Amy Ray and Emily Saliers talk about their extraordinary 30-year creative collaboration as the music duo, Indigo Girls.
Amy:
You said that?
Emily:
I can’t believe I said that.
Amy:
That’s a great quote.
Emily:
Yeah. Are you sure I said that?
Amy:
Yeah. That was good, Emily.
Emily:
It must have been one of my more loose.
Amy:
You should be a writer. No, you should be a writer. That’s really good.
Emily:
One of my more lucid moments.
Speaker 3:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, the Indigo Girls talk about their long career in music and the obstacles that are still there.
Amy:
If women are never given a chance to be in those spaces, we cannot get better.
Emily:
If you don’t play into the patriarchal, heterosexual mode, you’re not going to get as far as a straight woman.
Debbie:
Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met in elementary school, but they didn’t really get to know each other until high school when they started performing music together. They both went off to separate colleges and then they started playing together again and decided to call themselves the Indigo Girls. Their first full length album came out in 1987 and they have been making music together ever since. They have each done a lot of different things on their own, but their extraordinary creative collaboration has endured. They join me now to talk about it and all the wondrous things they’re doing. Amy and Emily, welcome to Design Matters.
Emily:
Thank you.
Amy:
Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Emily:
Yeah. We’re excited about this.
Debbie:
Emily, you are the daughter of a well-known Methodist pastor and church musician. He also taught at Emory in Candler School of Theology. You’ve said that your whole upbringing was saturated in theological discussion and music. What kind of music were you introduced to back then?
Emily:
Well, as a young child, I sang in kids church choirs and sang in a children’s choir, the Callanwolde, the Young Singers of Callanwolde in Atlanta. Both my sisters and I did that when we were very young. And then in the house, my parents listened to a lot of jazz and a lot of classical music. They weren’t really into the songs like folk music or rock music or any of that that I came to know and love. We had a turntable in the living room and I’d get up on Saturday mornings, there was always either jazz or particularly classical music going on. Then of course, all the girls picked a lesson, music lesson, and we all sang. We went to concerts. Our household literally was saturated. Then my dad, he’s been writing sacred music for a long time.
Debbie:
And you wrote a book together actually.
Emily:
We did. I was trepidatious about writing a book connected to organized religion in any way. We walked each other through that. Basically, I consider all music in a space, sacred music. And so we sort of broke down the barriers between Saturday night and Sunday morning and what was happening in a spiritual sense. When Amy and I played till 3:00 AM at a bar with a bunch of locals and an eclectic mix of musicians and what was happening on Sunday morning and how music can inform your life and inspire you and deepen your understanding of life and your spiritual path, really, in any context.
Debbie:
Amy, quite a few of your relatives were also Methodist ministers. You spent quite a lot of time at church. You’ve said that there were Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, and Friday night youth group, all at the church. You also went to church camp for five years. There was music around you as well. But from what I understand, you were dreaming of becoming David Cassidy, the popular teen idol on the hit show The Partridge Family. Was that because he was the one that got all the girls?
Amy:
That’s a great question. Yeah. I mean, probably not my finest musical taste hour, but I still have a very big place in my heart for The Partridge Family. I don’t know. You know, back then, I think I definitely pictured myself as David Cassidy instead of wanting to be with David Cassidy, which is I guess the first sign of lesbianism. But yeah, I just loved these young rock idols, basically kiddie rock, I guess. And so I would pose in front of the mirror and have a little microphone and pretend like I was singing and stuff. You know, just kid. I mean, I was in second and third and fourth grade. Then I started listening to just normal music.
Debbie:
I think The Partridge Family is normal music though.
Amy:
Well, great pop songs. I mean, some of the greatest songwriting, for sure. Those writers were amazing. The show was so fun and stuff. David Cassidy was great, great performer.
Debbie:
Absolutely. I had more of a crush, looking back on it, I didn’t know it at the time but I think I had more of a crush on Susan Dey who played Laurie Partridge. I also liked Bobby Sherman more than David Cassidy, but that’s a whole separate. We can have a whole separate podcast done.
Amy:
Yeah. That was the question of like, do you like The Who or the Rolling Stones? It’s like, do you like Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy? Yeah, a patriarchal centered discussion for sure.
Debbie:
Absolutely. Now, technically you first encountered each other when Emily first moved to Decatur, Georgia and began attending Laurel Ridge Elementary School. Emily, you entered sixth grade. Amy, you were in fifth. But you didn’t really become friends until later. But I do believe that there was a rather important first impression that you had of each other in terms of music as well. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Emily:
Well, you know, up until a certain point in life, you don’t really commingle with someone in a different grade than you are. But it was pretty small school and I was aware of Amy because she was the other girl who played guitar. I came into Laurel Ridge when my family moved to Georgia and I played guitar. It was just an awareness of that. For me, initially, nothing beyond that. But it was enough to have me curious in Amy from the outset.
Debbie:
Now, what motivated you both to pick up the guitar specifically as opposed to any other instrument?
Amy:
Well, for me, we took piano when we were young. It was like a rule in our house that you took piano for three years.
Debbie:
That’s a good rule. I wish I had that rule.
Amy:
Yeah, it was, it was actually. We did it. But it wasn’t that transportable and I wasn’t that great at it. I was listening to my older sister’s records from like Woodstock and stuff, you know, that hippie era and folk music. I wanted to play Neil Young songs basically, you know? And so I thought, okay, I’ll learn guitar. One of my sisters played guitar. I think maybe both of them even did, but it just seemed like a great, more kind of a cool instrument. I played flute for a little while, but I wasn’t very good at that at all. I took the YMCA up the street and I was like, this is definitely cool. I think I was exposed at church youth group, the youth ministers always had a guitar. We were like a singing folky Methodist church. So there was a ton of that around at church camp all the time. There was always guitars, kumbaya, all that. Yeah, it just seemed cool and a thing to do.
Debbie:
So you are a proper musician? You know how to read music, you know how to do all of those scales and things.
Amy:
Not like Emily. I can pick out a piano song. I have trouble with a bass clef, but I’m learning it because my child is taking piano so I’m relearning all that stuff. I mean, I know a little bit, but not like Emily. I didn’t retain a lot, let’s just say that. I mean, I took jazz. I took so many classes and I just never, never practiced enough. Let that be a lesson, I guess.
Debbie:
Emily, I understand you were able to pick out the chords of Joni Mitchell’s songs as you were growing up. That’s pretty difficult.
