"When We Were Writers," from Look Long, looks back with a mix of fondness and maybe even a little mortification at some of their youthful pretensions as would-be scribes. Their young hearts swelled with music, while their eager sentimentality was stoked by Literature with a capital "L." Indeed, their catalogue is replete with songs alluding to literary personages like " Virginia Woolf" and the poet Frank Stanford ("Three Hits"). The two met in elementary school, but didn't start harmonizing until the dawn of the Reagan era in 1981, when they were both in the choir at Shamrock High School. Ray and Saliers, or Amy and Emily (as their true fans refer to them with a loving ease and familiarity) have been making music together since they were young teens in Decatur, Ga. "Are you on fire from the years? What would you give for your kid fears?" A deeper dive into the Emily/Amy dialectic, the heart of what makes the Indigo Girls' music so compelling with its wide swerves between gentle, lovelorn balladry and the anguished yawps of activist souls struggling to be born (at least in their earliest records) gives us insight into what female friendship - what lesbian friendship in particular - can offer to our divided worlds. In other words, the Indigo Girls have, with music as their conduit, accomplished the very best of what both queer theory and queer politics always aspired to achieve. What the Indigo Girls' story as longtime collaborators and friends who practice a healthy and gregarious exogamy with other romantic partners, musicians, producers and political comrades models for us is an enduring, communitarian project of world-building. Just because we are gay doesn't always make us gay for each other. This couldn't be further from the truth, driven as it is by the slightly phobic assumption that anyone of the same sex will do for anyone who identifies as a lesbian. Nevertheless, I'm constantly surprised by the number of listeners - my own wife included - who assume the two must have dated each other at least once in their lifetimes.
Such information doesn't bear repeating for those of us who have carried their music like touchstones for most of our gay adult lives. But even though Emily and Amy have been together forever, they are not, nor have they ever been, romantic partners. All have aspired to hit their deceptively simple countermelodies and harmonic intervals so locked-in that people assume they could only be achieved by a romantic couple. Generations of guitar-strumming camp counselors and rootsy stoners of all ages and genders, as well as the global Sapphists who loved them from the beginning, have sung along to the Indigo Girls' expansive songbook by heart. During the festival's original run between 19, the duo acquired a reputation for being the most convivial of the Lilith brood by encouraging jam sessions, group-singalongs and backstage card games among artists as spiritually distinct as Sheryl Crow and Sinéad O'Connor. Most commonly known for their modest chart hits peppered throughout the 1990s, like "Closer to Fine," "Galileo" and "Shame on You," the Indigo Girls were a cardinal constellation in the Lilith Fair cosmology.
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