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You had too much to dream?

Good title.

Hmm!

- My finger's off the strings. - What's going on?

I'll do it right this time, ready?

I think we should record the song talking

and everything and goofing around. Ready?

- No. - I'm not serious.

I think we should go.

Are you all casual, Emily?

Uh, yes.

You don't have anything like...

Nothing dressy.

- Nope. - Will it matter if...?

I honestly don't think it'll matter

'cause it's just you and me, you know, the way we are.

My friend Teague gave me this shirt.

Look at that thing. Sleeveless Western shirt.

Is that the craziest thing you've ever seen?

Who would wear that? Me.

I would wear that.

Right. And how do you decide

about posing for your picture, for your albums and stuff?

- Bleh. - Oh, we don't decide,

we just, it's random.

- Just look at the camera. - It's very random.

- It's not fun. - Do a picture pose for us.

That's the picture pose.

I'm always supposed to look heavenward.

And then if we have to change positions,

I'll go something like this.

This is cool.

I think they're in style.

What, motorcycle vests?

- Reflective vests. - Oh, really? Oh.

Yeah, like...

So again, reminding everybody

that I'm starting really weird and artsy,

and we can get as clean as we need to.

It's nice to have something different.

Really nice.

Well I always get nervous 'cause sometimes people

just don't want all the weird stuff.

I like it. Do you like it?

Yeah, I pretty much love what Jeremy does.

- Me too. - Whatever it is.

- That means a lot. - You look good, Amy.

Cathy's like, "That's too '80s." The '80s are in.

How about the '90s though?

- How about them '90s? - How about them '90s?

Man, if I get to be in an Indigo Girls documentary,

that would make my college dreams come true.

What about your middle-aged man dreams?

I'm still a fan. No.

Like I'm obviously still a fan,

but they changed my life in college.

Fell in love to the Indigo Girls.

Hey, I was a baby and so were y'all.

- That's right. - We were all babies.

...94 in Atlanta. Again, the hot, humid weather.

Let's pay a visit to the big noise out of Georgia.

A folkish new female duo called the Indigo Girls.

Be advised, this is not folk music for wimps.

The Indigo sound is intense, it is hypnotic,

and we'll see if it captivates you.

Our next guests are natives of Atlanta, Georgia.

- Grammy-award winning duo... - Please welcome Indigo Girls!

I'm in love with them just like you are.

Here they are, the Indigo Girls! Whoo!

They're also tireless activists

for causes ranging from gun control to indigenous rights,

to, more recently, the removal of Confederate monuments.

You've both been out and proud since the early '90s.

This was a very different time.

There were not a lot of openly gay public figures.

But your roots are all about live performance,

and it's always a very connected experience.

They helped me understand who I was

and who I wanted to be.

The Indigo Girls completely saved my life.

Oh, I love green!

I love green. Should I sit in it?

- Yeah! - This is very exciting.

- You ready? - Hi, we're the Indigo Girls.

- Well, we should introduce ourselves. - Okay.

Should we introduce ourselves? Name by name?

- Okay. - Hi, I'm Emily.

- And I'm Amy. - And we're the Indigo Girls.

And you're watching VH1.

- I watch it too. - That okay?

So, do you want me to just, like, not talk

and just pretend I'm alone?

Yeah, do whatever you would do.

Well, when people are around,

I'm so Southern that I feel bad about not engaging.

Yeah.

Tomorrow's recycling day.

But this is all Indigo stuff in here.

Got tapes and videos and film and all sorts of archives.

So I have like, tons of posters,

and, like, things like, um, like gold records.

You know, stuff like that.

And then I have these DVD kind of tapes.

Okay.

Oh, my god, I have, like, so many different formats.

2013.

'Cause I used to basically

carry a camera around everywhere we went.

By the way, that's Amy behind the camera.

Hi, how you doing? Who's this for?

Are we videotaping while we're doing this?

We're documenting for our futures.

Oh, good, this is like the rockumentary.

It's Spinal Tap, instead, it's the Indigo Girls.

I really didn't think, like, we're taping everything,

and one day, it's all going to be used.