Emily:
Well, until I discovered her actual tunings, I was flailing at them, but I was so obsessed with her that I just had to play her songs so I just found my way around. But then I got, I think it was For the Roses songbook. I looked at those guitar tunings and that just like, from then on, I’ve been also a big fan of different alternative guitar tunings. But Joni Mitchell, she just was like the light of my musical life and path, and so I was obsessed with her.
Debbie:
Yeah. I still am, all these years later.
Emily:
Me too.
Debbie:
I still am. I’m so happy that she’s getting so much of the acclaim she deserves. I think she’s one of, if not, the best singer songwriter of the 20th century.
Emily:
I agree with you.
Debbie:
Anyway, your older siblings were in school together and they were in some plays and musicals. At 15 and 16 years old, you found yourself in chorus together. And Amy, I read that when you first started singing together, you thought your head was going to explode and realized that Emily was your musical soulmate.
Amy:
Yeah, I think I did write that. Debbie, you love that, don’t you? You’re smiling so big.
Debbie:
And that you were inconsolable. I read that as well, that you were inconsolable.
Amy:
I was like, this is it for me. I found my path. I don’t think Emily felt the same way, but that’s the way it is. I was a year younger too so I was very in awe of the older person. Emily disputes this, but she was very popular in high school. Maybe I have a romanticized vision, but she disputes that. But there was a certain magnetism already and so I was like, whoa, and the sound of harmony and someone that could just sing harmony to anything. It was a whole new thing for me, because I’d been in church choir and chorus and my sisters and my dad sings and everything. But I hadn’t experienced the effect of singing with someone in harmony next to you that’s just a single person. It’s a very different sound than a choir. Because in the choir, it’s like you could open your mouth and nothing comes out and the choir can’t tell basically.
Amy:
When it’s just you two, it’s like these overtones are created and crazy things that feel so magical. I think for me, I was like, wow, this is it. This is what I want to do. This is the person I’m going to sing with and I want to do it all the time. I didn’t care about making money. I was like, I just want to do this. It wasn’t about fame. I wasn’t thinking about the way you think now because things are so accessible with YouTube and people that become instantly famous. At the time, we didn’t have any of that so I was just, all I could think about was every day I want to do this. That was the important thing. Right. Which I think is good, because look at where we are. I think it’s good to have that perspective of something that you just love. That was my response. You’re accurate. I don’t know where you get your info, but it’s good.
Debbie:
Emily, was it the same for you? I got the sense as I was researching your histories together and separately that it wasn’t quite the same epiphany.
Amy:
It’s okay.
Emily:
No, not the way Amy describes it for her, but what it was was the most fun thing I was doing and we became really good friends in high school. I mean we used to quote lyrics to each other. We loved The Last Time I Saw Richard by Joni Mitchell. Remember Amy, we used to get so heavy into lyrics?
Amy:
Yeah, signed them in our yearbooks.
Emily:
Signed them in our yearbooks. We were best friends at that point in high school, very soul connected. But just playing those songs together was fun. We both picked songs that we liked to do and then we were really encouraged by our AP English teacher, Mr. Ellis Loyd. And so he set us up with like, “Well, why don’t you learn some songs and you can play for the class?” But I have never in my life, Amy, she’s so in touch with what’s going on. She has vision for things and she always knew what to play next and what to do. I mean, I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, but I’m a little bit head in the clouds just trying to figure out what’s going on around me. And so for me it was just like, wow, this is really, really fun. Amy really propelled us in terms of the next steps to take. But I also, I wanted to be an English teacher.
Debbie:
I know, I want to talk about that.
Emily:
Then I was like, when I was 11, I was taking classical guitar. I was just into a different kind of music really until I became more co-rooted in the music that Amy was turning me onto. You know? And then when we start, instead of learning a song by The Beatles or Carole King or James Taylor, we would learn a song by Everything but the Girl or maybe Lloyd Cole or something like that. She just opened my world. But I was never a visionary with what I wanted to do with the rest of my life except this distant thing of being an English teacher. And then we went to different colleges at first. It was like, okay, well, whatever happens, happens.
Debbie:
After graduation from high school, Emily, you enrolled at Tulane University. You were an English major intending to go on to grad school and become a teacher. Amy, you moved to Nashville a year later also to study English. I’m also an English major. I joke that we have degrees in reading. But you studied English and religion at Vanderbilt University, neither were particularly good experiences for you. You decided to come back. Independently without realizing that you both applied to, got into, and then decided to go to Emory, what was happening that year that you both didn’t enjoy where you were?
Amy:
You know, Emily was a freshman at Tulane and I was a senior in high school. I just remember going to see Emily and playing some together on Bourbon Street and seemed like a pretty amazing environment. So I was psyched to go to college. My sister had gone to Vanderbilt in Nashville too. She had worked at this cool record store. I was really, looked up to my sister. When she was at Vandy, she lived in the philosophy dorm and everybody played Dungeons & Dragons and listened to cool music. I was like, that’s where I want to go to school. But I got up there and I got a job at that record store. It was called The Great Escape. Walking in my sister’s footprints. It had just shifted so quickly from the school that would have Black Flag come play a concert to everything is all about sororities and fraternities and toned and like polite society and very kind of racist.
Amy:
It was like the Reagan era was starting. You could either be a completely stoned out person and not be involved at all or you had to be completely engaged in all that stuff. I’m in between all that. I’m a very engaged person. I love student government. I love being an organizer. I love all that stuff but it was so heavy-handed in the elite society kind of moneyed way that there was a big division between the international students and the other students, and the rich students and the poor students, and sororities and non sororities. I had a girlfriend. I had fallen in love my senior year in high school. She was at UGA.
Amy:
We were constantly having trouble. She didn’t really want to be gay. I was thoroughly gay. I hated myself. I was so self-loathing and I was so depressed. I mean, I hated myself. I wanted to be anyone but who I was, but I’m also constantly tempted by all these fun things like working at the record store and playing music and playing racketball. And so I was like a weird combination of things and my head was spinning. I couldn’t make it work. I was like, I just got to leave this place because there’s too many… I mean, my favorite things were, honestly my religion classes were amazing. My English classes were amazing. I had a therapist that I discovered who helped me out of a really dark time. And I love, love, love working at that record store so much.
Amy:
All that stuff was not enough to keep me even keeled. I was like, I got to go home to Atlanta and just be around my family, be in a scene where at least I feel like somewhat tethered to something to save me. So I did it. Emily, I’m not sure what her battle was, but then I found she was coming back to Emory too. I was like, yes, we can continue doing our music. So it was a good thing in that way.
