Sharing Their True Colors...Indigo Girls
By Alan Sculley
From Music Revue, November 1997
(Magazine courtesy of Snoopy in Grand Rapids)
For years, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls have been trying to escape the perception of merely being a folk act. Still, a perception continues to exist--at least within the music industry--that the Indigo Girls are folk and that they possess only a cult following. This despite a previous CD, the 1994 release Swamp Ophelia, that racked up 1.5 million in sales.
Saliers does admit to some frustration over the limitations some attach to the Indigo Girls and their image, but at the same time she stresses the fact that she refuses to worry about how her group is marketed and perceived.
"I really don't know why that image has lingered," Saliers said. "I think there's a certain amount of prejudice against us in the industry. I don't know if it's because we're women with a strong voice, or we don't particularly live up to cultural standards of how women should act or look or be. The music is kind of emotional and vulnerable. I think that rubs some people the wrong way. Some people just don't like it. They just don't like the earnestness, so that affects, you know, the media creates a perception of what a band is like...I think if you asked any of our fans, they'd have a completely different perception from what the media creates. But you know, whatever. To me I just feel grateful for how our career has gone so far, and our fans are tremendously loyal. We fall flat on our faces experimenting with new musical stuff and they're still there for us. So whatever perceptions the media is going to create, they're just going to go ahead and do it. And meanwhile, we'll just go on and be what we are--reality."
It's not as if efforts haven't been made to redirect perceptions of the Indigo Girls' music. The band's label, Epic Records, has specifically focused its marketing efforts for the duo's seventh and latest studio CD, Shaming of the Sun, on broadening the Indigo Girls' audience.
And while Saliers stresses that she doesn't concern herself with how the Indigo Girls are marketed, she says she and Ray have made a conscious attempt to diversify their sound.
Swamp Ophelia, had a few tunes such as 'Fugitive' and 'Touch Me Fall' that brought out a decidedly harder rocking sound. Shaming of the Sun, meanwhile, takes that spirit of musical adventure to a whole new level.
The folk element that has been a part of the Indigo Girls' sound since Saliers and Ray formed their duo in the mid-1980s, while attending Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is still present on melodic acoustic-based songs like 'Get Out The Map', and 'Don't Give that Girl a Gun'. Frequently, however, Saliers, Ray and a host of backing musicians (including returning collaborators such as bassist Sara Lee and drummer Jerry Marotta) stretch their artistic wings.
'Scooter Boys' is a brisk, edgy rocker featuring plenty of electric instrumentation. On 'Shame On You', Saliers mixes banjo and bouzouki with electric guitars and a solid rocking beat. The ballad, 'Hey Kind Friend', adds horns, a whistle, cello and other exotic touches to the acoustic foundation of the tune.
"The intent was basically just to be free, to experiment," Saliers said. "I don't think we set out saying we're going to make this record and put all this stuff on it and definitely make it different from what we do. I think we just try to keep things fresh, you don't rely on stuff you've done in the past, which means you're trying new things. And Amy and I over the past couple of years have tried to learn new instruments. We've added mandolin and banjo and piano and bouzouki and lots more electric guitar and things like that. That just came about from wanting to grow. And basically you get into the studio, and Dave Leonard is a whiz of an engineer. And we just went around the studio having fun, picking up instruments and inviting people like Ulali to sing on the tracks, and using loops for the first time and he glued it all together. At the end of the record it was like 'Oh my God," this is the the record we made. who would have thought? I never could have set out to do that in the way that it came out."
"Some people might not like this record as much because there's more on it," she added. "You're going to have your fans who always want you to do your first record over and over and over again. But the artists that I look up to particularly are the artists who weren't afraid to do different things, like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, for example."
Shaming of the Sun also shows a direct influence of the political activities of Saliers and Ray. This fall Saliers, Ray and their band launched the second edition of their "Honor the Earth" tour. The 20-date outing, which included stops at several Indian reservations, is designed to focus attention on Native American issues such as dumping nuclear waste on Indian lands. A similar tour in 1995 raised $300,000 for a variety of grassroots Native American and environmental groups.
Saliers said the knowledge she and Ray gained on that first tour flavored the music 'Burn All the Letters' and 'Shed Your Skin' are among the new songs that have distinct touches of Native American music) and the topical edge of many of the lyrics on Shaming of the Sun
"There's no doubt that it had a direct influence on some of the music on this record," Saliers said of the first "Honor the Earth" tour. "A song like 'Scooter Boys' deals specifically with what happened through colonization, and what's happened to indigenous peoples. And then a song like 'Burn All The Letters', where it started out as a love song, it becomes this political song about the government watching you and somebody's always watching. And that came from going into these Indian communities during the '70s and the AIM movement where Indian people were just trying to take back their communities and their livelihoods in the face of all the oppression they'd suffered and encroachment from outside forces, and the United States government setting up puppet Indian governments that were corrupt and things like that, and the way that our government tried to end, eventually did infiltrate and sort of broke apart a movement like AIM. That made me think a lot about what governments can do and how they try to control people. Those are things we learned specifically on that tour and continued to learn about. You can't help it. You get to a certain point in life where if you're a songwriter you have to write about those things because they're burning in you."
Some artists are hesitant to mix politics with music, but Saliers feels it's a natural element in the Indigo Girls music.
"I think no matter what Amy or I do for a living, even if we were doing something else, we would still be politcally active in this way, just because it just comes from a personal place," Saliers said. "And the fact that this is what we do for a living, it becomes a tool that we can use to effect some change, if possible, or at least leran amongst other people. The fact that it happens to be music to me is just a beautiful gift on top of that because it's such a great sharing experience. But you know, I think even if we didn't have this kind of venue to help promote these ideas or share them with people, we'd be doing it in another context. So it has to do with how we feel as human beings, and the fact that we're musicians has just helped it. It's a bigger forum."
Native American issues, Saliers said, became a natural point of interest, especially once she and Ray began to learn about problems being faced on America's reservations.
"Amy has always been interest in Native American issues, even when she was a kid," Saliers said. "She'll tell you when people were playing cowboys and Indians, she always wanted to be an Indian. She felt a strong affinity. Beyond that, early on in our career we did stuff for Greenpeace, which obviously is an environmental group. But then at an Earth Day show in 1991, Amy met Winona LaDuke. She's one of the women on the campaign board. She lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and she's been a very effective political and social leader. She ran as vice president with Ralph Nader in the past presidential election. And they started asking how they could put their heads together and how we could all work together to you know, bring to light some of these environmental issues and the Native American issues and the indigenous peoples' issues. Then we started to learn about these small communities that were fighting these huge corporations, and also about the injustices that were being done against their land and their ways of life and how respectful their ways of life were, well it just solidified our belief that it's going to be indigenous people who lead the way for saving the earth. That's how Amy and I feel."
Saliers, however, realizes there is a limit over how much activism to inject into the Indigo Girls' music. And while Shaming of the Sun is the duo's most political album, it retains a balance between topical and personal subjects.
"For me personally I like a mix," Saliers said. "I like some politics and social comment in music and then I still like a good love song, like a well written pop song, that sort of thing. So I wouldn't want everything to become hard core political musically speaking anyway. so I keep my mind on that."