At this stage of the game, after Melissa Etheridge's nearly 20 years in the big-time music biz, eight studio albums, chart-topping singles, endless videos, and live and greatest-hits packages (not to mention world tours), her fans are either going to go for it or they're not. The Awakening is likely not the kind of record to win a few thousand new fans over. Yet, given a particular life-changing circumstance or two and word of mouth, it might be. Musically, there isn't anything here that you haven't heard before from Etheridge. If you're a fan that's a great thing, right? (One need only remember that when 1995's Your Little Secret dropped, so did some people who had followed her from the beginning -- she won most of them back, but that slick set was the wrong track to take after the confessional and anthemic Yes I Am.) The Awakening is, according the artist, a concept record. Before you groan, this one is based on life experience, not solely ideas or opinions. For this singer and songwriter, that experience was cancer. The title of this recording is what she learned during her journey down that road and through convalescence, true, but it's also a straightforward look back and forward through a life -- her own. An autobiography can be boring and self-indulgent, especially in pop music, but it can also be an intimate and exciting look at an artist who has been guarded or protected by myth. The Awakening is both. It's interesting that while so many of these songs are peppered with faux-mystical approaches to spirituality, the album is also confessional and looks hard at itself, even if at times it seems cloying, self-indulgent, and preachy. There is plenty of straight talk about mistakes made, such as in An Unexpected Rain and in the opening statements about family in California.

1		All There Is
2		California
3		An Unexpected Rain
4		Message to Myself
5		God Is In the People
6		Map of the Stars
7		Threesome
8		All We Can Really Do
9		I've Loved You Before
10		A Simple Love
11		Heroes and Friends
12		The Kingdom of Heaven
13		Open Your Mind
14		The Universe Listened
15		Imagine That
16		What Happens Tomorrow