36 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | Q&A
Indigo Girls Let Loose
Amy Ray and Emily Saliers talk pandemic life, Trumpera inequality and how Pride can help heal the country’s divisions BY CHRIS AZZOPARDI
The day
before I got on a call with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, famously known as the Indigo Girls, the longtime folkrock duo and LGBTQ activists were playing a set for fans during a Facebook Live concert. They had planned on performing in public venues, but their set of scheduled dates were canceled due to the pandemic. Before the livestream performance, Ray and Saliers had been quarantining separately, long enough to feel they could safely and comfortably perform six feet apart in their manager’s empty, sterilized office. They were gearing up to release their 16th album, Long Look, which was released on May 22. A departure from the work they’ve created since the release of their 1989 breakout album, Long Look finds the Indigo Girls lyrically and musically untethered. During our conversation in early May, Saliers and Ray discussed artistic freedom, intensified inequality during the Trump era, and honoring the true legacy of Pride. PHOTO: JEREMY COWART
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 313 | JULY, 2020
How are you holding up right now? SALIERS: Well, so there’s homeschooling to be done. Amy has a young child and I have a young child, so that occupies a lot of my time. I’m sort of splitting it up with my wife and she’s working remotely, and then Amy and I are doing promo for the album. And then we do the live streams and stuff like that. And there’s a lot of catching up on other life that wasn’t able to be managed while on the road. And just keeping in touch with whom we can reach out to. Helping friends. Staying in communication. It’s been actually a very, very busy time. How do you like doing these virtual concerts? RAY: I think they’re super fun. It’s challenging because it’s a whole different way of trying to engage. I mean, we’ve done a lot of live streams from the studio or from soundcheck, just kind of spontaneous things, and we’re just trying to keep things engaged; luckily, we have this awesome community of people who tune in and they sort of talk to each other. They kind of create a whole community around it, so they’re so engaged and we know that that’s happening when we see the comments, so it really helps us really do the songs and do them honestly and with energy and have a lot of feelings around it. And we get a lot out of it too. It’s definitely a kick in the butt. It’s good for us to stay on our toes. Has quarantine been a creative time for you? SALIERS: I have found that it’s a creative time, but there’s not a lot of time to create. It’s challenging for me to have a 7-year-old home all the time; that’s a very different thing. So my wife and I are just kind of going back to the drawing board and carving out the things that we need to try to keep our personal lives in balance, which includes personal time away from each other, work time away from each
other, family time, schooling. So, I haven’t been practicing Indigo Girls as much as I’ve been feeling very creative and working with my recording software. But actually finding the time to complete anything like I usually can in normal life has been impossible. Going into this, everyone thought they’d have all this time to do everything. RAY: I was trying to analyze that, because I’ve been hearing other people from all walks of life — from my neighbors, who kind of work normal construction jobs, to people who have no kids — and everybody is experiencing it differently. But one thing people seem to be saying is, “I thought I’d have all this time, and now we’re just making meals and doing dishes and cleaning all the time.” I think it makes us understand how much we kind of eat out and get our meals in these really convenient packaged ways instead of that less wasteful way of eating at home and eating what you have. There’s an eerily prescient line on the album’s title track: “Everyone I know can sense Armageddon.” I’m not sure that you knew this is what Armageddon would look like, but when you sing a line like that now and reflect on where you were when you wrote it, what comes to mind? SALIERS: Well, the Armageddon that I’ve been experiencing is the day that Trump got elected president and the country’s divisions were magnified. And it’s not that the problems didn’t exist before, the systemic problems like racism and social inequality and all of the things that we’re aware about. But I believe they’ve gotten worse. I see the schisms in this country, and social media platforms don’t really help. There’s a lot of access to information and opinions that’s really not helping anyone and most of us engage in that in one way or another, so there’s sort of a societal illness that’s tied into social media.
And when I say illness, I also believe that the earth is so sick and she’s pissed. The natural world is the leader. And so we think we’re so important and we’ve achieved all these things and blah, blah. And it’s nothing when mother nature gets pissed. I believe that’s what’s happening, and we can sense that, and that leads to feelings of unrest and the thought of Armageddon. Armageddon is a very extreme word to use, but it was indicative of the social malaise: unrest, no answers. And now, of course, the unknown causes most everybody I know a great deal of anxiety: How long will the virus last? What happens when there are outbreaks of it? When am I ever gonna work again? Are you wrestling with those questions yourself? SALIERS: I’m very privileged, so I’m not wrestling with, “Where’s my next meal gonna come from?” But because I’ve read a lot of history, and there are patterns that happen when there’s a complete lack of leadership, I see the writing on the wall for what happens to nations and civilizations where that continues. I think about it in a prophetic way based on what I know about history, and that’s kind of depressing. I seek my joy in human communication and people who are resilient over difficulties. So my joy comes in little things, and my despair comes in big things. When you look back at recording your first album, how do you compare that experience to recording Long Look? RAY: This was a really special, standout time for us because it was the reunion of the group of people we met back in the late ’90s when we played Lilith Fair. There was a band backing Sinead O’Connor that we became friends with and we all sort of hung out together and then we started playing music together. They’re all from England and Ireland, and their musicality was incredible.
