Depressing Tunes

On her impressive debut album, singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge comes across as someone you don’t want to meet. At least not in the mood she’s in through that batch of songs.

Belting out the debut’s downer material, she sounds like a permanent resident of Heartbreak Hotel--one of those people who thrives on depression. There’s no joy in her songs, which dwell on the misery of those who’ve been wounded in the romantic wars.

Has Etheridge been mangled in the relationship wringer? Does she, as her songs suggest, have a bad case of the blues?

The first thing she did during the luncheon interview was to smile. After a few pleasantries, she did it again.

“See,” she insisted, “I can laugh, I can be happy, I can feel ecstatic about life as well as anyone.

“But I’ve had my share of pain. Heartbreak and me aren’t strangers. When you get to be 27 like me, who hasn’t been through some hellish romantic situations?”

Still, she pointed out, her songs are only partly autobiographical. “They’re the result of some soul-searching, some personal experiences and some heavy fictionalizing. In life, you struggle and stumble. You fall into pits--and you crawl out and do the whole thing over. It makes for interesting songs--if nothing else.”

Etheridge, who began singing and writing as a youngster in Leavenworth, Kan., started out in country music. In her late teens, she went to the famed Berklee School of Music long enough to figure out that singing in clubs was better training, and it was in a Long Beach club that she was discovered by Island Records’ head man Chris Blackwell a year and a half ago.

She chose the material for her debut LP from a large pool of songs that were not, she insisted, all doom-and-gloom tunes: “There were some happy ones too, but the depressing ones were better.”