Debbie:
What was the source of your depression at the time? I know that with your parents being so super conservative, you’ve written about, and I’m only going to use this word because this is the word that I read and found in my research, that you said that your parents were destroyed by having three gay kids in one family. You had come out. Your two sisters were also gay.
Amy:
It’s so hard now because my dad’s passed away. My mom is so amazing. Even before my dad died eight years ago, he had come around to the place where you couldn’t love gay people anymore than they do. It’s amazing what happened, but they were destroyed in this way where we were so close and raised to be very community-minded and generous. There were so many good values instilled in us, yet this one thing was so in opposition to their faith and everything they believed in and they just couldn’t picture it. Their friends rejected them in the church. It was a long, a very long road for them to get by. I mean, I felt like not only do I mean they were destroyed and like not happy for us, they were scared for what would happen to us. They were scared that they had done something wrong when they raised us because they were taught that what we are was a perversion. So there was so much fear that it became anger. They were always a little bit left of the middle in other ways. You know, pro-choice, and my dad was like a feminist and all that stuff.
Amy:
This is like the one thing that just, so it just was a life shift for them that they couldn’t picture. Then they saw us as being damaged. They were afraid that they were the ones that did it. I think they had to come around to realize that it’s not damage. It’s just another existence that’s beautiful as everything else, but that kind of society thing. Then when you have self-loathing yourself, it’s a recipe for a lot of terrible times and ways that just reiterate how you already feel. Now, it’s totally different now because they’re so great now that it’s like, I don’t want them to ever feel bad about what we went through because they worked so hard to come out on the other side of it. You know? It’s one of those things. It’s a necessary conversation, but it’s like, wow, you can make it through this. I mean, I’m lucky that they did, really, for me. You know?
Debbie:
Emily, what was it like with your family when you first came out?
Emily:
Well, my sisters knew before. I mean, I think my parents knew. There was very little language for it. I mean, I can remember in high school knowing I was different but having no way to articulate what that difference was and trying to follow the path of dating guys and all that stuff. But my sisters knew because I had like, I don’t know, like a camp counselor girlfriend on the side or something is very typical. They were so lovely, my sisters, and so supportive. I had a lot of fear about telling my parents, even though in my gut, I didn’t think they were going to kick me out of the house or ostracize me in any way. That was all internal. But I was spending a lot of time out of the house and I lived with them at that time and I felt out of respect, I should tell them why I was out and what I was doing and what I was feeling.
Emily:
And so I just took them to lunch separately. It was a different time. I think if anything, they were just afraid of the life that I would have to go through, what societal pain there would be. But beyond that, I mean, it was nothing. When I was five years old, my mom made us a lot of clothes and she made us Easter dresses and I asked for Easter pants. She made me Easter pants. I think the writing was on the wall in a way.
Debbie:
I asked for pants too when I was about five or six years old. My brother was having a birthday party and I wanted to wear pants. This was the ’60s and it was just very different, totally different time. My mother was adamant that she was not going to let me wear pants. I ended up falling just completely unrelated to the argument about pants and I scratched at my face and she felt so bad. She ended up letting me wear pants.
Emily:
Yeah. I mean, even that is traumatic. I think my mom just said, okay, I’ll make you some pants. I was so unscathed, my whole process. Not only my family and my friends, but the church. We went to church at Emory, so the ecumenical setting was academic. We had members of different faith communities come in and give the sermon or homily or whatever it called in that faith. We were taught to come home and ask questions about the text, the scriptures and all that stuff. I didn’t have to go through so much of the agony that other people did when they were kicked out of their church or their homes, but the agony that I went through was my own self-loathing, my own self homophobia, which I still have to battle today, so much better.
Debbie:
Me too.
Emily:
But it’s undeniably still there.
Debbie:
Well, we were socialized that way. We were brought up that way. I didn’t come out until I was 50 because I felt so much internal shame. I was worried about being judged. I was worried about just what people would think. My father never knew and he died not knowing. My mom still calls my wife, my friend.
Emily:
I mean, you probably were too like what you’re supposed to do is be attractive to men.
Debbie:
Right.
Emily:
Like that’s the goal.
Debbie:
I mean, I’ve always been kind of femmy, but you know, it’s not really a reflection on my sexuality. It’s just more that I like to feel a certain way. But yeah, it was a very different time in the ’80s. I mean, I remember sneaking into different LGBTQ bookstores in the West Village and finding Faron for the first time.
Emily:
Oh my God.
Debbie:
But I was completely closeted. I would go to Henrietta’s or the Cubbyhole and just go by myself and just occasionally kiss girls. And no one knew, no one in my life knew that I was doing this because I was so scared.
Emily:
Really?
Amy:
You never see anybody there like at Henrietta’s or Cubbyhole?
Debbie:
No. Nope, never. Never.
Amy:
Wow. That’s pretty amazing.
Emily:
When I was at Tulane, I remember, well, there’s a few pivotal things. I remember one was seeing the movie Personal Best and being terrified that someone would see me in the theater. Absolutely terrified, but I had to go. The other was Cris Williamson and Vicki Randall was in her band back then and they came and played a show at Tulane. I sat there also terrified not knowing why I was terrified. Like trying to tear down the band in my mind in some way because I didn’t know what was going on with me. Looking back, it’s like, oh my goodness. Was that transparent or what?
Debbie:
I have so much compassion for that little baby dyke that was so afraid to just be who she was and ended up spending the first 50 years of her life sort of tortured by it. It’s been 10 years now, otherwise. So there’s thankfully a happier ending to that or a happier mid story.
Amy:
But can you find moments in that time… Now I’m interviewing you.
Debbie:
No, that’s fine.
Amy:
Can you find moments in that time though where you can remember some happiness of that? Like some thrill of like, if you were, I can just picture New York at that time too. If you were at the Cubbyhole and there was a thrill, did you remember those moments of happiness though when you felt some liberation? Do you have any of that?
Debbie:
Yeah. I mean, I knew there was a feeling that I felt of being home, of being that I can’t really explain it more than that. But now 10 years into this new chapter, I can say I really understand what pride means. Because you feel proud of being who you are as opposed to ashamed. But yeah, the thrilling moments for me were discovering like the Ann Bannon novels and buying them all, which is pulp lesbian fiction for those that might be listening and not aware of who Ann Bannon is. I would go back to my apartment which I shared with a married couple and I would go onto my covers with a flashlight. I would read these books. Then I found On Our Backs. Then I found Off Our Backs. Then I found JEB. I’d find all of these sort of little amulets, and I still have to this day. I still have my original copy of The Joy of Lesbian Sex, which I got in the ’80s before I even had anything major in my life, but whatever. This is getting to be TMI.
