Etheridge croons her first gender-specific love song

In an interview with Reuters, out lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge says, “It is intentional on my part to keep my lyrics non-gender-specific. Even when I came out, I didn’t want to narrow my music…because we all have the same emotion. That’s been important to me.” On her latest album, Skin, however, Etheridge says she found she’d written herself into a corner on the song “It’s Only Me.” Although she wanted to be nonspecific, after the line “I found a little angel who had fallen from the sky / and I took that little angel…” she needed to go with a pronoun, so she completed the phrase with, “and I taught her how to fly.” Etheridge admits, “I’m making a sexual reference to a woman here, and that’s really the first time, and to me, that’s a big deal.” On the new-relationship front, Etheridge says of her pairing with actress Tammy Lynn Michaels (Popular), “It’s only been a few months, and I’m very happy, and it’s very clean and wonderful.”