We had done it too many times before, but we came back together yet again. We tried to make it work with the understanding that we would be together—that is, our family would be together in the same place, but we would be nonmonogamous.
I was not enjoying the new arrangement, even though Julie and I had started to connect on a physical level again. This pattern simply could not continue because it was not good for either of us. I started to wind things down again by the end of July. By August, I was back on my own path. I was no longer available to her on an emotional level because I was putting it inside myself.
At one point, Julie came to me and said that she wasn’t happy with the way things were going between us. She wanted to work on our relationship. I had to explain to her that, from my perspective, we were not in our relationship anymore. I was off on my own, working on me, and I wanted Julie to work on herself. I thought that if she could commit to having a healthy, monogamous relationship—something we were thinking might be possible in the future—then I would agree to work on our relationship sometime in the future. But, for the moment, we no longer had our relationship, so I told her no.
I think that threw her a curve she wasn’t expecting because that arrangement wasn’t part of the routine we’d fallen into. She quickly stepped up to the plate and tried to convince me that we could have a monogamous, healthy relationship and that she was through with her need for men.
She was finally saying what I’d been waiting to hear for years. But her words were only words. From that minute on, her darkness, resentfulness, and restlessness returned. She seemed so miserable. We were fighting every day. She was as far away from me as anyone could get. And every day it was something else. I’m not [this] enough, I’m not [that] enough.
About two weeks went by, and I realized that this was a miserable, horrible way to live. Julie called a friend who was in group therapy with us and asked for intervention because Julie and I were at a point where we couldn’t even speak to each other without an argument ensuing. We all decided to meet at a park near our home and talk. Julie and I started by trying to communicate with each other and deal with our issues. It was the same old place in our relationship that Julie and I had visited a thousand times. I guess she felt cornered again because she pulled out her “I’m just not gay” below-the-belt punch for the final time.
I couldn’t bear to hear that one more time. That was it—I was not dealing with this issue anymore. I wasn’t going to let her toy with me and take that easy way out. If that’s where she was going to take things, then I was through. This time, it was over. I never ever wanted Julie to be something she was not. I might never know, but I just don’t believe that’s the whole story. I think it became an easy door. Where was I supposed to go and what was I supposed to say after she told me something like that?
I had this sinking feeling that my life was in an uncontrollable downward spiral after we agreed to separate. The day I told my manager, Bill, that Julie and I were separating, was the day I felt that we had bottomed out. He had come to the recording studio and he was taken completely by surprise. This man has been in my life for nearly twenty years. He has seen a lot of people come and go, but this time it was different. Even though he understood, I knew that I would soon have to face the daunting task of telling all of the people I loved. Up to this point, no one knew anything about the breakup. I hadn’t talked to anyone about it. And that was hard to do because I was about to go to Julie’s thirty-sixth birthday party—a night of celebration with all of our friends.
We agreed to be respectful of each other at the birthday party. I wasn’t going to go hunting down somebody and neither was she. I just wanted to get through it. But it was horrible. I spent the whole night shying away from Julie, pretending to everyone that everything was just fine. It was a lie and I was telling that lie in a room full of the people I loved the most.
The next day, we began to discuss how we were going to tell everyone. Our decision to break the news to our friends and family came quicker than we had anticipated. The Star was going to break the story in its next issue, so we had less than twenty-four hours to make our calls. I have no idea how The Star found out, but we had to call everyone we knew and tell them that we were breaking up. That was extremely hard. We couldn’t get into details with anyone because of the time issue, so we just let everyone know that this was happening and we’d talk about it later. We didn’t want any of our closest friends to learn about it from the morning paper.
The hardest call was to David and Jan Crosby. Julie and I felt we had let them down. This wasn’t what they had in mind when they gave us their gift. I’ll never forget their reaction. It was from their heart. They said, “It was a gift. It didn’t come with any conditions.” They assured us that they had all of the trust in our abilities, as parents, to make the right decision for our children. All they wished for was the best for Julie and myself. We’ve actually seen them more since the breakup than we did before.
As crazy as it sounded, and as hard as it was to find, Julie and I decided to find two homes that we could move into that shared a common yard space, because neither of us was willing to lose a moment with our children. Our idea was revolutionary in terms of an amicable separation. Our main concern was for the children’s well-being. We talked with our therapist, who told us that, in a perfect world, parents would have to go from house to house and children could stay put. But the reality of that circumstance was not feasible, nor desirable, so we discussed it and agreed to get back-to-back homes. We could then put in a gate so the children would feel they could come and go through the yards anytime they wanted.
Shockingly, Julie found the perfect homes very quickly. Exactly the ones we wanted. And so we began to plan our move—something I was looking forward to, but something that was actually much more painful than I would have liked to admit.
