This show was independently created by iHeartMedia. Novarda's Pharmaceuticals Corp. Is the exclusive advertising partner. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please speak with your healthcare professional before making any treatment decisions. Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're taking
you beyond breast Cancer. It's Wednesday, June twenty fifth, and on today's show, we'll be skipping the need to know and getting right into my fantastic and fun interview with the very badass Melissa Ethridge. It's the latest installment of our new series Life Beyond Living Beyond Labels, a powerful podcast campaign brought to you by Iheartwomen's Sports. Our guest today is Grammy winning singer, songwriter and breast cancer survivor
Melissa Ethridge. She joins me to reflect on her public cancer battle, how it transformed her approach to life and advocacy, and how music became a healing force during her recovery. Beyond the diagnosis, she shares her ongoing passion for empowering women, including her vocal support of women's soccer and her anthem performance at the NWSI Championship last season, plus my total lack of surprise learning that a women's sports team was
behind her rise to fame. This episode is a tribute to living boldly, loving deeply, and refusing to be defined by a diagnosis. Our Life Beyond series showcases the extraordinary resilience and strength of successful women, diving deep into their lives, highlighting their personal journey's passions and the ways in which they're living beyond the labels they've been given by others. My conversation with Melissa is coming up right after this,
Joining us now. She's a two time Grammy Award winner and fifteen time nominee and Academy Award winner for Best Original Song Again and lesbian rights activist, a mother, an author, and a cancer survivor. She's got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She crushed the national anthem at the NWSL Championship game last year, and she recently paid a visit to the secret Boston pup, the Lazy Nut tavern. It's Melissa Athrage.
Hi, Melissa, Hello, Hello, Hello, how are you?
I'm good, but I'm jealous you've been to the Lazy Nut. I have only seen photos and videos. I've not gotten the chance to go yet.
It's an adventure, it really is.
Did they make you drink milort?
Well, you know what, I was working, so I wasn't drinking, So okay, I know I watched them drink.
Yes, I could have taken credit for that. A bunch of those scals came to Chicago and Wrigley for the Red Stars game at Wrigley Field, and I introduced him to the magical world of milort and they brought it back to the Lazy Nut. So next time, when you're not working, well, we'll make you do it. Let's talk
about your sports ties. Because I was so excited to learn as I was researching for this that not only are you a huge sports fan, but sports actually played a big role in your big break as a musician. So tell me about Verme's Bar in Pasadena and how a friend from your women's soccer team actually was part of the reason you got discovered.
Yes, it's crazy in Los Angeles. You just don't ever know how it's going to happen. So I had moved there in nineteen eighty two from Kansas. I grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas, and I'd done a lot of playing, and I got to LA and realized that there was another ten million people trying to do what I was doing. I wasn't unique, and nobody was paying for anybody to play. Everybody was. You would buy your own tickets and you
would get like a gig once a month. And I was like, well, I'm going to starve if I try to do this. So I went to a women's bar because I'm a lesbian, and I went to a women's bar and saw that they had a piano in the corner, and I asked if they had music, and they said, no, that's from the steakhouse that used to be here. But hey, do you want to do something? And so I started playing in Long Beach for about five nights a week. Then when that started to fizzle out, there was a
gal who said, hey, there's a bar in Pasadena. It's called Verni. He's a horrible name of a bar, but it was named after mouse. Long story, and I went there and they they took me in and I would play like three nights there and two nights in Long Beach, and it was just this perfect thing. And on Sundays, the girls from the soccer team, I think it cal Tech would come in after they had a game and they would play, and they were big fans and there was always a big table and they were great tippers
and you know, they were wonderful. And one day they said, do you have a cassette? And I had made this silly demo and they said, because one of our coach's husband is a music manager and that you know, and you just you you take whatever anybody said. You're like, yes, okay, this is fine. So I gave him a tape and then the the wife came down and she loved it. She had a great night and she went back and she was like, look, you got to see this girl. And he's like, I don't want to say, I don't
want to I don't want to go. So she finally got him to come down. He loved it. He signed me and he was my manager for thirty years. So, yes, soccer everything. I just I'm very grateful for those women, and yes, played a big part in my career.