Emily:
Not for us.
Debbie:
Those private moments, there were moments of real joy and they were very private. Now I can talk about it and share those things. I was talking to my friend, Wendy MacNaughton years ago about this. She’s like, “Oh my God, you should create a little baby dyke museum,” because I have all these things still.
Amy:
Little breadcrumbs to the weird path to who you are.
Emily:
Remember when if you subscribed to a magazine, it would come in a brown paper cover?
Debbie:
Yeah.
Emily:
I remember that like the secrecy of it all.
Debbie:
Yeah, yeah.
Amy:
Crazy, right?
Debbie:
I remember hiding these books and putting them behind other books and backwards just because I was so worried. But you know, one thing I do want to ask you, and I know that you’ve been asked this a million times, but just for the two people in the universe that might not be aware. As I was preparing for the interview, I can’t tell you how many times the question came up about whether or not you’d ever been a couple. My favorite perspective on this came from an interview that you did on NPR. The interviewer stated that she was constantly surprised by the number of people who assumed that the two of you must have dated each other at least once in your lifetimes. I know that this is not true. You’ve always been best friends. She suggested that it was driven by the slightly phobic assumption that anyone of the same sex will do for anyone who identifies as a lesbian. She goes on to state that just because we’re gay doesn’t mean that we’re always gay for each other. I was wondering if the assumption ever annoys you or if it’s just so old now that you just kind of get a kick out of it.
Amy:
It never annoyed me. It actually always made us laugh because it’s like saying like, do you date your sister? It’s like so from left field that we’re just like… It’s like when someone sees one of us at the grocery store and they ask where the other one is, we’re like, yeah, we actually live in separate towns. It’s cute, because I guess we’re so together in everything that we do, Indigo Girls, there’s just two spots and it’s always going to be us on the same sides that you can’t adjust your vision, you know? But I swear, when you see the Backstreet Boys, you’re not like, where are the other band members? You know?
Debbie:
Well, speak for yourself.
Amy:
But yeah, I don’t know how Emily feels about it.
Emily:
No, I feel the exact same way. I don’t get them any more, but I used to get the questions if someone see me in the grocery store. “Where’s Amy?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know where Amy is.” Far from here.
Amy:
You have to ask her.
Debbie:
Your original name as a duo was Saliers and Ray. You started actually, your first recording was in high school. You recorded a tape called Tuesday’s Children in high school. What was the motivation behind that?
Amy:
Were we both in high school or was you in college already?
Debbie:
It was 1981.
Amy:
Oh yeah. She was a senior. Well, we had fun recording ourselves because it was the way you heard yourself back, I guess. You know what I mean? I mean, the way we used to record was on just like a little jam box, press record. No tracks. Just us singing together. I have all those tapes from rehearsals and stuff. I just remember we had a song called Tuesday’s Children that was written about us playing on open mic nights at a club called Good Ol’ Days. It was just like a romantic little sentimental song about having fun on all those writers’ nights, I guess. I remember playing that in Ellis Loyd’s class, our English teacher’s class, I think, but I feel like you were already at college maybe.
Emily:
I can’t remember the timeline.
Amy:
Then we made a real cassette called Blue Food that we actually sold. I think our first year at Emory, right? At the time, the deal was like you wanted to… I was always like, “We got to record something so when we play a show, we can leave something with people to remember us so they’ll come back.” That was like the business model. So it wasn’t about making money. It was just making these tapes and then people would bootleg it and it would just go around. That’s how you got known and people would come to your gigs. Because the most important thing was for people to show up at your shows, because then you could get another show. That’s just how we worked. We were very like one step at a time. We’re so young. We don’t have to conquer the world. We just need to get the next gig at that place that we want to play at. You know? So yeah, so we started making cassettes and then we made a single.
Debbie:
The single was called Crazy Game and Everybody’s Waiting For Someone To Come Home. You recorded it in 1985 on vinyl and you issued it on your own label, which I think is just so incredibly entrepreneurial. You named your label for your high school English teacher who you’ve referenced now a couple of times, Ellis Loyd. I couldn’t find the name of the actual label. Was it called Ellis Loyd Productions?
Amy:
It was JLS Lloyd Records or something.
Emily:
JLS Records.
Amy:
JLS Records. Yeah, I mean it was just for that record.
Debbie:
Why him specifically? Is he still a big fan? He’s still coming to your shows?
Amy:
Well, I’ll let Emily say why him, but I will say before she says that, that he lives in my neighborhood. My mom still lives in the same house as she lives alone there. He jogs by her house every day and moves the trash cans back into the carport after trash day. Brings her the paper and brings her her mail and leaves it at the door. So I know he is around because of that.
Debbie:
Worthy label namer.
Amy:
Yeah. Emily can-
Emily:
I mean, teachers can be some of the most influential figures in your entire life. He was one of those, both for Amy and for me. I would say largely for all the people who took his AP English classes. He challenged us academically. He didn’t accept mediocre work. He was very engaged in our lives. He helped a lot of kids. He helped me decide. He said, “Why don’t you look at Tulane?” He just was a vibrant, supportive, very smart, academically demanding. Everybody was very, very stimulated by his class and the way he taught us. He was so supportive of me and Amy that we just felt like, well, I don’t know whether we’d be doing this, well, we might be anyway, but who knows? But he invited us to get a collection of songs together so we could do a concert for the class so we owe a lot to him.
Debbie:
You then took the boxes of your single to the Emory campus, set up in front of the student center and sold them. You’ve said that making that single felt as big a deal as it did to get signed to a major label three years later. Emily, at that point, you had to decide between grad school and becoming a full-time musician. You’ve described that as a real reckoning in your life. What happened? Was it a hard decision to make?
Emily:
It was not a hard decision to make. What was happening was like at that point we really were establishing a nascent career, not with any long term vision for getting signed to a major but just having gigs and a building of following. Springboarding from Emory and the college scene. College radio was really vibrant and alive and you could really carve your own path by calling a college music station program directors. You could just build a path. Amy was really good at that organizing and putting all that together. But the truth was that Amy was doing really mostly all of the work, hanging the posters, making the connections, all this stuff. Finally, one day, and I was meeting with my English professor, my advisor about considering which grad schools and all that stuff.
Emily:
Amy was finally like, “Do you want to do that or do you want to do this? Because this is what’s happening.” It didn’t take a second of thought really. I remember it. It was just like, “I want to do music.” And then from that point on, there was no looking back, no regret, no what would’ve happened, because of course we continued on to this. I don’t even have the words to describe what the path has been like over the years, magical and almost fortuitous. Amy and I in many ways, we’re diametrically opposed and our personalities and our sensibilities, but there’s at the soul core and our values and stuff like that. I mean, really, we were linked on this path. So it was an easy decision. I’m glad that Amy put it to me. She’s never had a problem doing that. Thank God. And that was it.
