a half, she does just that.
There is a swaggering self-confidence and a soulfulness to Etheridge – she would make a great existential cowboy. She has had hit records across the world (with the notable exception of the UK), won
Grammys for her singles Ain’t It Heavy and Come to My Window, and in 2007 secured an Oscar for I Need to Wake Up, a song she wrote for Al Gore’s climate crisis documentary An Inconvenient Truth.