I'm not surprised to learn that a team of women are the ones who sought out how to lift up and help you rise. Along with their fun and enjoyment of you. It wasn't just about that. It was about let's help her now that we really enjoy I love that. There's another really great lesson in how your first album came together, kind of a surprising one from what we often hear about the music industry. Your first attempt at an album was actually rejected by Island Records because it
was too polished. We normally hear about artists that want to be themselves and they make them more polished. But instead they said, nope, we don't like that, we like too you were, so you stripped it down to just you and the music, and that first album gets nominated for a Grammy. Were you surprised that they wanted you to be more gritty, less polished.
No, I was, and I hadn't. I had no idea what I should do. I'd never made a record. I barely made a demo, and I was playing solo in this bar. And Chris Blackwell, who was the owner, he was just the guy who ran Island Records. This is back in the eighties, seventies and eighties, early nineties. There were actually guys who loved music that would go find it and sign it, and they were always looking for new stuff, and Chris loved what he saw. He saw me playing by myself, just in like jeans and a
T shirt in the corner. He loved it. He heard like four songs that was all, and he says, I want you on my label, and he flew off to Jamaica wherever he went to, and I didn't see him until I turned it, so I didn't know what to do. I got a producer and this guy was from northern California and he had done the way music was being done back then was very synthesizers were starting and it was very like produced and I didn't know how to do.
So we sort of The guy kind of popped up my songs and I turned it in and Chris Blackwell actually said, well I hate this, and I was like, there you go. There was my chance, and I blew it. But myself and the other two guys in the band with me that I had put together, we were like, Okay, what he wants is what he saw in the bar. He saw a girl alone. So we went in and in four days totally recorded the first album, just did like three songs a day, boom boom boom, and mixed
it and then bang, here it is. He loved it, and it's still to this day one of people's favorite albums.
It's interesting how much you can be swayed by not knowing what's expected and just being like, Okay, I guess this is what you do when you make an album. It's like when I first went to ESPN and for my first TV gigs and got my hair and makeup done, I looked like a fifty five year old New Jersey reeltur and I was like, well, I guess this is what I look like with a lot of makeup. Like I just didn't have any idea that I could say I don't really like that, or I don't think that's me.
That's the thing about women helping women, And here were you and I in these places that had formerly been all men. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to behave. I didn't know anything, and you're just looking around trying to figure it out, and then you fall on your face a couple of times and go, oh, okay, this is what.
I'm Okay, now I get it.
Yeah, yeah, and now, And that's why we like to help women. It's like, look, let me help you do this because it's a rough road on your own.
Yeah, you put out three albums before you came out publicly as a lesbian at ninety three, and your first album after coming out was your big breakthrough hit. Yes, I am two mainstream, big radio hits come to my window and I'm the only one. Can you make a direct line between being publicly your full self and the success that followed.
Well, yeah, I believe. I believe that what you put out in the world comes back to you. So being that open and honest people I think really related to it. But this is nineteen ninety three, this is long before social media, the internet was jazz starting, so that wouldn't play a big part. This was me coming out and slowly every little place, every town I played, every little local newspaper would do an interview. It wasn't like I came out and the whole world knew I was gay.
Little by little, they and I would find that people would want to do articles and long articles with me and give me much space. So actually the publicity that I got coming out really helped bring this album to the forefront. It took a while, this album for a long time. It come to my window, had held the record for being on the charts for the longest time. It never I don't even think it ever broke the top ten, but it was on the charts because it just took that.
It was like waves of people learning about it.
Yes, it is slowly, slowly. And the gay part was a talking point and I ended up talking about being gay for about five years just that's all I could talk about.
Yeah, I mean, it's a hook when you need to separate yourself from the pack, and that's a scary hook in ninety three when you're not sure how people will respond. But to your point, it allows people to tell a story beyond here's a song. See if you like it, it's here's a song, and here's the woman behind it that has a story to tell. Did it feel different to
you either writing that album or promoting that album. Did you consider how people would receive your music through the lens of your sexuality or the lyrics you were writing, or the stories you were telling it anyway?
Yeah, there was, of course, you know, the unknown. I'd never there really had never been someone that came out and didn't put out an album and like that, and so I didn't know. I had no idea and I would perform and what would end up happening is the first section of people were just gazed, just losing their minds, you know, and then the rest yeah, right, And it was and I found that they were gathering they other
than the little bars they had in towns. There was no place that everyone gathered at once, and it was a It was very emotional to actually see that in the audience and see people being themselves. But then also to see straight people going oh, those are gay people, you know, and and everyone kind of going, oh, well, this is well, we like the same music. And that that was very empowering to me saying, Okay, you know, I've got both going on here. I'm not going to
just serve one or the other. And I've always kept my well in the beginning, I don't now it's not a big deal now to do gender specific, but back then I was very just let it be they them, and you guys just you know, take it however you want. But it was it was scary, but it was great. It was great.
