I don't want the only people enjoying it to be people who are sentimental about the record. "Our mission is to just play really well. "I think the majority of the people there won't be big enough Indigo Girls fans to know that we're playing a record from start to finish," she says. "If you're a gay person who is also a 'fashionista,' you're going to do better than a gay person who is masculine and butch."Īnd though she's looking forward to looking out at a sea of young faces-or as she calls them, "the people that really don't see those lines"-when she and Saliers take the stage to play some of their most iconic songs next weekend, she won't allow their legacy to dictate the performance's success. "The coverage you get when you're gay is so tied into sexism," she says. I know it's hard to believe that we would have been scared to even say we were gay, but we were." And, according to Ray, it's a form of discrimination that has its own hierarchy. "Until the people that are coming up now are the ones that are holding the power," she begins again, "I think things are still going to be a little status quo. And they have to die before we can, they have to die off." she trails off. "The gatekeepers for the majority of the media industry are still white men. Social strides notwithstanding, Ray still insists that "there's still a lot that needs to happen" within the industry to which she has dedicated her life's work. "I mean, gay women playing folk music is not, like, the most hippest thing in the world." "We would have talked about in '93, but it would have been only in the context of someone that was interested in talking about it for a positive reason," she says. But personal growth aside, there remains a cultural constant that has plagued the duo since their first foray into the mainstream. Since releasing Ophelia at age 30, Ray has gone on to release nine additional albums with Saliers, five solo efforts, and become a mom to daughter Ozilline Graydon with partner Carrie Schrader. It's a cultural thing, a cosmos, as much as anything else." "When you're in college, all your college friends come out and then after college, your life is like the music scene. "We started so young that there wasn't that pressure that you might feel when you start a band in your thirties and everybody is like, 'We've got to make it.' It was very, 'Let's just go have a good time,'" she recalls. "The record's got some great stuff on it, but I was still figuring out some things about songwriting."ĭevotees may protest, but in its B- review at the time, Entertainment Weekly called out the band's "college-poetry lyrics and wandering melodies" as the element that was "keeping them from becoming Indigo Women." If the themes feel girlish at times, perhaps it's owed to the fact that the Georgia natives began performing together in high school. "Some of my songs are not that great on it," she says. I actually had to go online and see how people played it." And though it's been an exercise in nostalgia, revisiting old material is not without its downsides. "Some of the stuff I had to go back in and figure out how to play. "It's been pretty interesting to re-learn the record start to finish," she says with a laugh. But for Ray, whose speaking voice has the same metallic timbre that lends a sonic undertow to the folk duo's lilting melodies, the demand for beloved songs such as "Power of Two," "Least Complicated," and "Touch Me Fall" came as a surprise. When Amy Ray and Emily Saliers take the stage next Saturday at the inaugural Eaux Claires music festival-Justin Vernon of Bon Iver's antidote to overwrought, overcommercialized concerts-they will do something they haven't done in years: play their seminal Swamp Ophelia album in its entirety. It's that we loved each other well"-"Power of Two," Indigo Girls
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