Another quiet Friday. What a wonderful sentence fragment! Ordinarily — OK, sometimes, if I caught it — I’d rewrite that. There’s no need to do anything to that sentence (fragment) in the lovely part of the middle of June. So I’m leaving it.
It’s a Friday.
It’s the countermelodies. To hear those you have to learn words. Then you can really hear the countermelodies. From there, you can get to whatever earnest thing that draws you into the emotional aspect of music. To me, what jumps up has always been the intensity and the vulnerability. The through-line for both is an unforgiving sort of sincerity. And that’s what you find in the countermelodies.
Why, yes, I am going to get another week or so of playing songs from this concert. This is a good thing. Anyway, here’s the song most people think of as their first Indigo Girls song. It was a 1994 folk-pop crossover hit, to be sure, on an album that went platinum and peaked at number nine on the US charts. The video received a lot of MTV airplay.
Probably I’ve only just described people like me. Their first four albums earned two golds and three certified platinum designations. Those successes notwithstanding, this was another opportunity for more people to walk in. I clearly had a lot of catching up to do, I did, and it was great.
When bands play their signature songs, these sometimes-iconic anthems, these we-burn-it-down-if-this-isn’t-in-the-setlist hits, I often try to think back to what it was like to hear it for the first time. It’s a silly little mind game. It’s just a song. Sometimes they are modest hits, sometimes bigger than that. But the meaning that comes along with them comes along over time. Listen to how The Ryman responded when Emily Saliers plucks the first few strings there. They didn’t do that the first time they heard it. There’s, now, almost 30 years of meaning and enthusiasm in that song.
I just learned something trivial and interesting. In 2020, The Indigo Girls became the first duo to reach the Billboard Top 200 in five different decades. Each one builds on the last. Body of work and all of that. It started before 1994, but for me it started, right there, with that song, in 1994.
