After more than 30 years of telling the truth in harmony, the Indigo Girls are still pulling off the impossible: staying inspired. "We're not trying to be what people expect us to be," Amy Ray says, and on their album Look Long, they make good on that declaration. With a B-52s-meets-Burt-Bacharach vibe, a sense of unburdened exploration, and a lowkey reunion of their Come On Now Social band, the record sounds like freedom—tempered, of course, by age, grief, politics, and the kind of insight that only comes with time.
“You get into patterns,” Emily Saliers says. “Nobody tells us what an Indigo Girls song should be. We do that to ourselves.” So on Look Long, they made a conscious decision: no boundaries. They brought in producer John Reynolds—who also worked on Come On Now Social—and basically said, “Do your weird thing.” He did. Before the band even arrived in the studio, he had already laid down beat frameworks. “We didn’t even know what he was doing,” Amy laughs. “But then ‘Howl at the Moon’—which I wrote as a folk song—suddenly had this whole rhythm track and I was like, ‘Okay, wow. We’re doing this.’”
They were doing it with old friends, too: Justin Adams, Carol Isaacs, Claire Kenny, and Carolyn Dale, who all backed them up back in the day when they were sharing stages with Sinéad O’Connor and making Come On Now Social in a haze of late-‘90s feminist fury. “It’s basically a reunion,” Emily says, “just with better tea service.”
But even with all the familiar faces, the songwriting digs deep into unfamiliar territory—or at least unspoken territory. There's grief: “Sorrow and Joy” is the first time Emily has been able to write about her sister’s death. There’s nostalgia: “When We Were Writers” turns a reflective ache into an anthem, complete with the line “Maybe you see smoke in my eyes, but I’m still burning inside.” And there’s urgency. “There’s no lack of energy,” Amy says. “In fact, there’s so much I can’t get it all in.”
If the duo sounds more fired up than fatigued, it's because they’ve figured out how to work smart. “We tour humanely,” Emily says. “Not easy, but manageable. That leaves us something in the reserve tank.” That reserve tank fuels both their songwriting and their activism, two sides of the same coin in the Indigo Girls universe. “There are so many things to be angry about,” Amy says. “If you’re paying attention, you’re never going to run out of material.”
And they’re paying attention. Look Long arrives in the thick of a global pandemic, which, if nothing else, gave Earth a minute to breathe. “This could’ve been a reset,” Emily says, wistfully. “People started eating everything on their plate because they didn’t want to go to the grocery store. That’s a kind of change, right?” But she’s not optimistic. “Once the economy kicks back in, people have short-term memories.”
Amy’s not exactly brimming with hope either. “I’m a little jaded,” she says, “but this is the time. We could’ve been building a Green New Deal. Instead, we’re bailing out oil companies. It’s devastating.”
Still, somehow, the fire burns. They still want to make albums. Still want to play live. Still want to write songs that don’t fit in anyone’s box, even their own. “As long as I’m observing life, there’s something to write about,” Emily says. “And I love life so much,” Amy adds, “that it aches. I look back at being a kid and riding a dirt bike in the woods and I want to go back. But the thing is, I’m still that kid. And the world’s still limitless.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
