The Countermelodies That Changed Us: A Lifetime Of Loving Indigo Girls
Turning the Tables is NPR's ongoing multi-platform series dedicated to recentering the popular music canon on voices that have been marginalized, underappreciated, or hidden in plain sight. In 2020, we will publish an occasional series looking closely at the careers of significant women in music, treasured albums or significant scenes. Find all Turning the Tables content here.
Are you an Emily or an Amy? Few mainstream fans of the Indigo Girls would even consider that question, but for the lesbians over age 40 who love them, it's an elemental personality test. The duo, which releases its 16th studio album Look Long tomorrow, has been together for 35 years. Early publicity materials established an enduring impression of the contrast between them – like this bio, written three years before their self-titled 1989 album: "Amy's songs are gutsy, powerful and upbeat. Emily's are lyrical, jazzy and more ballad-like."
Like a lot of baby butches in the '90s, I wanted to be like Amy: an aloof yet accessible alpha butch whose salt-of-the-earth zeal, both political and emotional, broke a lot of guitar strings, and presumably a lot of hearts. But in my own heart, the one I wear on my sleeve, I knew that I was at core an Emily: a formally skilled sentimentalist with a deft touch for finely wrought love songs, a sensualist with a penchant for the good things in life like food and literature. Though the "Emily and Amy dialectic" might initially present itself as neatly divided, all the gradients and the inevitable syntheses between the two are what ultimately matters. Thinking about what it means to be part Emily and part Amy, and how those identities or stances both merge and diverge, gave many women a way to understand themselves along the lines of what the radical feminist poet Adrienne Rich called "the lesbian continuum."
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. During the festival's original run between 1997 and 1999, 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.
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. 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. But even though Emily and Amy have been together forever, they are not, nor have they ever been, romantic partners.
Such information doesn't bear repeating for those of us who have carried their music like touchstones for most of our gay adult lives. 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.
