16 studio albums, and over 15 million records sold, Indigo Girls continue to blaze the trail for generations of Queer artists in the mainstream. The Grammy-winning duo of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray began their career in clubs and bars around their native Atlanta, GA amidst a blossoming alternative music scene before signing to Epic Records in 1988. Indigo Girls’ eponymous major label debut sold over two million copies under the power of singles “Closer to Fine” and “Kid Fears” and introduced the duo’s signature harmonies and powerful, sophisticated songs to a dedicated, enduring global audience.
Indigo Girls was the first of six consecutive Gold and/or Platinum-certified albums. On their latest record, the Indigo Girls tell their origin story. 2020’s Look Long, is stirring and eclectic collection of songs that finds the duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers chronicling their personal upbringings with more specificity and focus than they have on any previous song-cycle. These eleven songs have a tender, revealing motion to them, as if they’re feeding into a Super 8 film projector, illuminating a darkened living room. “We’re fallible creatures shaped by the physics of life,” says Saliers. “We’re shaped by our past; what makes us who we are? And why?” The two songwriters are tackling the mechanisms of perspective. In this moment of delirious upheaval, Look Long considers the tremendous potential of ordinary life and suggests the possibility that an honest survey of one’s past and present, unburdened by judgement, can give shape to something new—the promise of a way forward. With the energy of an expanding, loyal audience beneath their feet, a weather eye toward refinement, and an openness to redefinition, Indigo Girls exemplify that promise.“We joke about being old, but what is old when it comes to music? We’re still a bar band at heart,” says Saliers. “While our lyrics and writing approach may change, our passion for music feels the same as it did when we were 25 years old.”
Committed and uncompromising activists, Saliers and Ray work on issues like racial justice and reproductive rights (Project Say Something), immigration reform (El Refugio), LGBTQ advocacy, education (Imagination Library), death penalty reform, and Native American rights, (First Peoples Fund).
“As time has gone on, our audience has become more expansive and diverse, giving me a sense of joy,” remarks Saliers. Recently, “Closer to Fine” featured prominently in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film Barbie and introduced Indigo Girls’ music to a new generation of listeners. Released in 2024, their critically-acclaimed documentary Indigo Girls: It’s Only Life After All (directed by Alexandria Bombach) blends 40 years of home movies, raw film archive, and intimate present-day verité into a heartfelt career retrospective. A New York Times Critic’s Pick, the documentary premiered opening night at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023 and went on to screen at SXSW, Tribeca Film Festival, and Hot Docs before releasing to Netflix.
While Rolling Stone describes them as “ideal duet partners,” Indigo Girls’ live performances aren’t so much duets as they are community experiences—massive group singalongs together with their audience. To hear those collective singing voices raise into one and overpower even the band itself, one realizes the importance Indigo Girls’ music has in this moment. In an increasingly-terrifying present, we are all in search of a daily refuge, a stolen hour or two, when we engage with something that brings us joy, perspective, or maybe just a sense of peace. As one bar band once put it, “We go to the doctor, we go to the mountains...we go to the Bible, we go through the work out.” For millions, they go to the Indigo Girls: a creative partnership certain of its bearings, forging a way forward.
