Reading back through old journals is to a writer what listening back to old songs is to a musician.

A few years ago, rock star Melissa Etheridge flew back in time to a younger version of herself when she stumbled on some old songs from the late ’80s and early ’90s she never recorded.

“I thought they were too feminist, too powerful — I wasn’t too smart back then,” said the Grammy and Oscar award winner.

So she took nine of those songs and plunked them on a new album, last year’s “One Way Out.” Her samenamed tour will stop by Pikes Peak Center on Tuesday.

Going back through the music, she remembers the questions at the heart of her old songs, and knows they’ve been answered mostly by living and allowing wisdom to grow.

“It’s like, oh, honey you don’t need

the answer, you just need to find happy,” Etheridge said. “Start taking care of yourself, and stop worrying about what others think of you. I let

all those things go.”

And she saw that what was once painful has become softer with time.

“I don’t have that pain anymore,” Etheridge said. “I’m way over that. I’m glad to be out of that relationship. It was all the fun of the song without the hurt and the pain anymore.”

That doesn’t mean her songs still don’t hold great power for her.

“There are songs that touch my heart — they all do,” she said. “They’re all personal and a part of me, but I don’t feel pain. I feel great joy on stage.”

And Etheridge knows pain. Breast cancer took its toll in her early 40s, as did the dissolution of two serious relationships that produced four children. Two of them were conceived by a longtime partner via artificial insemination using sperm from her good friend and fellow musician David Crosby. In 2020, though, one of those two children, her 21-year-old son, died of causes related to opioid addiction.

By the time he died, she’d arrived at the hard-won acceptance of her inability to save him, though it didn’t come without a whole lot of effort at trying.

“If someone is making choices that just keep driving them down, I can’t get sick enough to make a sick person healthy. No one can,” she said. “You can say I love you, I’m here, and I need to take care of myself and the rest of the family. I can’t abandon the rest of the family to try to save you when you won’t save yourself. It’s one of the hardest things in life.”

Etheridge is famous not only for her music, including the hits “I’m the Only One,” “Come to My Window,” “Ain’t It Heavy” and “I Need to Wake Up,” but for coming out as one of the first lesbian rock stars almost three decades ago. She wasn’t trying to hide her sexuality at the time, but she harbored a desire to be even more upfront about who she was. That same attitude saw her through life’s other traumatic events.

“I want people to know who they’re listening to,” she said. “Once I got cancer, I thought I won’t hide this. I’ll walk through the same way I did everything else. And as I was going through divorces. Life has shaped me. It’s made me who I am. And with the loss of my son, I’ll be truthful.”

Looking back at her old songs, she can see the growth that has taken place. Nowadays, instead of getting upset over the small things, she asks herself: “Is this going to matter in 10 days, 10 months, 10 years?”

The best thing she’s done, she said, is to be honest about who she is, and release the worry of what anybody thinks about her life or her choices.

“I’m healthy and well,” she said. “When you hide things and you’re not yourself, the first thing that will go is your health. All I can do is be an example and inspire them through example.”

Life in middle age is rich and full for the rock star, and she can see only hope, plans and growth amid the sorrow that’s also sure to sprinkle her along the way. But she’s working on new material related to the death of her son that she hopes inspires others, and is intent on fully owning her place in society.

“I’d like to speak to the passions, desires and drive of a woman who’s over 60, and how there’s still a lot of that going on,” she said. “There’s a lot of power in a full-aged woman, and I’d like to present some of that.”