Amy:
Although now I probably would have, now that I reflect on what a big decision that would’ve been, I’d probably be pained in asking that question because now I understand, like to not go to grad school, that’s a huge deal. You know what I mean?
Emily:
But it didn’t feel like that to me.
Amy:
But for me I was like, I was so into music that I was like, what’s the big deal? Just come, just do music, you know? But seriously low, like what if everything had flopped and then you hadn’t gone to grad school? It’s like, what? That was a huge deal.
Debbie:
She could have gone to grad school later. There’s not a time limit, whereas you really did at the moment.
Amy:
That’s true. That’s true.
Emily:
I had no worries back then. Not a worry in the world. I think I was maybe following the footsteps, my dad was professor, my mom was a librarian, books, books, books, let’s go to grad school. But I tell you, I remember how easy the decision was and it was just like, okay, I’ll do that. It was so engaging all the time, playing gigs, writing songs, doing the work of building a career, it was so fun. So fun. You had to get permission from your professors to leave school to go do our little regional tours and stuff.
Amy:
Yeah, I did. They were great about it. I mean, I don’t know why they gave me permission but senior year, because Emily was already out and we were out touring. It was so fun. All of our friends would go. We would go to Charleston on the weekends and drink beer. I would write term papers after the show. Outside in a chair, listening to the Southern bugs on the water outside of a Charleston hotel or whatever. Life was good.
Emily:
We slept on floors. We stayed at Amy’s sister, in our girlfriend’s house and slept on the floor. Nothing ever felt like paying dues. Inconceivable that we would share a hotel room now, but we were sharing hotel rooms and it was so innocent and just pure fun. I really do believe that we have not strayed far from the purity of what we do together and what motivates us. So it was a great beginning. And also Amy’s dad loaned us the money to make the single, he was so supportive. We knew Dr. Ray was there, his little red light on his video camera. There were nights when the only four people in the crowd were Amy’s parents and my parents literally. We had a lot of support.
Debbie:
Emily, you said this about Amy and it really struck me, so I just want to just read what you wrote about her at this time. “Amy always seemed to know how to make the next right move. I was in awe of her ability to book gigs. A gig at the Moonshadow Saloon in Atlanta was a mind spinning gig. And she knew that we would be better suited plugging in our acoustics and playing rock clubs rather than playing pin drop quiet folk clubs. She shaped our destiny at the outset, even though neither one of us had or talked about aspirations of making it big or getting a record deal. We simply wanted to get the next great gig. And Amy always had a way of making that happen.”
Emily:
I wouldn’t change a thing about that.
Amy:
That’s very complimentary.
Debbie:
Well, Amy, did you have a sense of where that momentum was taking you? Where did that drive and ambition come from?
Amy:
It wasn’t like this, I want to be famous and this is how we do it. It was more like, we want to be cool, like ego. Just like, it’s cool to play this. It’s cool to play punk clubs. You know? Some of it was just adolescent. Like I read The Outsiders too many times, you know, kind of thing. Some of it was like, what we are trying to do I had a sense even before we knew we were gay, that we were doing something as outsiders. I always looked for outsider spaces because I felt like we’re not going to fit in at a folk club where they get mad if your friends are singing too loud and if you plug your guitars in and play all along the watch tower. That’s not going to be a good thing. So we got to play in spaces that’ll let us completely be who we are. Those are where the interesting bands are playing.
Amy:
I mean, that was my perspective. Because I was like, if Suzanne Vega is playing at the Moonshadow Saloon or Aztec Camera, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, or The Roaches, that’s where we need to be playing. We need to open for those bands because that’s the kind of crowd we want to have. We don’t want to be playing Margaritaville the rest of our lives. And that’s what we were doing a lot of times, or Please Come to Boston. Those are great songs but we don’t want to be at the Fern bars. We want to be at the punk rock clubs playing acoustic instruments, because then we are going to stand out. And that was my idea. Thank God it went right because who knows? It wasn’t that I was a brainiac. I was just compelled by some force that I can never control that makes me think of things really fast and constantly be in motion. It wasn’t just me as a visionary.
Amy:
I mean, Emily doesn’t give herself enough credit because she’s half of it. But you just go by your gut instinct when you’re that age. Like we can go up to New York City and beg to get a gig at CBGBs because that is an institution and you want to say that you played there. That’s kind of where we were coming from. I think that’s not a business head. It’s more like art of like, how do you want your art to be seen? We just fake it till we make it. We weren’t even good enough to be doing half the stuff we were doing, but you have to get in those spaces to get good enough. And that’s the thing about being women in music is like, if women are never given a chance to be in those spaces, we cannot get better. Because I mean, I believe that. You have to have access to all those spaces to evolve and be better than you are. If you keep limiting the space that you’re allowed to be in, you can’t grow artistically either. And so we had to figure out how to get into those spaces, but at the same time, create our own wheel in a way and have those things going at the same time and juggle them. I just thought the punk clubs were the best route.
Debbie:
I want to talk a little bit about the way in which you make music because you don’t write together. You’ve written a few songs together, but you primarily are separate writers. You write your own songs, you sing them together. Was that something that just happened organically? Did you try to write songs together and then found that you were better independently? How does that work?
Emily:
I don’t remember trying to write songs together early on. I mean, writing songs is a very vulnerable thing. Amy had her way of expressing herself and I had my way. We used different cord vocabularies and we might have had different influences. We didn’t give a lot of thought to like, oh, should we try to write our songs together? We just fell into the natural way of doing things. Luckily, what we have always been able to do is arrange our songs together. Writing is a little bit oil and water for us, but arranging is not. So it was very organic and inspiring and we kind of have boundaries too. Like whoever writes the song gets the last word in the arrangement, so if something really doesn’t feel good. But we do a lot of trying things too. I mean, I’m kind of bouncing ahead to when we prepare for an album or when we’re arranging stuff. But yeah, we thought differently, expressed ourselves differently. We wanted to write alone. It was just absolutely the organic way that we came to things and still do.
