August 11, 2000 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Getting even closer to fine

An interview with Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls

by Janet Macoska

The Indigo Girls' music has been most aptly described as "music that cradles you in the palm of its hand and then shakes you to your senses again and again."

Friends since grade school in Decatur, Georgia, and bandmates for over 15 years, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers write and perform songs that are simultaneously calm and explosive, combining fierce social consciousness with impassioned musicianship.

Over the past ten years, the Indigo Girls have sold over seven million albums worldwide, and have earned six Grammy nominations. Their large and loyal fan following intimately identify with the way these two voices reach out to them in the darkness, making them feel at home, understood and inspired.

The Indigo Girls will be performing an acoustic show at the Nautica Stage in Cleveland's Flats on Sunday, August 13.

Emily Saliers recently spoke with this writer, on topics ranging from their latest CD to musical heroes to their health regimen on the road.

Janet Macoska: The Indigo Girls have been recording together for 15 years now, with Come On Now Social being your latest CD. Before you go into the recording studio, do you do anything deliberately to take yourself out of a comfort zone and challenge yourself so that this music, this sound on this CD goes someplace where you haven't been before?

Emily Saliers: We don't really go in with a strategy, to be honest with you. I think there are certain songs that you know are going to rock out, like "Go" is going to be an electric guitar song, and “Compromise" is a punk song. "Trouble," I knew, was going to be an electric song because I wrote it on an electric guitar.

Those are songs we just wanted to cut live in the studio and that's what we did. There are other songs that we put together sort of piece by piece. I think a lot of what happens is when you get in the studio, there are ideas that come up in there which you can never predict, like vocal ideas.

For instance, Amy and I had this whole part worked out for "Peace Tonight" and the

way to record it. We got in there and tried to record it, and it sucked. We thought it was okay when we were practicing it at home and then we started listening to it on tape and it just wasn't working. So we totally revamped that song.

Someone came up with the idea of just giving it a sort of Al Green backbeat and brought in a horn section. Amy and I just discovered different harmony parts, like ån answer part in the chorus rather than straight up harmony. Things like that that you never know are going to happen until you get in there.

They take on a life of their own? Exactly. So we don't want to go in with a strategy. First, we just try to arrange the songs on our own before we go into the studio, so that we're prepared and don't waste time. But we're also open to coming up with new ideas if something doesn't work in the studio. Then we're also open to what the other players and singers bring to the record. We feature a lot of guest artists on our CDs.

Do you get revved up or feed off the creative energy of the guest artists and collaborators?

Totally. Totally. Totally. That's the way I like to make a record, and we've always done that because we started out as a band where, even when we were playing in the local bar in the neighborhood, there would be our friend who plays flute sitting in the audience.

We'd call her up and ask her to play with us. We had a friend who used to sit in on congas, and friends who would sing harmonies, friends who could sing a song during

our set.

So, we just came from that kind of experience of sharing music. That's the most exciting part of making a record, to me, is when people come and add their stuff. It just turns into something totally different.

When we sent the songs to Sheryl Crow, that part she put on "Cold Beer and Remote Control" just blew my mind. I said, “God, that is so good."

Did you just send her a tape, and say this is what we've got, what do you want to throw on there?

Yeah, we give some guidelines, but she just came up with the notes and stuff herself. Most everybody else actually comes to the studio, like Garth Hudson [of The Band] flew down. First we went to Woodstock and recorded the basic tracks for "Gone Again," but then he came down.

Emily Saliers, left, and Amy Ray

He's a genius and he'll fiddle around with the keyboard part and play it, and just try different things, and we get something that is just astounding. I mean, he's Garth Hudson. Or Joan Osborne, who's a great, great, great harmony singer as well as a great lead singer.

There are some simpler acoustic pieces on the album, but you also worked at having Such a fuller sound, too, on this recording. How does it affect you playing this music live when you do it acousti-

cally, as you will be for the Cleveland show at Nautica? Will it be more difficult for you to perform this material onstage, when it's just the two of you and not a full band? It's not difficult for us. We toured that way in the spring. We played colleges and a bunch of shows, just me and Amy.

It may be difficult for some of the listeners, I guess. We arranged the songs together, just the two of us sitting across from each other in a room. So we're able to play them that way together.

I think it's fun for fans, I think, to hear the songs in their original stripped-down version. Some fans come and hear us play the songs with the band, which emulates the record a lot. Some fans come and hear us play it as a duo and it's just a different kind of experience.

You each bring your individual songs to the Indigo Girls music. Did you ever write together, the two of you?

No. We wrote one together a long, long time ago that really sucked. We wrote a song later together that was actually released on the Honor CD, on Amy's label that raises money for grassroots indigenous environmental groups.

But she started it and I finished it, so it wasn't really like sitting down together. We express ourselves differently. We have different vocal ranges.

Writing is a very vulnerable experience. I can't imagine writing the songs that I write with anybody else. I'm interested in cowriting but I think they're going to come out being different kinds of songs which is fine. We write at different times. Amy is much more nocturnal than I am. She can jam for hours and I get burned out really quickly. We have different styles, different approaches, different sensibilities.

When you bring a song to Amy and it's done as far as your writing, and you've decided musically where you want to go with it, you still need to sit down with Amy to work out the arrangements and figure out exactly what instruments go on the track. So the finished song is still very much a collaborative effort?

It's very collaborative actually because there are songs that I wrote originally, that now I can't even hear them without hearing Amy's parts. The songs are just better because Amy is on them.

It's a weird thing. There is a transitional period where you've written a song and you've sung it by yourself and all of a sudden, there's Amy's parts being added onto it, or there are my parts going on her songs.

For the writer, it's a little bit of an adjustment but then after a while, when she starts singing it, if you're very careful about picking things that you think heighten the song, then after a while, you can't hear the song any other way. There is so much more collaboration than people ever realize.

What do you think are the major factors why the Indigo Girls have enjoyed such a long and successful career?

Well, just as far as the two of us being able to work together. We have a very strong friendship, a lot of respect for each other. Definitely, our differences are our strengths, to use the cliché, because it keeps us interesting for us as well as our fans. I think if we were similar musically, we wouldn't have the life that we have..

For me, because Amy's music can be so different from mine and her lyrics are different and I get to sing on her songs, it's like having two musical lives. I think we make every effort to make it as fresh as possible, like we change the set list every night, work really hard making the records, try to keep stuff out there for the fans that's interesting for them, not letting anything slide by, so we're very vigilant about our careers . . . and its fun.

There's a lot of good fortune thrown in there too, I have to say. I'm having as much fun as I've ever had.

Speaking of fun, what still excites you about your life as an artist and a musician? What makes you want to get up out of bed in the morning, and get on the bus and go to Cleveland or wherever?

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