Think of the Indigo Girls, and loud electric rock probably doesn’t come to mind. But there will be some of that when the duo of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray hit Medford’s Chevalier Theater on Thursday and Saturday, on their first full-band tour in many years.
They’re touring “Look Long,” the album they released in March 2020. “We had the band tour all planned and ready to go before COVID hit,” Saliers said this week. “A lot of our arrangements have to do with who is producing, and who we invite to play with us at the time. But for us, (playing rock) is the most natural thing in the world; Amy has done punk albums and her main writing instrument is electric guitar. Most people think of us as a folk band, and the acoustic elements are always there– but we’re really more of a mishmosh band. A mishmosh with a little pigeonholing.”
The duo writes nearly all their songs separately, with Saliers often pigeonholed as the more sensitive and Ray as the tougher one. “You can’t really articulate how it works, but we do tend to rub off on each other. Usually Amy writes about whatever she wants, I do the same thing and then we get together and arrange them, and it becomes quite melded. Even on the harder rocking songs which put me in her arena, and vice versa. But Amy is writing more ballads now and I’m writing harder songs than I ever did, so I’d say we inspire and influence each other.”
As always, the songs on the current album take on a variety of personal and social/political issues. Saliers wrote an especially resonant one with “When We Were Writers,” which looks back at the passions of a young wordsmith. “I was thinking back at my college days and how it felt to be sitting in my dorm room writing five songs a day, listening endlessly to Joni Mitchell. So that song is about writing as a metaphor for passions in life. It’s also a bit of a travelogue through relationships, wrecking them and finding your way.”
The more topical songs, she says, are usually written for personal reasons. “We write through the experiences we’ve had with out own activism, whether its queer rights or indigenous communities. A lot of them are very immediate in their emotionality and their critique of what’s going on. Speaking personally, I never think about who the song is going to reach when I’m writing it, we just write about the things that really move us.”
One song they’ll always play is Saliers’ “Closer to Fine,” which remains their biggest mainstream hit. “It’s become a real hootenanny song, every night the audience sings a verse, or whoever opened the show does one. That’s what still makes it fun to play at every single show. Obviously it was a song that landed at the right time, it was the one the record company chose to promote when there were other women with guitars getting signed. I think it’s a good song, maybe not a brilliant song. I’ve written better ones.”
A film about the duo, “It’s Only Life After All,” premiered at Sundance this year and will be in general distribution soon. “(Director) Alexandria Bombach didn’t want to make it a typical biopic, so a lot of it is about our interpersonal struggles. One thing that surprised me was the vulnerability hangover I had. When you reveal that much, you start thinking ‘Whoa, it’s out there now’– but that’s how Amy and I have always been. The other thing the movie did was to increase my love for our fans and our community. I don’t need to watch it again to look at two hours of myself.”