Fridae

Melissa Etheridge finally makes a sexual reference to a woman in her new album, Skin after coming out in 1993.

Etheridge, who began playing the piano and guitar in various covers bands around Kansas since her teenage years, said in a Reuters interview, "It is intentional on my part to keep my lyrics non-gender-specific. Even when I came out, I didn't want to narrow my music�because we all have the same emotion. That's been important to me."

She said that although she wanted to be nonspecific, she needed to go with a pronoun after the line "I found a little angel who had fallen from the sky / and I took that little angel�" in It's Only Me. She then completed the phrase with, "and I taught her how to fly."

The 40-year-old musician admits, "I'm making a sexual reference to a woman here, and that's really the first time, and to me, that's a big deal."

Etheridge and her ex-partner Julie Cypher are the mothers of two, Bailey and Beckett. In January this year, the pair who was together for 12 years revealed that, through artificial insemination, the biological father of their two children is musician David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Etheridge and Cypher, who have continually stressed their important jobs - parenting the two kids - bought homes next to each other to facilitate co-parenting after their separation.

Etheridge is now dating actress Tammy Lynn Michaels of the TV series Popular. "It's only been a few months, and I'm very happy, and it's very clean and wonderful."

The Grammy winning singer has also released an autobiography, The Truth Is ...: My Life in Love and Music, last month. The book details the singer's life from her humble beginnings in Kansas, to her rise to rock-and-roll fame and coming out as a lesbian, to her highly publicized relationship - and breakup - with Julie Cypher.