I think it's not a surprise when you see communities rally around someone that speaks for and to them, particularly the queer community. Women like in spaces where you often feel like you're allowed to come, but it's not for you. It's you get tired of that, and sometimes trying to explain to men what it feels like to watch women play professional sports, what it feels like to see women
be fully embodied and empowered and badass. It's just a different experience for me than watching your favorite guy play like You're getting a lot out of that. You want to be him. You idolize them. He's awesome, he's richie's famous, he's really successful, he's good at dunking great. It feels different. You have a million examples of power and earnest and authentic self in men across every space, and for women, feels like there's just not as many places to watch
that unapologetically, and so I feel like music too. It it feels different to feel spoken to and included and pointed out, as opposed to just a part of it. You know, one of the reasons you wanted to have you on was to talk about your breast cancer diagnosis and your reaction to that, because I do think the community of people who have been through this speak to each other in a way that feels really powerful of like I've been there, I understand and it changed me.
So in two thousand and four, you were diagnosed. You know, I just met with a friend a few weeks ago who told me that she remembered her mammogram, and she remembered the beginning of the follow up appointment that they asked her to come to. But she still, years later, can't recall anything that she was told. That day. After she was told you have breast cancer. She went home
in a blur. She had to finish work, she had to take calls and meetings, and then her husband got home and said, how was your day, and she said, not great. Actually she doesn't remember any of that. So can you take me back to the moment that you heard those words and got the news and your reaction to it.
It was a very slow I remember it in slow motion because it was it started. I was in Canada, I was on tour, and I had sort of I've come to a point in my life where I'd gotten my first divorce, my first relationship fell apart, I had two kids. I was super stressed. The music industry was changing. It was all There was no more singer songwriters or rock and roll I didn't know what I was going to do. I was I was unhappy. I had that
just stressed, unhappy life. And I remember looking up to the heavens and saying, what what what do you want from me? What do I do? What do I do now? And that next morning, I woke up and was showering and I found lump and was like, well, that's not what I was talking about.
Yeah, don't hand me something else more problems.
And I found it and I remember touching it and wondering why the world did I feel this yesterday? You know, because it was it was big, and I I remember going, wait a minute, this could this Because my father had cancer. He died of cancer. My aunt, my grandmother was everywhere in my family, and I slowly I came home the
next day. I was flying home anyway, and I had like a few days off before I was supposed to go to Boston actually, and I went to my doctor and was like, I found this, and she's like, I'm afraid I might know what this is. Sent me to the radiologist the next day, knowing that I only had so much time, and the radiologist was the was the one who had helped with my children you know, did the sonograms and the kids and stuff, so I knew her. And she biopsy did, which was it was so dense
that she couldn't pull the thing out. She got to literally put her foot up and out of me in bloods. It's really a horrible experience. But she at that time, because she was a friend, she said, look, I'm not supposed to do this, but you know, I look at these all day and I know what this is, and I just want you to know that you're going to be fine. And she goes, and this is the worst that can happen to you, and she unbuttoned her blouse and showed me her double mistectomy. I had no idea
that she had that. And she goes, this is the worst, but you're not even there, you know, and you will be fine. And just starting with that, just going okay, whatever this journey is, I'm going to be fine. And then I walked through it and it was. It was indeed the most incredible thing that ever happened to me, because I changed my life. I changed the stress. I no longer let stress run my life that was going to kill me. And I changed in my food habits, my exercise just my state of mind. I used a
lot of cannabis that helped me. Here in California, we have that. It was very medicinal and it really changed me as a person, and I am now twenty one years cancer free.
We got to take a quick break. When we come back. The rest of my conversation with Melissa Ethridge, I want to talk about the two thousand and five Grammy Awards. You were performing with Josh Stone. You sang a tribute to Janis Joplin and you were bald. What were the emotions heading into that performance and why did you choose to be bald instead of wearing a wig.
Well, it's funny. My surgeon who took the lumps out and took I had three separate surgeries to get everything out, get the margins clear. It was in the left nodes, but they were able to get it before it got all the way in there. And and this doctor said, so you're gonna need chemo. You're gonna need lots of chemo dose dents. Uh. And so you're gonna be bald, So you're gonna need a wig because no one wants to see a bald rock star. This is what she said to me. And I was like, what this just did?
