The year before “Closer to Fine” hit the airwaves, Tracy Chapman had paved the way for a throwback to folk music with “Fast Car.” And so the Indigo Girls song that proclaims, “I went to the doctor / I went to the mountains / I looked to the children / I drank from the fountains,” hit number 52 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1989. “I think that our songs, at least for people who go along with us on this journey - they relate to certain parts of their lives, but they continue to listen to them,” Saliers adds about the nostalgia embedded in their sound.
The Indigo Girl with the lilting upper register, Saliers, tells The Advocate that their songs are “a combination of a bit of melancholy, a bit of nostalgia, and a bit of excitement.” And although Ray and Saliers didn’t come out as lesbians until a few years into the ’90s, they pinged as gay for a generation of queer women who had only a handful of role models that included out musicians Melissa Etheridge and k.d.
But there was something about the Indigo Girls’ music that was both refreshing and radical in all of its acoustic earnestness. The inevitable lesbian anthem was the antithesis of the synth-heavy ’80s sounds that typified alternative music of the time, like that of Depeche Mode and the Cure. Georgia natives who began harmonizing together at their high school near Atlanta, the Indigo Girls already enjoyed a robust local following when “Closer to Fine” - off of their eponymous 1988 album - hit the college radio circuit. “Even though we’re, like, old ladies now. “Our name is kind of like forever young because it’s ‘Girls.’” Ray adds. And so I think it lends itself to nostalgia in that way.” We’re sentimental, and our music is of a communal sort of ilk. “We had a moment where people were a certain age, and now they’re nostalgic for that time. “We grew up with our fans in some way, so we were all in post-college or graduating or still in college, and Emily and I had just gotten out,” Ray tells The Advocate about the memories their music evokes. It’s also the perfect summer road-tripping music. From “Kid Fears” to “Galileo” to the more recent “Happy in the Sorrow Key,” their music - infused with sincerity, hope, and their activism - is nostalgic, timeless, and vital to a queer canon. Or it could be 2018, and it’s as though you’re hearing so many of their classics for the first time thanks to the lush and whimsical arrangements on their new double album, The Indigo Girls Live With the University of Colorado Symphony.Įither way, the music of the Indigo Girls’ youth (and that of so many of its fans) evokes a simpler era before snarky rejoinders on Twitter and Instagram stories constituted feeling like part of a community. The year could be 1992, when the musical duo of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray released their breakout album, Rites of Passage, which features the song about Woolf that became a rallying cry for so many queer women of a certain age. The wind whips through your hair as you belt the refrain “Each life has its place” from the Indigo Girls’ song “Virginia Woolf.”
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With the release of a double album of their classics sung with a full symphony, the Indigo Girls talk about nostalgia, road trips, and overcoming being the brunt of the joke.Ī big orange sun dips below the horizon as you fly down the Pacific Coast Highway, over the over the Rockies, across the bridge at Lake Pontchartrain, or on any drive that constitutes a road trip.
Indigo Girls main page Coming of Age With the Indigo Girls
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