One day someone smart will get rich very quick by releasing the bestselling compilation album "Best Divorce Songs In The World Ever - Part 1", and that person will have the terrible dilemma of which Melissa Etheridge track to choose from this album. Passionate, honest and so raw the CD bleeds, this album is a must-have for the broken-hearted. It's one to stay in to, hair unwashed, stereo cranked up so loud you can't even hear the neighbours knocking, with half a bottle of red wine already down and the rest not about to last long.
What makes this album such good therapy, and for my money infinitely better than the recent "Breakdown", is its painfully real modulation between moods, and the sheer intensity of emotion expressed. The furious jealousy of "Like The Way I Do" is excoriating in its intense rhetorical questioning, "does she stimulate you?/attract and captivate you?", only to be completely undermined - wholly realistically - by the deflated resignation of the repeated "like the way I do". This rocks, as does the painful immolation of "Bring Me Some Water" in which the spurned lover screams out to anyone who will listen "somebody bring me some water/can't you see I'm burning alive?" These are tracks for Home Alone karaoke and some very therapeutic rock-chick air guitar - yeah, girls do it too...
A bit of therapeutic raging is good for the soul, but this album also has tracks so still at their centre that you can actually hear your heart hurting. On "Occasionally", Etheridge's voice is accompanied only by percussion, emphasising the acute isolation of the lyric as the speaker repeatedly and with painfully obvious irony asserts that she is "only" lonely in a whole list of different contexts. "Watching You" bleeds from the self-inflicted lacerations of being completely unable to let that ex go. I cry every time...
Listening to this album is a full-on virtual reality experience of the excruciating agony of lost love, but one that was at least worth something. How terribly Romantic.