I was like scary and weird. And then I when I knew I was going to be toward the end of the Treatments, when I knew I was going to be on the on the Grammys, I asked my friends. I was like, what do you think should I be bald? I also had a stylist get me kind of a handkerchief as swayed. I had that I was maybe gonna wear that, and everything on my head made me so hot because I was getting hot flashes because they chemo puts you into menopause and and I was like, I
just I can't. I'm just I'm just gonna go bald. And I remember telling the lighting director and every said, I said, I'm going to be bald. So I don't know if that changes how you're going to do anything. And I just didn't want anybody to make fun of me. And right before I went on my guitar player, he said, he goes, Melissa, you don't know what you're about to do, do you? And I said, I don't know what you mean, and he goes, well, just watch And I went out.
And I still get a little choked up because the audience was so warm and loving and they just just received it so well and it was one of the greatest moments of my life.
Yeah, it actually inspired a song by India I Ree I Am not my Heart No, Yeah, I love pretty powerful.
Yeah.
You know, one of my best friends, unfortunately, was recently diagnosed with multiple my law and she is going to undergo a stem cell transplant in a couple months, and she's going to lose her hair. And we were talking the other day about if she wants to wear a wig that looks like her, or wear a wig that's like totally wacky and fun, or just go bald. And she said the same thing about how she's already hot all the time, and so she's a little worried about
this wedding. Do you have advice for her or for others who are scared about that particular moment where everybody will know that you're going through something. It will be written all over your face and your hair.
Yeah, it's okay. It's okay for everyone to know that. It's okay for people to know that you're at a point in your life where you're changing and you're working on it, and you're working on health, and it's nothing to be sad about. You are doing what you need to do. And part of that weird shame about our hair and what we look like is a part of the problem of why we're sick. So time to let that go. Time to know that we look gorgeous without
our hair or not. And I love it because sometimes I see people bald women and I'm like, could be a choice? Could be? You know, because I'm telling you, losing my hair felt amazing. One. I love people rubbing my head. That was really really I would get massages
and I'm just like, just rub my head. And I would actually recommend just once in every woman's life to shave her head, whether she's sick or not, but just to shave her head because there's a lot of energy and hair and you let it go and it's really a great experience. And someday I'll go back to really short hair. I'm looking forward to that.
You've always written very personal song, songs about issues that matter to you, songs about your life. Did your cancer battle make it into your music?
Oh yeah. The first album I made after that was called The Awakening because it's less about being sick, because that was just the symptom of the change that I needed to make in my own spirit, in my own life. And it's more about waking up to oh this, I'm in charge of me. I can't. I got to be okay first before I help anybody else. And so many women we take care of everybody else. We want everyone to be happy and then we'll be happy. And that's a You keep doing that and you will get sick
because that's not how we're made. We're made to make sure we are good, we are well, and that's the only way we can help anybody else.
Actually, Yeah, what's been the hardest part for you over the course of the decades that you've been in the public eye and had a voice and an agency of standing up for things even when society might not be ready, or maybe when the loudest voices might be trying to shout you down. What's been the toughest part for you?
Well, the toughest thing was probably just five years ago when I lost my son to an opioid overdose, because that's like, that just knocks you down and you don't there's so much guilt and shame involved in that as a parent that that can really really be hard, and it was, and it was during the pandemic, so it
was a very very strange time. And what I've done to help with that is to start the Etherage Foundation, which is at the forefront now of providing funds for research into plant medicine, into psychedelics and how they can help and help with our emotional systems that lead to pain relief and opioids within heroin and then fentanyl and death.
And so it's trying to change that. And there's a lot of misinformation and a lot of people saying different things, but I have a deep belief that as an alternative to opioids, in helping with addiction, opioid use, disorder, all these things, plat medicine can it really has a lot of answers.
Yeah, I was really skeptical about it, to be honest with you, and I think because it was so often associated with folks who were presenting it in this sort of hippie dippy cult like way. And when I listen to doctors talk about the appropriate usage of it and how it sort of takes the topography of your brain that you've created over the years to help hide away trauma or go around something instead of through it and
dealing with it. How it levels that out and you're forced to go through the things that your body has tried to protect you from, and that's the only way to actually integrate them into the rest of your memory and learning and get through them, process them, and move
past them. As soon as that was explained to me, it made such sense, and having read a lot of books of late for the book that I wrote, I started to be much less judgmental about the things I didn't understand, particularly when they were presented to me in sort of a logical and thoughtful way as opposed to like, come to my tent in the woods and I'll show you the magic of ayahuasca. Right, But I love what I love you said, because you know, Robin Roberts always says,
make your mess your message. It's easier said than done. But if you can find a way to turn the deepest of pain into something proactive where it feels like you're making a change and helping at least something came from it and you're not just just held down by it hurts, and you are also choosing to make something of it. And that's really powerful that you decided to do that. I want to close our conversation with something fun.
