But in my own heart, the one I wear on my sleeve, I knew that I was at core an Emily: a formally skilled sentimentalist with a deft touch for finely wrought love songs, a sensualist with a penchant for the good things in life like food and literature. Like a lot of baby butches in the '90s, I wanted to be like Amy: an aloof yet accessible alpha butch whose salt-of-the-earth zeal, both political and emotional, broke a lot of guitar strings, and presumably a lot of hearts. ![]() Emily's are lyrical, jazzy and more ballad-like." Early publicity materials established an enduring impression of the contrast between them – like this bio, written three years before their self-titled 1989 album: "Amy's songs are gutsy, powerful and upbeat. The duo, which releases its 16th studio album Look Long tomorrow, has been together for 35 years. Īre you an Emily or an Amy? Few mainstream fans of the Indigo Girls would even consider that question, but for the lesbians over age 40 who love them, it's an elemental personality test. Find all Turning the Tables content here. In 2020, we will publish an occasional series looking closely at the careers of significant women in music, treasured albums or significant scenes. I’ve written better ones.Turning the Tables is NPR's ongoing multi-platform series dedicated to recentering the popular music canon on voices that have been marginalized, underappreciated, or hidden in plain sight. ![]() I think it’s a good song, maybe not a brilliant song. Obviously it was a song that landed at the right time, it was the one the record company chose to promote when there were other women with guitars getting signed. That’s what still makes it fun to play at every single show. “It’s become a real hootenanny song, every night the audience sings a verse, or whoever opened the show does one. One song they’ll always play is Saliers’ “Closer to Fine,” which remains their biggest mainstream hit. Speaking personally, I never think about who the song is going to reach when I’m writing it, we just write about the things that really move us.” A lot of them are very immediate in their emotionality and their critique of what’s going on. “We write through the experiences we’ve had with out own activism, whether its queer rights or indigenous communities. The more topical songs, she says, are usually written for personal reasons. It’s also a bit of a travelogue through relationships, wrecking them and finding your way.” So that song is about writing as a metaphor for passions in life. ![]() “I was thinking back at my college days and how it felt to be sitting in my dorm room writing five songs a day, listening endlessly to Joni Mitchell. Saliers wrote an especially resonant one with “When We Were Writers,” which looks back at the passions of a young wordsmith. But Amy is writing more ballads now and I’m writing harder songs than I ever did, so I’d say we inspire and influence each other.”Īs always, the songs on the current album take on a variety of personal and social/political issues. Even on the harder rocking songs which put me in her arena, and vice versa. Usually Amy writes about whatever she wants, I do the same thing and then we get together and arrange them, and it becomes quite melded. “You can’t really articulate how it works, but we do tend to rub off on each other. The duo writes nearly all their songs separately, with Saliers often pigeonholed as the more sensitive and Ray as the tougher one. Most people think of us as a folk band, and the acoustic elements are always there– but we’re really more of a mishmosh band. But for us, (playing rock) is the most natural thing in the world Amy has done punk albums and her main writing instrument is electric guitar. ![]() “A lot of our arrangements have to do with who is producing, and who we invite to play with us at the time. “We had the band tour all planned and ready to go before COVID hit,” Saliers said this week. They’re touring “Look Long,” the album they released in March 2020. But there will be some of that when the duo of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray hit Medford’s Chevalier Theater on Thursday and Saturday, on their first full-band tour in many years. Think of the Indigo Girls, and loud electric rock probably doesn’t come to mind.
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