Ahead of a mighty rare UK tour, including only their second Welsh show in nearly 40 years, Amy Ray – who, with Emily Saliers, comprises big-hearted folk-rock duo Indigo Girls – speaks to Emma Way about interacting with their fanbase, the mainstreaming of queerness and being captured in documentary form.
How do you go about picking out songs from 40 years’ worth of material for a live show?
Amy Ray: Well, it’s hard. If we’re playing somewhere like Wales, you know, where we don’t get to play very much at all, we think about that. We think about the songs that people really want to hear and try to mix that in with newer stuff that we want to play. We want to play all of it!
We try to mix it in with newer songs from our newer record, which just came out. It’s hard – a lot of the time, we wait until we get there and see what people are asking for in other places. When we get over to the UK, as far as what people want to hear – and what people have heard – we’ll probably be able to tell a lot more after our first gig. We usually just get a feel for the place: every show is different. Or we’ll get a Facebook message, Instagram messages – if anybody from that area says, you know, play this or that, we look at those too. So kind of a combination of all that!
And you must meet a lot of people as well. What’s your favourite story someone shared with you because of your music?
Amy Ray: Oh, there are so many. So many stories! The favourites, for me, are usually people who have used our music to create community or heal a relationship that was broken with their parents – or their siblings, or a friend. Or we hear stories where [our music] brought people closer together.
Or stories where someone was inspired to go do work in the nonprofit world, helping other people in other communities, and making the world a better place. Those stories are really so good because it feels like you’re joining in the effort to improve the world and bring joy and hope. When people feel that, and they continue to pass it on, that feels really good.
Was that why you always wanted to be transparent in your music from the beginning?
Amy Ray: We were so young when we started that we didn’t necessarily know what we wanted to communicate, beyond just having a good time. We always knew we wanted it to be joyful: an experience for everybody. I think we were invested in creating community, but I don’t think we really knew how to articulate that. It was something that we had learned from other people, or in my case, I went to church a lot. So I learned a lot of good things, along with the bad things.
I think it’s something that, over the years, we learned how to articulate. Something was kind of innate within us: the idea that it should not just be about you and your ego, but about the other people we’re playing with. People having a good time, but also having provocative songs. Those are always things that we held from our upbringing, and now we can articulate that better… but we really haven’t changed that much. We still have the same approach and are inspired by the same thing, which is just the idea of everybody being individuals. We’re all unique, and we’re all worthy of love and respect. That’s how we feel. And so our audience, to us, is the same thing.
You say you feel you haven’t changed – but have you felt like you’ve witnessed representation change in your audiences over that time?
Amy Ray: For us, it depends on the city and the time period in our career because we’ve been touring for 40 years. It’s about how much visibility there was for gay people or queer people, and how much our music might have crossed over into a mainstream audience – because we had a lot of radio play.
An interesting thing, that I have definitely noticed over time, is that we had a lot of support from the women’s community, from the beginning, and then a lot of support from the queer community. Then our college friends. So it was an audience of college kids, and then community people and some queer people. But at one point or other, there were straight people who felt like they couldn’t come to the show because it would be too gay or something! And now [Indigo Girls audiences are] more mixed, in some ways, because people feel more open about accepting other people. The people that might have felt alienated, or scared of the association, they don’t have the same fears anymore. They’re not ashamed to go to a show where people talk about it. Mainstream people are more comfortable coming now.
I mean, that’s the experience in the United States, you know – openness has really increased. Just kind of a flipside of what you expect, but it brings people together and makes people more comfortable with each other.
An Indigo Girls documentary movie, It’s Only Life After All, came out earlier this year. Were you at all reluctant to see a film made about you because of those things that you mentioned?
Amy Ray: That didn’t make us feel reluctant – but we didn’t want it to be only focused on us. We wanted it to be more about the greater community and how we all grew up together, and we had not met anybody that wanted to make a film which had that approach. So when we met the filmmaker, Alexandria Bombach, we felt she was the right person, and it just felt like the right time.
And this year has also seen the release of Glitter & Doom, the Indigo Girls jukebox movie! What kind of direct involvement did you and Emily have in its making?
Amy Ray: The songs in that movie are songs that we already wrote. We had a really amazing producer that took different pieces of the songs and created mashups with them. So somebody else did all that legwork! I am working on a song for the end credits. For us, writing for anything else is always a good challenge. Emily is actually working on a couple of musicals, and she really likes to do that – it’s a completely different thing which she does on her own, with other collaborators besides me.
We do our own thing. We do Indigo Girls, and then we do other projects on our own. I do a lot of solo music; I have a punk band and a country band. Emily is working on these two different musicals, and she also does a lot of co-writing with people in Nashville, and tries to just challenge herself.
Indigo Girls, Tramshed, Cardiff, Sat 19 Aug.
Tickets: ÂŁ27.50. Info: here
words EMMA WAY