Breakdown

As I noted in my review of her 1995 album, Your Little Secret, it is about time Melissa Etheridge stopped screaming. Musically, lyrically, politically, as a lesbian. And she sure has. But don’t, for one moment, think she’s lost her cutting edge. Indeed, it blade is made all-the-sharper because she now whispers, when enraged, hissing instead of shouting.

Not only that. She may now have two children but “settled” is hardly a word that comes to mind when she focuses on love’s insecurities in ‘Stronger Than Me.’ “You said you want to start/making new friends/Well I’d found some peace/You want release/You must be stronger than me.”

Better yet, ‘Mama I’m Strange’ could be a coded song of frustration for gays or anyone else outside the bounds of ‘respectable’ society.

That said, when Melissa sings to a lover, almost sweetly, of how she longs to “lay down on your shoulder/Surrender to the peace/And just go to sleep” in the album’s final song ‘Sleep’, the sense of calm and resolution is absolute. It sounds almost as if she is ready to surrender to death. Either way, any person headed in that direction – particularly if suicidal – might make another choice listening to the positively glorious ‘Angels Would Fall.’ A secular hymn in the truest sense.

As produced by Melissa Etheridge and her touring guitarist John Shanks, the sound is suitably minimalist – four instruments tops – and largely acoustic. This may even be the most intimate album Melissa will ever make. Breakdown? Breakthrough.