Debbie:
You recorded your first full length LP, Strange Fire, in 1987. By this time, you’d gone from Saliers and Ray to B-Band, to choosing the name Indigo Girls. I’ve read over and over and over again that you picked out a word you thought was cool from the dictionary. All this time prior to my starting the research, I’d always assumed that Indigo was a wink, wink, nod, nod reference to the color lavender, which symbolized gay empowerment in the ’60s and ’70s. I mean, I remember because I’m a native New Yorker and loved to look at the Empire State Building on Pride weekend because it was always lavender. So I was shocked to see that it was a completely cool word from the dictionary kind of thing.
Emily:
It could have been like a subliminal foreshadowing on some cosmic level. But I don’t think so.
Amy:
Yeah. Who knows? It’s a weird thing. We literally went through a dictionary and found a word that we liked.
Debbie:
It’s a good word.
Amy:
I mean, now, obviously we didn’t know we were going to be around for this long because Indigo Girls. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t even know if we liked being girls at the time. You know what I mean? It’s such a weird thing to think about why we chose that name.
Emily:
I mean, I remember Amy, I was a camp counselor. Amy called the camp and I was in the cafeteria. “You got a phone call Emily.” “Oh, hey Am, how’s it going?” “Yeah. Listen, I’ve been thinking about our band name. How do you like the word Indigo?” I was like, “I like that. Yeah. I like that. Let’s add girls for alliteration. That’s why I want to add girls, just for-
Debbie:
Alliteration. Not thinking about what it means, just for alliteration. So you got signed to Epic Records in 1988 and this was after Epic Records A and R man, Roger “Snake” Klein was in town to see a band called The Rave-Ups’. A friend of yours was a college rep for the label and had put your name in the hat at Epic, so to speak. You’ve stated that you weren’t sure if Snake had accidentally dropped by because The Rave-Ups’ were playing down the street or if he had an intention to see you. Have you ever found out what made him drop in to see you specifically that when he first found you?
Amy:
No.
Emily:
I mean, the labels were poking around because R.E.M. was going to sign another deal and Athens was so close. The music scene was so fertile, vibrant and amazing. And so there were other folks from record labels down there poking around. He was eccentric.
Amy:
That was a bidding war for REM, that’s right.
Emily:
Yeah. There was no bidding war for us.
Amy:
No. Back in those days, A and R people went to towns when they felt like there was a movement, a music scene. They would just go and hear bands, which is crazy to think about, right?
Debbie:
It’s incredible. And so Snake took you under his wing. From what I understand, he fought really hard for you to get signed on your own terms. What were the terms you were asking for at that time?
Emily:
It would be like not we are who we are. We’re not going to change who we are.
Amy:
We’re not going to move.
Emily:
We’re not going to move. Yeah. This is just what you see is what you get and we’re not going to compromise. You can’t produce us in this way that we’re not comfortable with. Because it just wasn’t worth it to us. We’re playing little five points pub, maybe, I don’t know, three nights a week on the weekends and selling those shows out. It just felt incredible and nothing was worth it to compromise anything. It was just like, wow. I mean, we’d never thought about a major label till he came around. We had to talk our manager into being our manager.
Debbie:
Well, he didn’t think he’d ever make it, right?
Amy:
He didn’t.
Debbie:
I mean, talk about support.
Amy:
Yeah. Well, I guess it was written in stone at that point, but he’s still with us. I don’t know if he thinks that we’re going to make it or not, but he’s still with us. No, I mean, we didn’t. I mean, we had nothing to lose. I mean, we had everything to lose, I guess I should say, but we had nothing to lose by just staying at what we were doing because we had tours booked in our second record. We were getting ready to make and it wouldn’t be a big deal for us to back out of the deal. But something was telling us, you should do this because the amount of work that you have right now to get all of it done is really hard to get it done. Like putting records out and booking and promoting and all on our own. Some of it was just mechanical, we need help. Some of it was the headiness of getting signed offset by the fact that we were aware of corporate identity and music corporation being not totally about what we were. So that was a little bit of a struggle because it felt a little bit like selling out to me a bit. But I just thought, well, we can do this the way we want to. At any point we can just cut bait if we need to, because we’re going to do it our own way no matter what.
Debbie:
Emily, I read that you became depressed after you signed the contract, that you were worried that you’d signed away your freedom and independence. How did you overcome that?
Emily:
I think I was just afraid. I didn’t know, it was unknown. It was, I mean really shocking that we got signed to a major label. A lot of it was the timing because other majors were signing women with guitars. But I was afraid that I felt like it was this continental shift that my life was really going to be different and change. I didn’t know how that was going to look. I was just afraid, just simple fear I think is what that was. But then once we got signed and I kind of had a good time with all that stuff. We won a Grammy. I was really excited about that. You’d go to the record party after the Grammys or whatever, and there’d be Bob Dylan or whatever. I think Michael Jackson. He was on Epic and he was on at one of the things. It was just like, oh my God, here we are. So that was a little head spinny for me. But initially it was just the fear of like, whoa, this is big and life is going to change. I don’t know what that’s going to feel like.
Debbie:
You released your first major label album, aptly titles Indigo Girls in February of 1989. Closer to Fine, your first single peaked at number 52 on the billboard chart. The album reached as high as 22, remained on the charts for 35 weeks and was certified gold by September. You’ve been going ever since. What did you make of that nearly instant success? I mean, it’s really like going from zero to 60 in three seconds.
Amy:
It was like Emily says, it was a head spinning time and we didn’t even have time to think half the time, or even stop and smell the roses. Because we were just riding the wave, you know? I think the biggest thing for us really that really made us understand what was happening was when we toured with R.E.M. and understood just how much it meant for them to give us that opportunity and the stature they had and the connection to that. We knew that that was a huge deal. We did not take it for granted and we enjoyed every moment of it, you know? I think for me, that was when I was like, oh yeah, okay. This is big. We’re on our way, wherever we’re going. I don’t know where. It was intense, but you get in that wave and your ego gets big and you got to figure it out. You know what I mean? So you don’t ruin yourself. We had a good time.
Debbie:
You said that when the album came out, you read every review and took it all to heart and felt bummed by the not great ones. Amy, you’ve written about how you took yourself very seriously at the time and reading reviews impacted the way you wrote and ultimately stunted your growth.
Amy:
Yeah.
Debbie:
How so? Did you feel like you had to start writing for the critics?
Amy:
No, I think I wasn’t even that evolved as a writer yet. And then I would spend too much time thinking about myself and not enough time and just doing my art and just like writing and trying to get better. Because if you’re always trying to please like figure that puzzle out, you’re not really focusing on your craft. You’re focusing on the wrong thing, which is the end, how you’re going to get to the end. I think it’s stunted my growth by being so distracting, you know? And so I don’t read anything now. I mean, I’ll read something if it’s a writer that I really like, like a great rock writer like Kim Rule or something. I’ll read her stuff because she’s so good. Yeah. I don’t know. I just think I was way too egotistical and self-involved and not self-critical in the right way. I was self-loathing about my sexuality and my gender, but I was not critical about my own writing. You know what I’m saying? I had the wrong things I was thinking about. I should have been just working on my writing. It definitely delayed my growth. I was a late bloomer I think because of that, probably.
