Indigo Girls — All That We Let In (CD)

 

Sound: B     Music: C+

 

 

It was an impossible love.  I knew that all very well, yet, in my teens, a high school student on the lookout for new and exciting experiences, eager for love and adventure, I fell passionately, foolishly in love with the Indigo Girls.  I stumbled upon their femme folk while innocently reading a magazine article concerning REM.  I’m ashamed to say now that it was probably in an issue of Rolling Stone (was I ever so young and naïve that I eagerly gobbled up every bright, shiny issue of that trend peddling travesty of a music magazine?).  The lads from Athens, GA had just guested on a couple of tracks for the eponymous second album by something called Indigo Girls.  Naturally, I immediately sought out said album.  Yes, there was a time when Michael Stipe was a tastemaker.  Ah, crazy days!

 

And such a strong record it was.  Song after song kept me riveted.  “Kid Fears”, “Prince of Darkness”, “Closer to Fine”, guitars were strummed fiercely, and those voices swirling around each other so beautifully.  The silk and sandpaper vocals of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray shot arrows at my racing adolescent heart. With each new album the experience repeated itself.  Emily Saliers wrote songs that seemed lifted from every hidden diary ever kept.  Her songs were, at times, painfully intimate, like a Virginia Woolf determined to sink herself in Rock-N-Roll rivers, the stones in her pockets, heavy guitar picks.  Amy Ray was the wild one, growling out of dark folky forests she stumbled onto to honky-tonk stages, a slug of whiskey caught permanently in her throat and the shadow of Pearl era Janis tattooed to her breast. 

 

I was smitten.  They were scheduled to stop where I live on their Nomads Indians Saints tour.  I stood in line for tickets and scored some choice seats, but when concert day came I fell ill.  Burning with hysterical fevers I flopped around in my sickbed while the women I loved were on stage.  I missed it!  Damn you, cruel fate!   Never would I be able to gaze upon the lovely ladies of the nascent alt-folk scene.  Actually, I probably could have caught their act a year later when they came back around, but by then my fickle teenage heart had moved on to new loves.  I continued listening to the albums.  Rites of Passage was, I thought then, and still do today, their strongest album.  Swamp Ophelia was where it all came to an end between me and the Indigo Girls.  It was a pretty good record, and Amy Ray in particular was in fine form, but I had lost interest.

 

It happens all the time.  There are bands that come along in our lives at specific moments and they just click with us.  I’m not talking about the bands we carry with us throughout the course of our lives.  Bands like The Beatles, or The Velvet Underground, or The Beach Boys (choose your own Bands That I Live My Life With here to make the analogy work for you) are always there with us.  As we grow and, in some cases, mature our relationships to these bands; also continue to grow and mature.  I know that five years from now I will have a different and deeper connection with The Velvets third album.  Ten years from now Pet Sounds will undoubtedly be saying new and important things to me.  But the Indigo Girls will always be a snapshot of who I was back in high school at the time I first listened to them.  For me they are tied to a specific time and do not relate to me now.

 

And that is exactly the experience I have had listening to their new CD All That We Let In.  It’s a musical experience caught in amber.  This could easily be one of their albums from the early ‘90s.  Amy Ray’s “Dairy Queen” could be an outtake from Swamp Ophelia.  Emily Saliers’ Fill It Up Again could easily have shown up on Nomads Indians Saints.  If you’ve heard those earlier albums, then you’ve heard this one.  That’s not to say All That We Let In is a bad album, it’s just the same old album that I listened to years ago while working on my trigonometry homework.  I guess the problem is, I’m not the same.

 

Listening to the new Indigo Girls CD was like running into an old girlfriend and stopping for coffee together to catch up. And while listening to this woman whom you loved when she was younger, the revelation of her life since you pushing along the conversation, two things happen to you.  First, you warmly recognize what you first fell for in her.  And second, you realize she hasn’t changed at all.  She’s still the same girl who stayed after class to write letters for Amnesty International, and she’s still the girl who shocked her parents by going vegan.  But, and you get a little wistful here, she’s no longer the girl who made your heart feel like it was going to explode in your chest when she held your hand late at night.  It’s nice to see her again after all this time, but you understand that when you left her you did the right thing by both you and her.

 

So there you go.

 

Oh, one more thing. There is a limited edition of All That We Let In that includes a bonus DVD of the Indigo Girls performing the new songs at The Bottom Line in New York City [Bonus DVD Picture: C+     Sound: B-     Extras: D].  They play a pretty good set to an appreciative audience of what appears to be thirty-somethings who haven’t heard the clang of an electric guitar since their college days.  I still would have liked to have seen them way back when, but now I don’t feel quite so bad about the whole thing.

 

 

-   Kristofer Collins