Indigo Girls – Look Long
Rounder Records – 22 May 2020
Recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, Indigo Girls’ 16th album sets out to underline that, as Emily Saliers says, they’re “still a bar band at heart”, not only reunited with producer John Reynolds, who helmed 1999’s Come On Now Social but also the same band, with Reynolds on drums, Clare Kenny on bass, keyboardist Carole Isaacs, cellist Caroline Dalea, guitarist Justin Adams, joined by longtime violinist Lyris Hung and Lucy Wainwright Roche and Lucy Jules as backing vocalists.
Clearly not giving a toss about mainstream radio play, they open with a track titled Shit Kickin’, a funky scratchy guitar, clavinet and bass groove underpinning a number about the realities of growing up in the South with its prejudices in the rap-like delivery of “Walking past the old men/get a load of that tomboy” as they declare “Damn that trickery/it got the best of me…I’m gonna tear it down and start again”.
With its gently cascading chords, arpeggiating piano and strummed acoustic guitars, the title track takes the tempo down, their voices here a croon as the lyrics take a nostalgic turn, Saliers recalling her grandparents, her grandfather’s telescope through which they saw ‘forever’ on starry nights and how her grandmother gave them drinks in her “Apollo Mission glasses / etched in red, white, and blue commemoration”, the song, a declaration of how, even though “everyone I know can sense Armageddon”, she will “always love my troubled nation”.
Switching musical styles again, steel drums give Howl At The Moon a calypso lilt, a song about personal liberation and letting your inner wolf run free of the boundaries that hold you back, an idea that is also manifest in the dreamy, string-laden Emmylou-ish Country Radio as Saliers sings “I wanna be that boy / I wanna be that girl / I wanna know what it’s like to fall in love like most of the rest of the world” and how she’s “just a gay kid who loves country radio”.
Earlier, a particular highlight is When We Were Writers, reflecting on Saliers’ time at Tulane University in New Orleans, including a reference to a concert she attended (“Neville’s singing on a makeshift stage/ you sittin’ on a towel in the shade“), on a song that speaks of the fire of youthful passions and ideals and how these still blaze all these years later in the lines “When we were writers when we were fighters/ Before we found purpose and made deals with God/ Let’s pull an all-nighter push wood in the fire/ It might just look like smoke in my eyes, but I’m still burning inside”. The song also reflects on the decision to pursue the queer life unlike those who sailed “the calmer seas serial monogamy”, ignoring “the slings and arrows”, and how the “Best trip I ever took was on the ship that I wrecked and how I got set free“, regardless the personal cost.
Sounding like The Bangles, driven by Saliers’ guitar, Change My Heart is another uptempo rock cut that brings together physics and politics as “the four fundamental forces came to play/In the American schism”, then things get skitterish on percussion for the breezy power pop of K.C. Girl and its tale of app relationships, with a similar catchy approach being taken on the bubbling melody lines of Muster, although the song itself has a darker lyrical context being written in response to America’s gun-violence as Ray sings “Is this the best we could muster/Custer or just prayers for the slain/I wanna get this right and not the same ole thing”.
Wah-wah guitar effects open Feel This Way Again, their voices intermingling on a Salier song about enjoying the exuberance and promise of being young, a number that feels somehow right sat next to Favorite Flavor, a jittery organ-backed funky number that apparently developed out of a call and response game between Ray and her young daughter, the title referring to the sweets kept in a jar on her desk, although the lyrics take on a dimension about political divisions.
It ends on a particularly poignant note with Saliers’ Sorrow and Joy, a piano-led sway-along written in memory of her late younger sister, who died when she was just 29, frozen in time while “some of us got to go on with our lives, the ones who leave home are the ones who did not”, as she sings about the bittersweet emotions of seeing her school picture staring back at her.
The world, both theirs and the external, has seen some seismic changes since they last released an album together and, as the title suggests, this album is often an observation and reflection on those. They are still the bar-band they claim to be at heart, you really should grab a beer and celebrate their return to the saloon.
Look Long will be available everywhere May 22 on Rounder Records.