Emily:
I think too. I remember early on with those reviews, there was a distinct sense of this is homophobia and sexism, and of course you don’t know exactly. It’s a little bit like gaslighting because then you’re like, well, maybe they just don’t like the music, or maybe I am too verbose, you know? But all these like New York Times critic or Rolling Stones critic or whatever, you know, all the cool or acclaimed sources, it felt like they were never going to accept the value of what we put out. I think it’s true. In a male-dominated business culture world, if you are not in part of the binary, patriarchy, you’re attractive to men, they can sexualize you. They can relate to you as a woman who’s inferior and play up on that, then you’re not on the same level playing field as other people. That’s just a fact, and that always felt bad.
Emily:
It felt bad going into radio stations, not only because all that talk was such bullshit with DJs and morning shows. It was just so vapid, so empty and endless. We had to keep doing that as long as they were playing us on the radio. We had to go do all these radio shows. I’m not saying that I am not grateful for the exposure we got in the end to grow our following. But that sexism, that homophobia, that walking into those male DJs and they can’t relate to us and that palpable, visceral feeling of that, it sucked. I still believe that if you don’t play into the patriarchal, heterosexual mode, hierarchical, you’re not going to get as far as a straight woman.
Debbie:
You’ve had a 35 year career. You’ve recorded 16 studio albums, seven of which were certified gold, four certified platinum, one double platinum. You’ve toured all over the world to sold out shows and sold over 15 million albums. You now have your own record labels, record entirely on your own terms. You’re gay icons, role models. You’re both happily married. You have children. You release the critically acclaimed album, Look Long in 2020 and have new work on the way which I want to talk to you about. But what haven’t you done that you still want to do?
Amy:
Maybe a collaboration with Outcast.
Debbie:
Really?
Amy:
I still want to do that. I mean, Atlanta.
Debbie:
Let’s put it out there.
Amy:
Well, that’ll never happen probably, but ever since I heard them, I was like, oh my God, it would be so great to do an Indigo Girls, Outcast collaboration.
Debbie:
Why outcasts?
Amy:
I just love them and they’re home people. Brilliant. But in terms of things that we haven’t done yet that would be cool to do, a lot of times they come to us. For instance, playing with symphonies. Before we played with symphonies, we didn’t, well, I don’t remember thinking I want to start playing with symphonies across the country. And then we were invited into this world. I know that certain artists like Nanci Griffith had The Blue Moon Orchestra and so on. But that was just a really great thing. And then playing on Lilith Fair was a real shot in the arm to our career at that time. For me, quite inspiring. Then there’s this film coming out, Glitter & Doom, that’s an independent film that the writers just came to us and said, “We want to use Indigo Girls music for this.” That came out of nowhere. And then we have this brilliant filmmaker who’s working on a documentary about us, and that came out of nowhere. So all these things keep presenting themselves to us. But for me personally, I’m working on two different musicals so it’s become a new dream of mine to have that come to fruition on a stage.
Debbie:
You also have your activism. I want to talk a little bit about that. It seems like your activism has always been intertwined with your music. In 1993, you co-founded the nonprofit Honor the Earth, which is dedicated to indigenous environmental justice and green energy solutions. You’ve provided more than three million dollars in grants to over 200 Native American communities. What first motivated you to create this effort?
Amy:
We had seen the great native activist, Winona LaDuke at an Earth Day show, honestly. We were backstage telling her how amazing she was, because she really spun. We had never heard her talk. We heard Winona speak and we were just like, oh, okay. This is what we want to do for the environmental work that we do because this is the lens we need to see everything through. We just talked to her and we started scheming. What grew out of that was Honor the Earth, which was really co-founded by women from the Indigenous Women’s Network, some leaders from the Seventh Generation Fund. I believe some people that are now in the Indigenous Environmental Network were involved. We basically just had leaders from different communities who created a board. We basically just built this organization that would do, what our part of it was to build bridges between non-native and native communities by playing tours and shows that were all geared around Honor the Earth and the issues.
Amy:
We would do like a regional tour that focused on like a nuclear waste issue, or we would do issues around salmon in the Northwest and water quality issues and toxic waste and cultural sustainability and sacred site work. And all of that went on for years and years and the tours would go into these different areas and we would have cross pollination with native artists and White artists and other people of color that were working on the same issues. Maybe around toxic waste dumps in their neighborhoods and stuff like that. It’s basically for us has been the model that we learned to do all of our activism through. Once we met these native leaders, they became our mentors and we learned how to do grassroots activism with everything. From queer issues, feminism, death penalty work, immigration, just anything that we do, we always have that lens of like, how do you do community-based organizing. Before that, we did benefits for homeless projects and women’s shelters and a lot of feeding the community kind of things. During the height of HIV when we were just starting out, we would do the meals on wheels type stuff and things like that too. We’ve always been interested in it. But I think that the native mentorship gave us a structure that we understood to be effective.
Debbie:
I was really intrigued by you stating that you could no longer see environmentalism except through the lens of indigenous communities. How did you come to that realization?
Emily:
Well, the indigenous communities do not separate “nature.” It’s not separate from their lives. I mean the indigenous communities that have the wisdom for how to continue to protect and nurture the earth are completely connected to everything. So earth and spirituality and vision and ancestry and future generations and all those things are completely organically combined together, for lack of a better way to describe it. Where it’s like other communities, we compartmentalize things, or we don’t, because we’re so removed from, say feeding from the earth or collecting the wild rice. The manuman, the tribes from that upper Midwest part of North America and the sustenance economies and all those things. A lot of us, we go to a grocery store and it’s all wrapped up and we’re so removed from that.
Emily:
But the completely holistic, organic living way of indigenous peoples, it’s really the only way you can look at a protection of the earth and gratitude to the earth is to be connected in that way. Also, let us who do not live in those communities listen to and learn from those communities. Let us be allies. Let us not go in and say, we are going to do this here and we can make these changes and it’s all going to come from the government or this political movement. It’s like tell us what we don’t know and show us how we can be allies and what we can take back to our own ways of life separated from your more completely integrated lives.