Packing up “our” house and dividing “our” stuff was the hardest, lowest, shakiest, most frightening part of the process for me. It was a slow ripping-apart of our twelve years together. I can’t even tell you how hard that packing situation was. You start packing things up, and ask, “Is this yours or is it mine?” Going through the CDs, “This is your music, this is my music,” Even talk of “Your house, my house” was hard to swallow. The dirt in the house just kept getting thicker and thicker as the boxes were packed and things came off the walls. This wasn’t just the dismantling of our home, it was the dismantling of “our” life.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I’d always thought of a house as a metaphor for life, and here was mine coming apart day by day. I could barely sleep. I couldn’t eat. I just felt sick. Twelve years of my life were being boxed up and taken away before my eyes. And then the hot water heater in the attic exploded. Water poured through the ceilings into the house, drenching everything, just like it was raining inside.
We were moving. And our house was crying.
SKIN
• • •
I’d started working on Skin, my new album, before we had moved out of the old house. Making this record was a completely different recording experience than I had ever had. The studio became my refuge during the breakup and the move into the new house. After I’d get up and spend some time with the kids, I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning and pour every ounce of energy and thought and emotion I had into the making of the album. I would walk into the studio and I’d shut the door, leaving all the turmoil of my life behind me with a huge sigh of relief. I’d get lost in the songs. It was like when I was ten years old and running into my basement to write songs. Everything was dark and filled with hurt and fear. It was a time of tremendous hurt. Except this time, the “basement” was the recording studio. I just put all of that emotion into my new songs. My heart would just pound. I couldn’t eat anything but chicken taquitos. And I would just sing … and let it out. Almost all the vocals on the album were recorded in their first take, live.
© 1995 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY JODI WILLE
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Recording Your Litle Secret.
© 1995 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY JODI WILLE
In the studio making
Your Little Secret
© 1995 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY JODI WILLE
David Cole, John Carter, and me in the studio making Skin
© 2000 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY STEVEN GIRMANT
I worked with producer David Cole, who is the sweetest, gentlest, most un-Hollywood guy. He’s a total family man. He was just so there with me. He was always interested in what I was doing, and where I was at with my songwriting, and he encouraged me to go deeper—to search inside myself and grab hold of all of the emotional stuff that was stirring. David was great. He’d laugh at all of my jokes, and we’d say really corny things to one another. I felt like I grew up with him.
The studio became a safe place. Steven Girmant was in the other room, and between him and David, I felt completely protected from the outside world. Had I been working with people I felt guarded with, I’m not sure they would have gotten the results that David did. I hadn’t told David that Julie and I were having problems when we first started recording the album. The day I went in and spilled the beans, he just looked at me and said that he figured something was up because of the songs. We were really connected and I think it’s been key in making this album so real and so of-the-moment. There were no judgments on the material. He started off working with this very broken baby bird and he gently nursed me through my catharsis. I could say, do, and be whatever I felt, and he’d help me make it into music. Even when David would send me back into that painful world and tell me to write deeper, I would step back and create images that were so much better than what I started with.
I wrote a lot of thoughts that never became songs for this album. There were moments of self-pity, anger, grief, and emancipation. Though I do not consider myself to be a poet—poets are much more accomplished than I am—I am a lyricist, and while writing the songs for Skin, I let my creative juices start to flow so that I could get that thought process and my brain working again. I had not written a song for well over a year.
I want a drink, a real one, nothing fancy or smooth, vodka or gin, some excuse for being rude.
I want to sit at the end of the bar and think and drink.
I want someone to ask me to dance just so I can turn them away.
When I get good and drunk, then I’ll dance.
But until then, this misery stays.
I want the bartender to tell me a story about
How Elvis just showed up here one night.
And there’s a napkin he signed on the wall and a bullet hole just to the right.
And I don’t want to make any sense.
And I don’t want to figure it out.
I don’t want you to find me and come in and remind me.
That was as far as I got on that, but I kept coming up with lines like “The heart is a garden you dig your fingers in,” and I would sit down with these drum loops and try to pour it all out on paper. Usually, I would just sit with my guitar, but this time my inspiration was coming from a new rhythmic source. It helped me a lot in the process because I could hear the beginning of a song in my head and then work with the drum loops to create from my feelings. The first song I wrote for the album was “Down to One,” which was also written as just lyrics. I read it to a friend, and her reaction wasn’t to reel from the pain of the song. She understood it, and that helped me keep going, because my life was definitely changing. It was completely different, and I think a lot of people have experienced, at some time in their life, all of the feelings I was writing about. My songwriting was wonderfully therapeutic for me.
