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Melissa Etheridge talks about her spiritual journey and "The Awakening," her first album of new material since undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

Most people would consider contracting cancer a curse; Melissa Etheridge looks upon her disease — and subsequent recovery — as a blessing.

Her journey began in Ottawa in 2004, when she discovered a lump. Chemotherapy left her so debilitated that she could only lie in bed, alone with her thoughts, until, she says, there were no thoughts left and only serenity. She realized she had been working since she was 11, and while there was nothing she could change about her past, she could write the script for the next half of her life.

'A rumination on life'

Her experiences are chronicled on "The Awakening," her first album of new material since undergoing treatment for breast cancer in 2004. The set isn't a triptych of her illness and recovery, it is something much deeper; it is a rumination on life, what it means to be guided by a power higher than our own will and how we are all connected in our journey.

Etheridge opens "The Awakening," with "California," a story about her migration from Kansas to the Golden State in the early ‘80s, but by the album's mid-point, her stories have expanded from the personal to the universal. "This whole project, that was my intention," she says. "I'm mixing, brewing, throwing the paint on the wall with this whole thing, then I put it all together and then I realized that I have to let go of it."

Her blueprint for the CD was classic albums from the past. "I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Marvin Gaye and ‘What's Going On,' Stevie Wonder and ‘Innervisions,' Peter Gabriel and ‘So.' These albums that stand alone," she says.

Similar to "What's Going On," the Oscar winner also turns political on a number of tracks, including "The Kingdom of Heaven" and "Imagine That," but the album is far from a Bush-bashing polemic; Etheridge also turns in one of her catchiest songs of her career with the uplifting, reaffirming "Message to Myself."

The album's spirituality reflects an exploration Etheridge began years ago but whose trajectory was fueled by her illness. "I started this spiritual journey a little bit before I was diagnosed with cancer, so being diagnosed just sort of shot me through the tube into this," she says.

'God has been hijacked'

A number of songs invoke God's name in an effort by Etheridge to reclaim him from the religious right. "I feel that God has been hijacked and it's not fair anymore. To feel as spiritual as I do and about what I feel about God and to think that some preacher has all the rights to God, that I'm godless, you know, it's ridiculous," she says.

Her views were sharpened by an intense period after she completed chemotherapy, during which, she says, "I just ate books. I didn't know I loved to read until chemotherapy and now I'm addicted to reading. I studied every form of new age philosophy to all the physics, the quantum physics and string theories and realized that everyone was saying the exact same thing. I even studied the Gnostic gospels. I studied the Bible, I also studied ancient Hebrew. When you take the time to back up far enough you realize that everyone is saying the same thing: Each one of us is responsible for our reality."

While the subject matter may be different from her past projects, the way she writes has not changed in her more than two decades as a songwriter. "If you're laboring over a song, it's not working," she says. In fact, Etheridge seldom spends more than 60 minutes writing at a stretch. "I have a studio that I write in," she says. "I sit there for an hour and take a break and come down and do something and go back."

But often, an hour is way more than enough, such as with "I Will Never be the Same" from 1993's "Yes I Am." "I wrote it while my roommate — she wasn't my partner — went to take a shower. I said ‘I'm going to write a song.' She got out of the shower and I said, ‘You want to hear it?' I played it for her and she went, ‘you're weird,' and walked off. She always called it ‘the shower song.'"

 

Melinda Newman is a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist who writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, the Hollywood Reporter and a number of other outlets. She is the former West Coast Bureau Chief for Billboard. Her love of music goes back to when she was a small girl who used to write down all the songs on "Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown" - lovingly and obsessively - on purple, lined notebook paper. She can be reached at melindanewman@ca.rr.com.