Ravinia 2019, Issue 2, Week 4

F Etheridge adds a touch of harmonica to her 2013 debut set at Ravinia. Etheridge composed the song “I Run for Life” to reflect her battle against breast cancer. One year later, her song “I Need to Wake Up” entered the world with the environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth . It ultimately won the Academy Award for Best Original Song; when she took the stage to accept her Oscar in 2007, Etheridge thanked Al Gore for “for inspiring me, showing that caring about the Earth is not Republican or Democratic; it’s not red or blue, it’s all green.” F or Etheridge , the personal is directly, even inexorably, linked to the political. Life leads her directly to both creativity and social activism. “I find that it’s not usually me that chooses. It’s usually the cause,” she says. “Like being a gay person, LGBT, that was just me. My own choices then put me in the spotlight with that. Same with cancer; cancer came to me, and my choices put me in the spotlight with that. “Now it’s cannabis,” Etheridge continues, speaking of her latest cause. (It’s often called “medical marijuana” in common parlance.) “I’m an advocate for it because I use it as medicine. …There are a lot of people who don’t really know what’s going on, and I hope to educate.” Naturally, “The Medicine Show,” her new release’s title track, nods to her latest personal-as-political experience. An anthemic opening number, it’s a raucous call to good times, complete with a nursery-rhyme-inflected chorus that audiences will surely chant along with. Etheridge freely admits that, in writing the lyrics, she had cannabis in mind—but was also thinking metaphor- ically. “When I call it ‘The Medicine Show,’ I believe music is medicine. Joy is medicine,” she says. “It’s thinking about medicine in a whole new way. It’s not just getting a pill from a doctor. This is very different; it’s about understanding your own medicine, your own body’s ability to heal, and how plant medicine is a part of that.” Or, as distilled into the lyrics: “A little remedy never do you no harm.” The song also references a 2017 arrest for possession of marijuana in North Dakota. Her tour bus was returning from Canada when border patrol pulled them over and dogs sniffed out the contraband. Although a resident of Cal- ifornia, where she could legally possess and use cannabis, the uneven patchwork of state laws across the country (not to mention federal anti-drug laws) led her to ultimately plead guilty to a misde- meanor charge. She paid a fine and was sentenced to unsupervised probation. “I was on the books for, I think, eight months, and then it kind of goes away. You know, I’m a white middle-aged woman, so there you go,” she says. “There’s forward movement” to legalize the drug across the country, she adds. “One day this will be quaint and funny, and we’ll work on helping all the people whose lives are ruined and behind bars” because of personal pot use. The flip side to “The Medicine Show” is “Here Comes the Pain,” a haunting ballad about the tragedy of opioid addiction. Meanwhile, “The Last Hello” traces how the horror and grief of school shootings evolved into activism (particularly the Parkland massacre, which inspired the nationwide March for Our Lives). But despite the darkness she sees in the world today, Etheridge also knows how to look to the light. She aims to inspire with “This Human Chain,” an R&B groove that celebrates connectivity and love. While working on the album, Etheridge says, “I knew I was living in interesting times, and I knew this album would reflect these times. Many of the songs, we’ll look back in ten years and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what was going on.’ …This feeling of togetherness, unity through diversity—I hope it lasts.” Web Behrens covers arts, culture, and travel for the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business . He’s also worked as an editor and contributor for Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Reader . RUSSELL JENKINS/RAVINIA 14 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JUNE 17 – JUNE 30, 2019