Entertainment, Music - Army Times

Indigo Girls still rocking after nearly 30 years

After nearly 30 years of playing music together, it’s not always easy for the Indigo Girls to choose a set list.

“It’s harder and harder,” says Emily Saliers, one half of the folk-rock duo. “There’s so much to choose from. ... When we eat dinner together, that’s when we make our set list. We do that after sound check everyday, and we always make a new one. It just keeps it fresh for us and for the audience.”

Saliers and Amy Ray, the other half of the group, are currently on a limited tour nationwide, and they expect to dig deep into a catalog reaching back to the 1980s.

“We do a balance of old and new, so we’ll do a few songs from the latest record, but we’ll also do songs from — typically — each of the records,” Saliers says. “It’s mostly an up-tempo set with a few ballads thrown in. ... It’s just the two of us.”

And it’s been the two of them for a long time. Long enough to watch the popularity of countless other musical groups peak and fade, long enough to realize that their differences may be their greatest assets.

“From the very beginning, Amy had a lower voice and I had a higher voice, and she was more of an aggressive guitar player and I was more of a picker,” Saliers says.

“Those different influences that came to play, I think, made our music more interesting as a whole. ... There are so many factors that have to do with being different from each other that have kept us, ironically, together this long.”

The divergences between Saliers and Ray extend beyond music into lifestyle. For instance, Saliers is a city girl and Ray prefers the country.

“We’re completely different from each other in every way possible, and I think that’s what has made it interesting for both of us,” Saliers says. “What Amy does, I can’t do and vice versa. So we add something unique to the group. We also write separately, so we’ve had creative freedom.”

That said, the two musicians always arrange Indigo Girls tunes together.

“It’s kind of an odd combination of an absolute need to write alone, but a gift at arranging together,” Saliers says.

Saliers and Ray’s yin and yang relationship dates back to childhood when they attended the same schools while growing up in Georgia.

“We became friends in high school, even though we’d known each other before that because we were both in the chorus,” Saliers says. “She was playing guitar and I was playing guitar, and we were both songwriters. So we knew that about each other. Then, when we became friends, it was just like the most natural thing in the world to get together and play music.”

Although they approached music differently — Saliers is more of a traditional folk artist and Ray is heavily influenced by rock — they immediately clicked, Saliers says.

“It was so much fun, and we just wanted to keep on doing it,” Saliers says. “We started learning cover songs and eventually putting our own songs into our repertoire. Our first concert was for our AP English class. Then we both, after that, got fake IDs and started playing out in bars.”

Nearly 30 years later, they’re still at it, only now with a national following and a string of folk-rock hits under their belts. Their first single, “Closer to Fine,” helped propel the Indigo Girls’ self-titled, major label debut to the top 30 and a Grammy Award for best contemporary folk recording of 1989. Their 1990 follow-up wasn’t as popular, but it was nominated for a Grammy and went gold nonetheless. From that start, the group has continued to produce top-selling albums and popular tunes, including “Galileo,” “Power of Two,” “Shame on You” and “Hammer and a Nail.”

Their latest CD, “Despite Our Differences,” makes an obvious reference to dissimilarities between the musicians.

“That’s from a line in a song of mine that’s actually just a love song,” Saliers says, “but it’s meant to describe the blatant differences between me and Amy.”

Saliers says the title was also meant to call attention to the current state of the world.

“It’s a shout out to the fact that even though we may be different from our neighbors in this way or that, we can co-exist, and we can have diplomacy, and we can not kill each other just because we’re different,” Saliers says. “That’s our hope for the world and that went into the thinking behind naming the record.”