Born on May 29th: Melissa Etheridge, the sincerity of intimacy

Melissa Etheridge was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1961, and has been fighting for gay rights ever since she came out in 1993.

At an age when some girls still need their comforter to fall asleep, Melissa was already strumming an acoustic guitar at the age of 7. She was hired by an amateur country band, which she left only to enter Boston's prestigious Berklee College Of Music, the school every musician dreams of attending. She spent three years there before finally wanting to rub shoulders with the real world. After all, music is first and foremost meant to be played in front of an audience, which is not always achieved in advance. Scouring the bars of Pasadena in Los Angeles, she ended up meeting messengers touting her talent. And it's true that her distinctive vocal timbre, somewhere between Tina Turner and Bonnie Tyler, is hard to ignore.

After unsuccessfully knocking on the door of Olivia Records, a small, openly lesbian label, she digests this rejection with some difficulty and keeps their rejection letter as a totem to keep her going.

Eventually, she caught the eye of Chris Blackwell, head of the famous Island label, who quickly offered her a debut album that would simply bear her name. The year was 1988. And "Like The Way I Do", one of her biggest hits, was included, along with the touching "Bring Me Some Water".

Right from the start, she set an uncompromising tone, both intimate and explosive. "I've never wanted to hide," she confided in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1993. "If I sing my truths, then I have to live by them. This honesty found its public high point in 1993 when she came out. Tom Robinson had already sung "Glad To Be Gay" in 1978 (censored by the BBC), and Bronski Beat had long since topped the charts, but very few female artists were openly claiming their homosexuality.

That same year, "Yes I Am", her fourth album with titles such as "Come To My Window" and "I'm The Only One", proved to be her crowning achievement.

Over the years, with sixteen albums to her credit, Melissa Etheridge has always mixed her artistic career with activism. She campaigns, of course, for LGBTQ+ rights, but also for the environment, battles that have become particularly perilous in the USA since the election of Donald Trump. After surviving breast cancer in 2004, she's also calling for the legalization of medical cannabis."The disease taught me that I didn't have time to live half-heartedly," she declared on Oprah Winfrey. "I started writing, singing and loving again, as if every day counted twice."

A committed artist and a passionate singer, Melissa Etheridge remains ready to take on new battles with a passion that seems inextinguishable...

Photo: Melissa Etheridge at the Pinkpop Festival (Netherlands), June 1990