Etheridge Laments Busted Relationship

By Russ Lane

Managing Editor

No matter what direction popular music veers, break-up albums are always in vogue. Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Tori Amos' Boys for Pele, the majority of Aimee Mann's career -- there's something compelling and reassuring when larger-than-life musicians make records documenting their broken hearts and screwed-up love lives.

These are the albums that never sound better than when they blare out of your car's speakers at 3 a.m. as you're tearing up the highway. When you're trying to make sense of a beautiful relationship that somehow went horribly awry, it helps to have like-minded music to help see you through.

So even if you weren't aware, it's clear Melissa Etheridge is without a significant other when she sings, "I drove all night just to drive all day/ But the walls of this prison still surround me."

The dissolution of Etheridge's relationship with director Julie Cypher last year is the driving force of Skin's 10 songs. In the great break-up-album tradition, Etheridge's lyrics veer from pointed (as if she's taking cheap shots on record) to distraught.

But in the great Melissa Etheridge tradition, Skin's music doesn't stray far from the Springsteen-Joplin hybrid that made Etheridge a household name after the release of Yes I Am. Although Skin adds loops and sampling into Etheridge's girl-and-a-guitar style without altering her signature sound.

Nor should it. Etheridge has tried several times -- 1992's Never Enough and 1999's Breakdown -- to evolve her sound, and despite some tracks on Breakdown, those attempts resulted in either boredom or embarrassment. Although most artists are condemned for not changing their sound every album, it's ultimately Etheridge's saving grace.

Given her considerable involvement in the album, Etheridge cannot help sounding like herself. Producing and playing the majority of the album's instruments, Etheridge spends the entire album trying to cope with the loss of Cypher. It's the most emotionally raw album she's released, which is odd since Etheridge has always given passionate, balls-to-the-wall performances.

There's a weariness and ache in her voice on the album that previous efforts never touched, despite her constant over-the-top delivery. Etheridge sounds wounded on "Walking on Water;" on "The Different," she wails through the odd arrangement with the rage of jilted women everywhere and screams, "Don't you worry about the kids/ The kids are all right."

She wraps up the album with "Heal Me," a meditation on love with actress friends Laura Dern and Meg Ryan singing backup vocals. It's a mix of testimony and Indigo Girls, and while on its own the song is a bit hokey, it's touching in the context of the rest of the album's emotional excesses.

And that's the key to appreciating Skin. It probably won't generate several hit singles, and it doesn't really deserve to,