There are many sides to out singer-songwriter Melissa Ferrick, and on her latest album, The Other Side (Right On) she explores a few. Movement is a central theme on the disc, and you will find her digging a hole in her backyard on “Beijing”, floating and waiting for the tide on the title track, swimming and diving on “Bad Bad Girl” and generally continuing her ongoing quest for love that lasts (“Streetlight”, “I Give Up” and “Anything Anywhere”). As part of a promotion for her new album, Ferrick recently spoke with the Gay & Lesbian Times about heartbreak, love and movement.

Melissa Ferrick: I hope I find a really gorgeous woman, that I fall completely and madly in love with. I hope I find a sense of peace within myself — about not always wondering if there’s something better around the corner. All those things. Just a sense of being settled inside my skin. That’s what I’m looking for.

MF: I’m from about 40 miles northeast of Boston, which you know already. I’m originally from a town called Ipswich. I currently live in Newburyport. It’s a port city, so I’m right on a river. It’s really close to New Hampshire; I can pretty much throw a rock. I like where I’m from. I lived in Los Angeles for seven years, [but] there’s something about living in a place that changes [seasonally] that’s really important to me. And the people, the blue-collar aspect of where I live, and the realness of it. And the fact that people aren’t wondering if you’re looking at them when you walk down the street. I really like that. It’s good for me to be in a solid, kind of grounded place. Also my family all live here, so whenever I’m home I see a lot of my nieces and nephews, and my parents and my grandparents live there. It’s just really good for me to come home and get grounded again.

MF: Chicago. I love Chicago. I would live there. Chicago or New York would be the only two other places probably in the United States that I would live. I also really like Toronto a lot. But I’m not Canadian. It’s very difficult to get dual residency, but I’ve thought about Canada because I do really well up there with my music. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

MF: And “Let’s Fly”, from Listen Hard is about Chicago: “Takes 55 to Lake Shore Drive.”

MF: Yeah. Of course the fear is that I become the “road girl” songwriter. I hate that.

MF: Yeah, exactly. I try not to do it too much. “Nebraska”, for instance, that one came out of nowhere. And I really liked that I was able to describe a feeling with a state. I think that one of the things that really inspired me in writing that song was that I had been watching the documentary on U2, when they made the Joshua Tree record with Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, about making an album that actually reflected a terrain, which was the desert. I just thought that was so interesting. I remember I had watched that probably three or four times because I’m a huge Daniel Lanois and U2 fan. I was re-watching the interviews with The Edge, and his guitar sounds, and how he tries to create sounds that look like something or feel like a place. I thought, that’s so interesting to approach a song in that way, and I just felt so barren in love — and so wishing I was in love and wishing that my heart was filled with that kind of feeling all the time. And Nebraska, as a state, takes a long time to drive through. And of course there’s the classic Bruce Springsteen album. And I was driving in Florida, and there was this road called Nebraska Avenue, and it kind of seemed like everywhere I went I was seeing the word Nebraska — Nebraska, Nebraska! And I wrote that song. As far as Beijing goes — I’ve actually been to Beijing before when I toured China when I was 16 with the Youth Wind Ensemble. It’s the first place that I fell in love with a woman, in China, my first girlfriend. There are a lot of great memories of kissing on the Great Wall of China, and having sex in hotel rooms over rice paddies and stuff like that. When I wrote that song I was listening to Dave Matthews’ solo record Some Devil. There’s a song on there that’s got a really similar riff, but much slower, at the beginning. I love that song so much, so I tried to figure out how to play it. As I was trying to figure out how to play Dave’s song, I wrote my own song because then I realized it wasn’t the same song. And so I wrote “Beijing”. I also thought about Dan Bern, too — about how he will start to write a song about something and then he’ll just tangent off until suddenly you’re in a cafeteria, then you’re in a high-rise, then you’re at a coffee shop, and then you’re at a bar and by the end of the song, yeah, there is some kind of relevancy to it.

MF: Maybe I’m just such a die-hard romantic; it’s disgusting, really. I want, so much, to find the kind of love where I’m as in love as the other person is with me. I look at all these relationships around me, and I don’t see that kind of even love between the two — it always seems like one person is more in love with the other person. And especially in queer culture, and in gay culture, there’s such a lack of stability in long-term relationships. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that we’re not allowed to marry, and so our culture has accepted moving from one partner to the other, or the “lesbian U-Haul”, or the gay male bathhouse scene; that it’s OK to move from one person to another. That’s kind of been instilled in us. I find that to be so sad, and yet, I find myself just being another one of those people, where I do go from these three-year relationships to another three-year relationship, and the whole time I’m in one, after the first year, I know that I shouldn’t be there anymore. I’m looking to find that person I’m supposed to be with forever, and I’m sure it comes from childhood — wanting the prince to come pick you up, everything’s supposed to be wonderful and your stomach is supposed to sink every time you kiss. I really want that, and I think that I’m holding out for it. Maybe it’s stupid to hold out for it, maybe you are supposed to settle, maybe being really great friends is enough — all these things I hear — but it’s not enough for me. I really want to feel as passionately about another person as I do about what I do, about my music, or feel as committed. I have felt that way. I’ve been in love twice, and I know that I’m capable of being that invested emotionally.

MF: I think it affects another person’s ability to believe that it is possible with me. Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t go out with me because I travel so much. So there’s a lot of heartbreak in that. There is definitely a couple people in my life that I have felt the possibility of this kind of love with, and that hasn’t been able to even be explored because of my life and my lifestyle. That’s really sad to me, and I think that’s becoming more and more apparent now, that I’m not even given the chance because I travel so much, and it seems that with the more visibility that I’ve gained in the last couple years, there’s also that factor coming into it: Going out with somebody that everyone’s looking at every night. That’s sad for me. That’s too bad.

Melissa Ferrick’s new CD is The Other Side. She performs at McCabes in Santa Monica on June 25 and at Largo in Los Angeles on June 26.