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Night Out

By KATHERINE ROSMAN

How does a rock star begin an evening? She puts in her hearing aids.

“I can tell people are talking,” said Melissa Etheridge, 55. “It’s just that I don’t know what they’re saying.

“Mom,” Bailey Cypheridge, age 19, said with a chastising tone. “It’s bad.”

Ms. Etheridge laughed — she has a big, staccato “Ha!” laugh. “She’s right,” she said with a shrug.

Ms. Etheridge, who lives in Hidden Hills, Calif., had come to New York to promote her new album, “MEmphis Rock and Soul,” which she recorded in tribute to the city’s legendary Stax Records. The album includes “Hold On, I’m Coming”, her cover of the Sam and Dave standard, and Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember.”

Dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans and black motorcycle boots and wearing blue-tinted aviator eyeglasses, Ms. Etheridge was sitting on the couch in the Chelsea apartment originally rented by her wife, Linda Wallem, a creator of the Showtime series “Nurse Jackie.”

This was her break during a long day bookended by a morning appearance on “Live With Kelly” and a late-night turn on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” She was eating takeout from Cookshop, a neighborhood place, and watching the vice-presidential debate with Ms. Cypheridge, a Columbia University sophomore working as an intern for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

A few minutes before the debate started, the television was tuned to CNN with the volume muted, while Ms. Etheridge ate pan-roasted porgy and a salad and philosophized about her dairy-free, gluten-free pescetarian ways. Receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2004, she said she is now 12 years cancer-free and believes her diet plays a crucial role in maintaining her health.

“To work at the level I want to work at, to be relevant, and to make music and perform worthy shows, I have to take care of myself,” she said. “It’s like being an athlete. It’s food, it’s sleep, it’s all the un-rock-and-roll things.”

She relies on her children to stay hip in other ways, like on social media.

“You’re doing well — all my friends follow you,” Ms. Cypheridge said. She gives her mother critiques when necessary.

For example, her jigsaw posts: “She told me: ‘Mom you have to stop tweeting about the puzzles that you do. It’s not cool.”

In addition, her daughter says she needs to curb the posts about the Kansas City Chiefs. “I love the Chiefs,” Ms. Etheridge said.

“It’s the only time she’s interested in men,” her daughter said. Her mother responded with another “Ha!”

Ms. Cypheridge’s last name is a blend of those of her mothers: Ms. Etheridge and her former partner Julie Cypher. Together, the women also have a son, a high school senior. They were conceived by Ms. Cypher with a sperm donation from the musician David Crosby — “Bio Dad,” as the children call him. With her former wife Tammy Lynn Michaels (who conceived with the sperm of an anonymous donor), Ms. Etheridge has two other children, 9-year-old twins.

After going through these splits, including a custody battle with Ms. Michaels, Ms. Etheridge has empathy for friends going through similar experiences. And she has a propensity for sharing her feelings publicly, when asked, which is the sort of thing that happens when you are on a press tour promoting a new album, and in fact happened to Ms. Etheridge the day before.

On Monday, she appeared on the Bravo host Andy Cohen’s program on SiriusXM, and he asked her what she thought about the recent split of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Ms. Etheridge and Mr. Pitt were close friends years ago, and she defended him to Mr. Cohen. Her comments were picked up by publications like Vanity Fair and The New York Post.

“If I even think about Brad Pitt, it is the most international event,” she said. But of course she didn’t just think about him; she spoke. “I told myself a long time ago that I would always answer whatever question was asked of me,” she said. “It challenges me to be truthful and to be myself.”

(Ms. Etheridge went on “Watch What Happens Live” with Mr. Cohen on Wednesday, saying she had been contacted by Ms. Jolie’s “people” by phone and then performed “The Fixer Blues,” a song she had written after the call. She sang, in her signature rasp, “Oh, well, I woke up this morning to a subtle warning that had my mind rockin.’” Then toward the end, “Fixer, I hope you understand, to scandalize was never my plan.”)

The Jolie-Pitt headlines just rattled her, she said on Tuesday ahead of the debate, reminding her of the sadness she had felt as a parent when her own relationships dissolved. “You think, ‘I am now going to lose half the time I spend with my children,’ and it is heartbreaking,” she said.

Since they were first friends in the 1980s, Ms. Etheridge said she knew how important it was to Mr. Pitt to become a father and have close relationships with his children. That is why she didn’t turn to him for biological help when she wanted to become a mother. “I did not ask Brad to be a donor because I knew how much he wanted to be a father,” she said, “how much that meant to him.”

As Ms. Etheridge talked, her daughter listened while keeping an eye on the television and her phone. When the debate finally commenced, she folded her long legs onto the couch close to her mom. They cuddled and watched.

“Two old white men talking over each other, how great,” Ms. Cypheridge remarked.

“Ha!” her mother said, as she tapped away at her phone, texting with her wife back in California.

Then she glanced at her daughter’s phone screen: Using a Snapchat filter, she had taken a picture that gave both of the vice-presidential candidates dog ears and long, slobbery dog tongues.

“How’d you do that?” Ms. Etheridge said, her voice full of wonder, sounding more like a mom than a rock-and-roller.