2 Photos
Indigo Girls, perhaps the most enduring and prolific folk rock duo to come out of the ’80s, are headed to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Friday, April 28, to play music from their partnership’s 15 studio albums, as well as selections from their solo careers.
Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met in elementary school outside Decatur, Georgia, and started to play music together in high school. During their college days, they took the name Indigo Girls, and they released their first single, “Crazy Game,” in 1985. Their self-titled major-label debut came in 1989, including the hit single “Closer to Fine” and earning them the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording.
More than three decades after their first recording, they continue to play, record and tour together. Ms. Saliers said their gratitude level for being able to do so for so long is off the charts. But, to what do they owe the partnership’s longevity?
Speaking last month from Oregon, where she was on tour with Ms. Ray, Ms. Saliers explained that it comes down to striking the right balance, and making sure they never get bored.
“We’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I can tell you it is a really good balance of time spent together and time spent apart,” Ms. Saliers said. “We have plenty of things outside of Indigo Girls that enrich our individual lives, and that is the secret to our longevity.”
They both still live in Georgia, but while Ms. Saliers calls Atlanta home, Ms. Ray lives an hour and a half outside the city—or, as Ms. Saliers puts it, “She lives up in the woods.”
Outside of their career together, Ms. Saliers said, “We’re like family. We love each other. We respect each other. We’re completely yin and yang. We’re opposite personalities, opposite voices—different ways of writing, expressing ourselves—but at our very core is the same values. That’s kind of the long and short of it.”
They bring many types of instruments on tour—guitars, ukuleles, mandolins, banjos, a dulcimer and a buzuki—and change what they’re playing between every song.
“I’m not like a virtuoso banjo player or uke player, or anything,” Ms. Saliers admitted. “I mostly play them like I would play a guitar. But those different textural sounds bring different songs, so they help me write different kinds of songs.”
She added that, if she didn’t mix it up, “I would be bored, and I would think a listener would be bored to just hear acoustic guitar all the time.”
They are sure to never go on the road for more than two weeks at a time.
“The longest we ever did in our entire career was six weeks, and we didn’t get along for the first time ever,” Ms. Saliers recalled.
They are of the same mind that it is important to go home frequently and spend time with family, so they decided to never do a long tour again and never skip a family vacation, even if it means sacrificing opportunities like big gigs and festivals.
“What happens is that you end up touring throughout the whole year, rather than just get it all done in three months,” Ms. Saliers said. “But it’s not worth our sanity, even to save money and be practical about things.”
They also aim to “always keep things fresh,” by writing new material, participating in events that have meaning to them—they both value activism—playing in different types of venues with different opening bands, and picking a new set list every performance. And “never play a song we don’t want to play,” Ms. Saliers added to the list.
This month’s show in Westhampton Beach comes at a turning point in Ms. Saliers’s music career: She has finally decided to record a solo album.
“Amy’s got six solo records,” Ms. Saliers pointed out. “She’s been playing solo for many, many years now. I just never had a desire to. I liked what we had been doing as Indigo Girls. But then I just got this part of my musical inner life that I haven’t brought out yet. So I found the right producer to help me bring it out, and now I will be undertaking a lot more solo performances.”
Her producer is Lyris Hung, who regularly joins the Indigo Girls on tour to play violin and sing harmonies with them.
The album will diverge from what her fans are accustomed to, Ms. Saliers advised. “I’m more known as a poetic narrative writer, so there are going to be some songs that are different for people.”
She describes her typical areas of songwriting as concerning interpersonal relationships and travelology—the places they’ve been.
Ms. Saliers is careful not to play all of her new songs in public before she gets them just the way she likes them, because she wants listeners’ first impressions to be of the final versions. “The version that people hear first is the version that people love the best, forever-ever,” she explained. “But I have been playing one or two of the songs consistently during Indigo Girls shows from the new record, and I’ll be doing that in Westhampton too.”
Indigo Girls have a new album planned together as well: They recorded a performance in Boulder with the Colorado University Symphony Orchestra last month.
“For the past several years, we toured around North America and played shows with symphonies in major cities and then in smaller markets, so we have this group of 25 songs or so that have been arranged by classical music arrangers,” Ms. Saliers noted.
It’s just one more way Indigo Girls keep it fresh, and make sure neither they nor their fans get bored.
Indigo Girls play Friday, April 28, at 8 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $66 and $81. Call 631-288-1500 or visit whbpac.org.
on Apr 18, 2017