So it's a speed round, a speed round for you because there are too many questions and too little time. What's the most nervous you've ever been for a performance?
Singing the national anthem at the Old series Game seven two thousand one, two thousand and one. I believe giants angels?
Okay. Dream collaborator for an album or a live show or a song.
Wow, I've got a lot of my dreams have come true. I did sing with Bruce Springsteen. I've sung with a lot of people. Dream collab that kind of always changes. I mean, it was always Barbara Streis him for a long time, but I know she's never gonna sing with me, so that took you know, But now it'd be like, it'd be fun to do something like with Chapel Roone.
I knew you were going to say that. I knew it. I knew it.
She's fun. That would be too much people's heads would explain exactly.
I'd like to see you doing Pink Pony Club. I'd like to see it. I was at a show last night actually in the lead singer said, at this point, I have lived out all of my dreams and dreams I never had. At this point, I'm just stealing other people's dreams, like things he had never imagined he could do. He was doing so now he figured they must be somebody else's that he stole. Who's the musician who's talent you're most envious of? Alive or dead?
Peter Gabriel made some music in the eighties and the nineties that I really wished I was that sort of it was. It was when tech and music was meeting, and he did it so well, and he wrote in Your Eyes, which I think is the greatest song ever, and I'm always jealous. I always go, God, I wish I've written that song.
Yeah, it was like tech plus mysticism. Somehow he made it. He made it mesh in a way that like felt right, Yeah, what's the thing you've gotten to do in your career that still feels like a pinch me. I can't believe that happened.
Moment well, singing with Bruce Springsteen, Yeah, yeah, that was like bench main. I didn't want it to end. I listened to it and I can still hear my heart beat as I'm introducing him, you know, telling everyone, oh my God, I get to sing with Springstein, that's probably one.
Yeah. What about the goal or accomplishment you're working toward now in life, career or otherwise.
Oh, now, it's about longevity. Now, it's about you know, when you when you reach your goals, when you when your dreams come true, you realize that it was never the dream, it was never the thing and getting the thing or doing the thing, it was the journey to the thing is the most fun, absolutely, And I've done enough that I know that for sure. So now I'm like, oh, let me put these dreams out in front of me,
let me put this goal. But let me take my time, you know, let me take my time going through the process, because I know when I get there, I'm going to want something else. It's gonna because it's about the dream. It's about keep moving. So my goal is to be in older older and older older age and still performing and rocking and making music and writing about my life and talking to you know, wonderful young women like you and just doing that. That's my that's the goal. Now.
It's wild how many very successful people have the same message about what it feels like on the other side of success or the thing they always wanted, and it's impossible to impart that to people who are just getting started. You can never explain to them that the process of getting there is the thing too, because they're so hungry to prove to themselves and to others that they've made it or they've done it. There's a great song Hosier and Brandy Carlisle Damage Gets Done, that I think like
hits it perfectly. There's this line about the it's the comforts that make us feel numb, and he writes about we'd go out with no way to get home, we'd sleep on someone's floor and wake up feeling like a millionaire. And you do remember, looking back now at your twenties, when you were broke, you weren't sure if you were ever going to make it at anything. You and your friends were sort of like, who are we what are
we going to do? We're going to pay rent? And now when you're successful and rich later, you look back, you're like, man, that was fun.
Fun at the wanting, the desire, the someday that yeah, And so I try to keep that as much as I can.
It's hard in the moment when you're like, nobody, I really do need to pay rent, but it is. You can romanticize it later when it all works out.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, last question for you, since this is living beyond, if you look at Melissa Ethriche beyond breast cancer, you'll find.
What, Oh, a woman having a great time in this life right now, just loving every moment, every moment. Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much, Thank you, Sarah anytime.
Good Game with Sarah Spain is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Good find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network, our producers are Alex Azzie and Misha Jones. Our executive producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan, and Emily Rutterer. Our editors are Emily Rutter, Britney Martinez, Grace Lynch, and
Gianna Palmer. Our associate producer is Lucy Jones and I'm your host Sarah Spain