The Power of Song – Dallas Voice

Melissa Etheridge brings music to a women’s prison in new documentary series

RICH LOPEZ | Editor
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In the new documentary series “Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken,” director Brian Morrow and his directing partner Amy Scott spin an inspiring story of healing through the music of lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge. The two-part series leads up to a concert that Etheridge gives at the Topeka Correctional Facility, a women’s prison.

In the meantime, five female inmates write letters to the singer, which serve as inspiration for the title song.

Over the course of the series, Morrow and Scott address a range of issues related to the women in prison, including substance abuse, trauma and grief, and the stresses of female incarceration, which has increased 700 percent since 1980.

But for a moment all that is forgotten when Etheridge gives a real concert for the inmates.

Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken premieres exclusively on Paramount+ on Tuesday, July 9. Ahead of the show, director Morrow spoke to Dallas Voice about working with Etheridge and the incarcerated to tell layered and emotional stories, as well as the challenges, constraints and Etheridge’s one-day turnaround to write the music for the show.

Dallas Voice: Thank you for speaking before this show aired. Could you talk about how this all came about? Brian Morrow: Melissa and her manager had been trying to get this show together for a while. She grew up in Leavenworth and was impressed by Johnny Cash’s role in the prison there. That made a big impression on her as a kid, so she had been thinking about this show for a long time and wanted to make a film about it at the same time.

A couple from our production company Shark Pig met with her to see what she was like and what she had in mind. We developed this piece to pitch and luckily MTV Entertainment and Paramount were interested.

The premise is that five women wrote to Melissa Etheridge. Was it a prompt or a coincidence that they wrote to her? So we wanted to build a kind of storyline – we would get letters from them and find out how they were doing. But that was also their inspiration for the song. The letters were very long and contained a lot of personal details. You could see that it was a cathartic process for them to pick up the pen and reflect in that way.

Since the film is set in a correctional facility, were there any challenges in both filming and writing the letters? It was a laborious process. All correspondence had to be approved. We were not allowed to be involved in selecting the women who wrote. They had to get some kind of approval for it. And it took a long time for us to go to them and coordinate the arrival of cameras at the prison. But we took it all very seriously.

Melissa Etheridge is, of course, a huge queer icon – especially for lesbian women. Were any of the letter writers identified as such? And if so, did that have additional meaning for Melissa? None of that really came out. She even asked what percentage of the population identified as queer, but they didn’t know because they couldn’t ask. There was a sweet moment when she told a story on stage and shouted “I’m a lesbian,” which drew huge applause from the audience.

The parallel is that the show deals with addiction and substance abuse. Your son died from opioids a few years ago. How did you deal with such topics? I have to say first that she’s really a fearless person. She wasn’t afraid to go into those hard, dark places. She talks about the loss and the painful process. In a way, it shows how addiction touches everyone, whether you’re a rock star or someone who’s ended up in prison. That population is kind of forgotten, and we respect that victims are affected too, that’s why they’re here. We don’t ignore those. But it meant a lot to them that Melissa cared enough for them to do that.

She was also breaking new ground musically. She wanted to write the score herself and co-wrote it with Heather McIntosh. But she had never written a score before. I told her not to feel obligated – she wrote the song – but she insisted. She came in and there were 36 cues for her and she said, “As long as it takes.” She did it all in one day, playing all these different instruments.

She won an Oscar for her song in An uncomfortable truth. Maybe it’s time for her Emmy? I hope so!