To Melissa Etheridge, Wednesday in Dallas Is Another Town’s Saturday

Melissa Etheridge takes a moment from her crazy schedule to make a phone call. The rock ‘n’ roll songwriter, who’s been shaking the world with her music and activism for over three decades, has just kicked off her Summer Tour ’23 and is on her way to Albuquerque.

“It’s been really amazing,” Etheridge says of the tour so far. “I have played small places, and I’ve played Stagecoach [Festival], which was just out of this world. Then theaters.”

On Wednesday night, she’ll play a show at Majestic Theatre in downtown Dallas.

For Etheridge, playing venues as diverse as the 1,704-seat venue or a festival with over 75,000 attendees offers her a chance to mix up the setlist and have a lot of fun matching the music to the community of fans she is playing for.

“I’ve always done that; it keeps me sane,” she says with a laugh. “I will always do the hit songs because I’m proud of them, and I know that people want to hear it. There’s always people in the crowd that have never seen me, and they want to hear that song that they know.”

With a catalog of nearly 20 albums and hundreds of songs, Etheridge can dig deep for her fans.

“I mix it up really to fit the place I’m playing and the people,” she says. “I know a Saturday night crowd is going to be different than a Tuesday night crowd, you know?”

When it comes to Dallas on a Wednesday, though, “Everything goes out the window from what I just said,” she says laughing. “Wednesday in Dallas is another town’s Saturday.”

Though it has been a few years since she has played this part of the country, Etheridge does have fond memories of Dallas from her early years.

“Dallas has just always been there from the first album on,” she says calling back to her 1988 self-titled debut and its fiery single “Bring Me Some Water.” “We’ll be having a lot of fun in Dallas.”

Five years later, on the stage of the Triangle Ball at an LGBTQ-focused celebration of President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, Etheridge came out publicly and has since had a music career that is entwined with politics and identity.

“As an LGBTQ woman that grew up in Kansas and moved to California, I have my own type of life, my own lifestyle,” she says. “From the very beginning, I’ve always written songs about my experience. I certainly flourish them, but my songs are all based in some kind of truth inside of me. And just as certain politics affect me personally, those are going to go into my work.”

As a performer, however, Etheridge is less concerned with using the stage as a political platform than she is leading by example.

“I write about what’s going on with me personally, but I have never [gone into my politics] unless it was asked for at a place that was meant to do that,” she says. “I want people to just see me go, ‘Oh, this is a nice gay person, or a nice person who advocates for cannabis or whatever it is. I’m also a cancer survivor … I’ve never thought that I had to preach or do anything like that. I just want to be, I want to entertain, I want to inspire. And if part of that is changing people’s hearts and minds, then awesome.”

When the Summer Tour ’23 concludes, Etheridge will release her second book, Talking to My Angels, a follow-up to her 2002 memoir, The Truth Is …

“As the years went by, I’d look at my first book and go, ‘Oh wow. Well, that was just a drop in the bucket of my life,'” she says about the decision to write another memoir. “So many things happened after my first book. My first book was just kind of an introduction. … I have grown, I have learned, I have traveled, I have journeyed, I have been to the edge and back.”

While writing a second book had been on Etheridge’s mind for some time, the real decision came after losing her son Beckett Cypher to an opioid overdose in 2020.

“I became part of the hundreds of thousands of families that are affected by opioid abuse, and I said I really want to write about this,” she says. “People want to ask me, and sometimes they don’t because they want to respect any feeling I might have, but I just wanted to lay it all out in my book and tell people why I can go on and where my strength comes from.”

For Etheridge, the book is the long answer to questions about how her son struggled after breaking his ankle and becoming addicted to opioids, about how her family struggled, about all the love they showed Beckett and the hoped that he would somehow get out from under it.

“As a mother, he would want me to live my life and live in joy and have the family be happy, not sad,” Etheridge says. “So, I try to be happy, and I do what I can.”

One of the projects Etheridge has undertaken as a means to cope with the loss is to help prevent future opioid-related deaths with the formation of the Etheridge Foundation, which raises research funds for alternatives to opioids, mainly in plant medicine.

“I just do what I can,” she says, “Right after my son died, I needed to do something. In the 35 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve done a lot of benefits, and I’ve raised millions of dollars for other people’s things, so I knew that I could raise money.”

Now, thanks in large part to the help of executive director Anna Symonds, the foundation is connected all over the world with doctors and even the government of Spain in trying to provide answers to this difficult subject.

Just last week, the Texas Senate advanced a bill that would increase the penalties related to the sale and production of fentanyl while stalling a bill that would remove fentanyl test strips from the state’s list of drug paraphernalia.

“You can take an easy way to look at drug abuse, and you can say there’s good people and bad people and you can draw a line, but when you really look at that line, there is no line,” Etheridge says. “It’s hard to say where to start when you’re talking about opioid addiction because you can blame it on the pharmaceutical companies. You can say that the person is lazy and an addict, but if it’s not in your family, it’s really hard to understand.

“The pharmaceutical industry is a very, very large industry that has large coffers with large funding ability, so you’re not going to get a lot of forceful action on them unless it’s through the courts. Legislatures know it’s a problem. They see their cities and towns, especially their rural areas, fall into this. Fentanyl is just insidious. It holds no purpose, and once you start it, it’s impossible. You’re done. It will take a while. There’s a lot going on in the world, but I hope that people start looking at this with a clearer eye soon.”

Aside from tackling the nation’s opioid crisis, Etheridge also aims at taking a closer look at the penalties addicts suffer from beyond their addiction. This year will also see the production of a documentary film about the Leavenworth women’s penitentiary in her home state of Kansas.

“When I was a kid, I grew up in Leavenworth, which has a lot of prisons, and I actually played in many of them when I was a young girl,” she says. “So, I’m going back to the women’s penitentiary and highlighting what’s happening in our whole judicial system and our idea of addiction and punishment.”

Etheridge is also looking forward to spending four months in New York doing a Broadway show at the end of the year.

“I love my concerts,” she says. “There’s nothing like getting up, singing my songs and people listening and singing along, but creatively it’s just so much deeper than what I usually have done in my regular concerts.”

Even with so much going on, Etheridge is happy to be taking everything as it comes. As for 2024?

“Let’s see,” she says before a pause and a laugh, “Well, I don’t want to go to space. No desire to do that.”