Aside from the emotional rescue of the songs, making Skin involved a lot of first-time creative musical experiences in the studio. I wanted to make an album where I did everything. I played every instrument and sang all of the tracks. We’d start off by putting down a rhythm track with a drum loop, and then I’d play acoustic guitar. And then I’d sing. And David would start to build these layers of tracks that became my songs. Usually, when I record, I sing the entire song three times and then the producer and I pick the version we like best. David used to call my singing his favorite time of the day because it was filled with so much passion and emotion straight from my gut. Even though there are flaws in some of the songs, we decided that performance was more important than perfection. I would later bring in Kenny and Mark to add live drums and bass to help some of the songs.
David and I experimented a lot with sounds and instruments and vocals. I’d tell him, “I want a spooky sound,” and he’d find it for me. John Carter, who was the executive producer of the album, came to the studio one day to check on me and on our progress. One of the last things Carter said before he left the studio that day was, “Whenever you’re stuck and you want to try to do something with an instrument, use your voice.” I wasn’t really sure what he was trying to say, but I went back into the studio after he left, and started layering harmony and dissonance. We built layers of color behind the songs. One of the last songs we finished was “It’s Only Me,” and I wanted to have this moment in the song, right before the very end, where you hear the sound of insanity. We called it “the moment.” David suggested that I go into the studio and just let out a very impassioned tribal OH GOD! scream. What is heard in the final mix is that scream played backward. It was the last thing I did vocally for the album, and it was a final purge of everything that had been building up inside me during the making of Skin.
I really love this album. It was exactly what I needed to get me through those first few months after breaking up with Julie. I needed it to move through this transition. It’s also the first album I have written that is about a specific moment in time. It’s not a smattering of songs from different periods of my life. I cannot wait to perform the songs from this album live in concert.
As the record came together, I slowly became more comfortable in my new house with its unique closeness to my ex. It became a comfort to me in that I would see my children and that would be in close range to me. That gave me hope that everything could be worked out so that Julie and I would both be happy. Our parental lives are very closely intertwined, but it’s still a struggle to separate our personal lives when we live so close to each other.
I’m discovering how much I like living alone. I’ve decorated my house exactly the way I wanted to. That’s something I’d never done. I bought myself a flat-screen TV, which is something I really wanted. If I leave something on the kitchen counter, it’s still there the next day.
I am starting to put into myself everything I’d been giving away. I have opened my eyes to the rest of the world. When I see Julie, I see a person I’ve known for a long time. Attractive, yes. But that desire is no longer there. And I think that desire came from feeling like she was a piece of me, and if I didn’t have that piece, I’d be missing something. There’d be an emptiness.
Having since shared passion with other women, in a very simple and very noncommittal way—women who find me attractive, who say “Look at how good your stomach looks,” and “You’re beautiful,” you know, just very simply giving of themselves, with no expectations—I am sure that I could never go back to anything less. I’m planning on moving on and finding someone who’s at a different place in her life. Someone who is on her own journey and is ready for a relationship full of giving and receiving.
I wanted to find a way to celebrate this new me, this new woman who was emerging from the ashes of the old. I’d wanted a tattoo for years, but I could never decide exactly what to ink on my skin forever. Then I met a woman who was a wardrobe stylist on a photo shoot I was doing, and she had a white tattoo that I thought was really cool. A white tattoo uses white ink. The image is faint but it’s really pretty. Not only would I get a tattoo, but it would make a great picture.
I called a photographer, Dan Winters, and talked to him about my idea. I decided to tattoo the back of my neck, a place on my body th
at I never see, and I asked Dan to photograph it for me. I went to Graffiti Palace, a tattoo parlor in North Hollywood. White tattoos are rare, and this apparently was the only place in town that had an artist—Abel—who specialized in white tattoos. When I called to make an appointment, Abel told me to come down at nine P.M. My mom was scheduled to come to town later that week, so to actually go through with this, tonight had to be the night. I contacted Dan to be sure that he could make it, and he said he’d be there. I had dinner with a friend, drank some sake, and went to the San Fernando Valley so I could get my tattoo.
I sat with my back to Abel and put my head down so he could have a clean line on my neck. Abel was a real heavy-metal-looking dude. He was tattooed on every visible part of his body. Everyone in the shop had the same sort of look. There was nothing Hollywood about the place. It was real, and they took their craft every bit as seriously as I do mine. We designed how it was going to look and then he made a stencil of it, which he used to create the outline for the tattoo. It hurt, but in sort of a good way. It was sexy and exciting. I can understand how people would get turned on by the pain of the whole process and would want to tattoo their bodies all over. The rush kind of hurts, but it takes your mind to a whole new place that is almost a pleasure. Abel had a power over me that I found exciting in every way. I wasn’t Melissa Etheridge, “Rock Star”; I was his canvas. My skin belonged to him for those few moments. And it was my choice alone to surrender that over to another person. It was a mind trip that made my head spin.
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