Wednesday, April 27, 1988

Melissa Etheridge “Bring Me Some Water” charted

Bring Me Some Water

Melissa Etheridge

Writer(s): Melissa Etheridge (see lyrics here)

First Charted: April 27, 1988

Peak: 10 AR, 100 UK, 34 CN, 9 AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to singles charts.)

Sales (in millions): -- US, -- UK, -- world (includes US + UK)

Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 4.7 video, 12.49 streaming

Awards:

Click on award for more details.

About the Song:

The first time I heard “Bring Me Some Water” I thought it might be a new Tina Turner song. It had the rocked-out vibe of some of her ‘80s hits like “Better Be Good to Me” and “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” It turned out it wasn’t someone who’d been around for decades, but a brand new artist. She was even practically a hometown girl. Melissa Etheridge was from Leavenworth, Kansas, which was less than an hour from Kansas City where I’d grown up. I was in college in Warrensburg, Missouri, at the time, but it was close enough to pick up the KC-area radio stations. The album-rock stations embraced Etheridge wholeheartedly.

Etheridge, Tracy Chapman and Indigo Girls emerged as personal favorites in the late ‘80s and pointed the direction for other ‘90s favorites of mine including Sheryl Crow, Shawn Colvin, Sarah McLachlan, and Tori Amos. While I never heard anyone else lump them together under one banner, they were all part of the “Lilith Fair” genre in my mind. Lilith Fair was a festival organized in the ‘90s by Sarah McLachlan for female artists and female-driven bands that generally traversed the ground between album rock and alternative with elements of folk thrown in.

Etheridge was definitely more on the rock-end of the scale. “Bring Me Some Water” even garned enough national attention to land at #10 on the Billboard album rock chart. It also earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. It has become, she says, her song with “the highest recognition value and that wherever she plays the song in the world, everybody at her concerts knows the song after the first seconds of the intro.” ^WK

Etheridge was living in Los Angeles, away from her girlfriend, Kathleen, when she wrote “Bring Me Some Water.” It was an open relationship, a fact which Etheridge clearly wasn’t completely on board with, considering the song’s themes about “the pain and jealousy arising from thoughts of her lover being intimate with someone else.” ^WK As she said, “It was very painful. It was very true. It was awful.” ^SF

The song was cleverly written so that the listener didn’t know if Etheridge was singing about a relationship with a man or woman. She wouldn’t come out as gay until five years later.