Lucky

Album Info:

Released: February 10, 2004

"J.T. [Jon Taylor] put some loops together for me, and on one he took this Civil Rights Gospel singer in the '60s, named Ella Jenkins, and sampled her singing an old Gospel song: 'Up and down this road I go, skipping and a-dodging to the .44.' I was messing around with it, and hearing 'skipping and a-dodging to the .44' over and over, and it just started getting way inside me. It was February 2002, five months after 9/11, and I started writing 'Tuesday Morning.'"

"I remember getting People magazine with the stories of Flight 93, how these heroes did it. They get to Mark Bingham and there's his lover, and I thought, 'Oh my god!' I hadn't heard that until I saw the People magazine. Time goes by, and the government starts putting out the benefits for the families of those who lost their lives; a certain percentage of people who lost their lives, of course, were homosexual-at least 10% of any population is gonna be homosexual-and the government says no. All of a sudden, that felt uncomfortable. I start watching as it unfolds, and they mention Mark Bingham but they don't mention that he's gay. It starts to get a little more whitewashed away. Here is a bona fide hero of our American culture, one of the four men who said, 'C'mon, let's roll,' being wiped away. That's not okay with me.

"It was very hard when I was writing the song. In the original lyrics I'm not so nice. I think I even said by name, 'Mr. Ashcroft, maybe it was your life that he saved. Where was that airplane going? And yet you will not acknowledge him.' I went really, really hard with it, and I remember thinking, 'No one's going to hear me if I'm yelling so loud. My job is to present it, just kind of ask that it be considered."
- Melissa Etheridge on Tuesday Morning