Amy:
What we realized, I think too, is that when you look at resources that we draw from the earth, the nuclear, uranium mining and coal mining and the way we use water and the hydroelectric dams and all this, just really so many resources, it ends up ironically to be on native land. I mean, it’s all native land in the United States, but you know what I’m saying? It’s kind of the way in communities of color end up being impacted just far more by our energy consumption and affected more by climate change. And so it’s like, that’s who you listen to then. You listen to them because they’re being affected by it and they shouldn’t be. It’s just the same old thing, communities that are disenfranchised. Yet these people that we’ve worked with are so powerful and they’re so brilliant and they’re strategizing about how they do these movements are just, it’s like the way Black Lives Matters was so transformative. I mean, these are transformative people that know how to organize. It’s like, why wouldn’t you listen to them? You know? I think for us, it was just the moment of realization that really steered our whole lives.
Debbie:
Musically, you’ll be touring through 2022 for your most recent album Look Long, which reunited you with one of your strongest backing bands to date. One of the things that I was so struck by when I first listened to the album and then I’ve been re-listening in prep for today is both how personal it is. It’s a lot more personal than I think a lot of your other previous music, but it’s also really political. It’s both, it’s this Venn diagram of both the personal and the political. Why the name Look Long?
Emily:
Well, it’s a name of a song I wrote. It did come from that. But it also, the implication is to look to the future. How can we make a better world? What kinds of things need to be changed politically, personally. The older I get, absolutely impossible to separate the personal from the political and the integration of things. And so Look Long is just indicative of that. Let’s have a vision for the future that can be a better world.
Debbie:
Emily, you said this about the music on Look Long, “We’re shaped by our past. What makes us who we are? And why? In this moment of delirious upheaval, Look Long considers the tremendous potential of ordinary life and suggests the possibility that an honest survey of one’s past and present unburdened by judgment can give shape to something new, the promise of a way forward.” What do you mean by an ordinary life?
Amy:
You said that?
Emily:
I can’t believe I said that.
Amy:
That’s a great quote.
Emily:
Yeah. Are you sure I said that?
Debbie:
Yeah. You wrote it.
Emily:
It must have been one of my more-
Amy:
You should be a writer.
Debbie:
I could not have conjured that myself.
Amy:
No, you should be a writer. That’s really good.
Emily:
One of my more lucid moments. Well, I think a lot about the role that we play and I think a lot about our purpose in life. I think a lot about all the systems that break apart, the beauty of what life could be. And so I’ve come to have the utmost admiration for individual life. The simplicity of the human struggle, what people overcome, how they join each other in community. I focus much less on grand works and how it is our little lives, our little human struggles lives that are able to highlight what the best of humanity is capable of, through community, through dreams, through art, through justice work. We’re given these lives, what do they mean? How can we be in allyship with each other? How can we dismantle our own thinking? I mean, I think a lot about the binary paradigm, how structured my life has been by it, how much my wife is a therapist.
Emily:
She has many trans clients. I think about all the kids who struggle, and this one woman, she’s doing her PhD. She’s worked with a lot of sexual minority youth non-binary and gender affirming youth. She said, these kids are tired. They’re tired from always looking for a safe place, but also, they fight. They fight for the future. I think about any people of color who fight for the future and the beauty of their own integrity and human lives. It’s a lot about that.
Debbie:
The last thing I want to talk to you about today is your new film, your show, your concert special. You have Look Long: Together, which premiers on Sunday, May 8th at 9:00 PM Eastern time, exclusively on veeps.com. It is a career spanning concert featuring some of your greatest music, some rarities, and for the first time, full band live renditions of songs from Look Long. What made you decide to do this now? I can’t wait by the way, I was trying so hard to get a screener so I can see it. I saw the trailer. I’ve watched it like 15 times. I’m so excited about this. Tell us how this came to be and what we can expect.
Amy:
I mean, it grew out of when we were in the thick of the pandemic and you couldn’t go see music and we were doing live streams of just us sitting in a room, playing, reading the chat rooms and having fun. We had planned a big summer tour with our band and we were so excited about it. Then we had to can the whole thing. Basically we’re like, let’s just have everybody record at their houses. Everybody was doing this creating virtual shows by remotely recording. It’s a long process, but basically it took us quite a long time to get it done. Now we’re done, but we’re going to go on tour as well so it’s kind of funny. But it is a chance to see the band that a lot of the people that we play with really, it’s like guests, it’s like our band, but it’s also guests that come in and out of our lives and sit in with us all the time and just make music with us. It’s just a mishmash of stuff that we put together basically.
Debbie:
I have one last question for you. This is for both of you, what is it like to do shows where everyone in the audience knows the lyrics to your songs and sings along with you?
Emily:
It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s an energetic event. All those molecules swirling around and people are feeling joy, there’s nothing like singing in public together. It’s a unique experience. It’s very galvanizing in the most powerful way. Especially in these times, just to come together and to sing together. I never think, oh, I wrote this particular song that everyone sing, never, never. It’s almost like a channeling and here we all are. Because when I go to a concert, I sing my heart out even with a mask on my face. It is really a way for people to get together and so it’s a thrill. I never get tired of it. Our fans are singers, our community. They really love to sing so it is wonderful. It’s physical.
Debbie:
I once saw Loudon Wainwright III playing at the Bottom Line in the ’80s. He was singing and realized that the audience was singing along with him so he stopped singing and we were all still singing and he started to cry.
Amy:
Wow.
Debbie:
Amy, what about you? Last word.
Amy:
I mean, I reiterate what Emily said, it’s beautiful. Everything else kind of goes away and you just exist in that moment and everybody’s singing together and what separates us doesn’t matter anymore, you know? I think that’s the beauty of music. So yeah, it’s a great feeling.
Debbie:
Well, it’s definitely, definitely the beauty of your music. Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you for giving us so much beautiful music for the last 40 years. Here’s to another 40.
Emily:
Thanks, Debbie. What an honor to be with you for real.
Debbie:
Thank you. Thank you.
Amy:
I’m a total fan of your podcast. I listen to it.
Debbie:
Thank you. Be still, my beating heart.
Amy:
I love your interviews. I love how well you do your research. It’s all good.
Debbie:
Thank you.
Amy:
You’re great. It’s an honor.
Debbie:
Thank you. Thank you. To see the Indigo Girls concert special on Veeps from May 8th to May 15th, go to www.veeps.com, V-E-E-P-S.com to see all of the extraordinary music the Indigo Girls have been making all these years. Get tickets to all their live shows, go to www.indigogirls.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 3:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. Interviews are usually recorded at the School of Visual Arts. Masters in Branding Program in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The Editor in Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyland.