When Sophie B. Hawkins's controversial song "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" burst onto the American pop culture scene in 1992, singing openly about attraction to another woman wasn't exactly a recipe for success in the music industry.

Neither was publicly acknowledging your attraction to men and women. It was still a few months before Melissa Etheridge would come out, a few years before Jill Sobule's 1995 song "I Kissed a Girl" would become a pop hit, and a decade before bisexuality (or faux-bisexuality) would became the marketing tool of choice for many female pop singers.

But Hawkins did both, and with a single line ("I lay by the ocean making love to her with visions clear"), "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" made history as the first Top 5 American pop song explicitly about a woman's love--or lust--for another woman.

13 years later, the 30-something former New Yorker is a successful singer-songwriter with four albums (Tongues and Tails, Whales, Timbre, and her most recent, Wilderness), a Grammy nomination, and one of the longest-running singles in adult pop chart history (for her 1996 hit song "As I Lay Me Down") under her belt, with a fifth album in the works and a busy tour schedule that keeps her playing at concerts and Pride events in and outside the country, including a recent tour in Australia.

But tonight, she's going to revisit her past by performing the song that started it all on the final episode of the NBC reality show Hit Me Baby One More Time, a one-hour program featuring veteran music hit-makers who will each perform their greatest hit and a popular contemporary song in a competition to win $25,000 to donate to a charity of their choice. Along with Hawkins, tonight's episode features performances by Wang Chung, Cameo, Irene Cara, and Howard Jones.

Does Hawkins mind playing the song that first made her famous all those years ago? "I can’t play that song enough," Hawkins says via a phone interview this week. "Pretty much everyone knows it, so the audience really gets into it," she says. "It’s really a beautiful anthem, and it’s layered. What it is to me is different than what it is to someone else."

But when it was released in the early 90s, Hawkins's then-music label, Sony, had mixed reactions to the song, and especially to Hawkins' erotically-charged video for it. "The record label never told me what was really going on," explained Hawkins. "First they said they loved [the video], the next day they said I had to re-shoot it. They're not really doing it on purpose, but in such a big corporation, everyone has a different agenda. Their main agenda, though, is to keep their job, so no one wants to tell the artist what's really going on."

Hawkins made another version of the video after her original one was banned by MTV, a video which she describes as "totally boring. I’m wearing a flannel shirt, and I’ve got this bullshit band. As if the band had anything to do with it." Both versions are available on the 1996 documentary Cream Will Rise, which explores Hawkins's rise to fame and the story of the conflict between who she was and who Sony wanted her to be, which ultimately led Hawkins to walk away in the late 90s and start her own label, Trumpet Swan Records.

"I thought my career was over," Hawkins says of her decision to strike out on her own. "Everyone told me 'you're a fool, it’s over' and I thought, 'well then, it’s over for the right reasons, because I took a stand.' They were burying me alive, and I wouldn't be buried alive again."

"I would say "don’t you guys know I’m a songwriter, I’m not just a singer? Can’t I play my guitar? Can’t I play my banjo? What’s wrong with you people?' They wanted to take the instruments away, and I was always so frustrated that the women I admired got to be artists, and I didn’t, because I was with a label that wanted to hide that part of me. They were scared of that part of me, and all men have been."

Just as she has insisted on defying categorization as an artist, playing music that incorporates sounds from a diversity of genres, including pop, jazz, folk and gospel, Hawkins has resisted conventional labels around her sexuality. "I have a real rebellion against being defined by people," Hawkins admits.

She made waves early in her career when she came out as "omnisexual," which Hawkins explains as "my sexuality is not identified with someone else’s gender."