I thought more like, if I ever have kids,

they'll be able to see our lives.

I'm so thankful that Amy captured so much of our career.

It's really fabulous.

But I have no idea what are in those archives.

I hate those things.

You're in this song?

You don't like these things?

I think there's some things that should just fade off

into oblivion and not be documented.

It does fade off into oblivion. It stays...

Is that one of those tapes that self-destruct?

Well, it stays in my apartment, that's about the same thing.

You're going to be sorry that you asked for this,

'cause it's a lot of shit.

What do you think this film is about?

Um... I don't know what the film is about.

It's kind of like, "I can't wait to see it,"

but I have no idea what it's going to be like.

What we understood was that you were going

to figure out what the story was

and we didn't have to worry about it.

I had to do that once!

So I don't know what it's about.

I mean, our hope was that it could be

about something besides just us.

This one is a song about liberation.

Whoo!

There's so much more to us that happens off the stage

that tells our story.

Are we supposed to be somewhere where we're not?

Yeah.

The important part of what we have experienced

is more about activism and actions

and just how you affect the people around you.

So that's why context is important.

From the context of the music business,

and what's going on in the world.

An estimated million people...

And the experience within the context of the community.

That was funky.

This is like one of the only times

we were ever in Rolling Stone.

I used to collect Rolling Stone magazines too,

when I was a kid, so it's fun to be in it.

Except that it's, um... kind of a boys', misogynist,

sometimes, magazine, but...

Oh, here we are. Look, even then.

They asked us to pose like that.

Baptism.

I mean, we didn't suggest it, I'll just say that.

But, like, people thought it was just kind of um...

I don't know, is there a category

that's lesbian Christian folk?

The fact that you're both lesbians,

but not together, so to speak, in a romantic way,

do people care about that?

Do they know about it? Is it part of the appeal?

Does it have any impact at all on your life and your music?

Yeah, it does.

I mean, it's the impact has changed through time,

how it impacts us, but we get a lot of support

from the queer community, and we appreciate that. Um...

It has held us back in many, many ways, you know,

but I think it's held us back just on radio, you know,

and in the media, but I think sexism is...

You mean, they wouldn't come and write about your albums?

The way they write about us, you know, as much as anything else.

It's more... it's more... it's more of the personality and the lifestyle

than it is the music, is that it?

Sometimes, or it's our audience, or it's just derogatory remarks,

or we can't get a break, sort of, but I think, you know,

I think it's sexism as much as homophobia, honestly,

- Right. - because we're two women that have images

that are not as glamorous, you know.

Like, I'm more masculine maybe,

and it's not the kind of woman that you necessarily

want to write about, or that is necessarily easy to image,

and so I think in that way, it's been hard,

but I think our political outspokenness

has been the biggest... the biggest hurdle...

- On what issues? - On anything, you know?

- Yeah, right. - It's like we're always, you know,

I think we're doing a lot of activism.

Whether it's the environment, or Iraq, or whether it's...

Gay rights, or pro choice, or it's...

Anti-death penalty.

- Yeah. - Yep.

Women who are outspoken and sort of earnest,

for rock critics that's a hard one, you know.

They can't get their head around it.

They can understand Rage Against the Machine,

but they don't understand the Indigo Girls.

Hello?

All right, so you're gonna creak through the straw

in the water, just like this.

Pick that up, up and down the scales.

- Hey, y'all! - Spokane!

When I look at Amy's and my trajectory,

it's kind of remarkable.

It's good to be back in Spokane.

It's good to be here!

All the time

and everything that we've been through.

You've been together for what, 35 years?

Well, we've been playing together

since we were 15 and 16.

So we've been playing together for 40 years.

Oh, my gosh.

Thank you, Amy.

And what is your writing process?

Because isn't it sort of you write separately

and then you don't try to interpret for each other?

Right. I write my songs, Amy writes hers,

and in the end we collaborate on the arrangements.

Here's a song by Emily.

Here's a song by the queen of rock and roll,

Miss Barefoot Amy Ray.

So we work on harmonies together, guitar parts,

instrument parts, and go in the studio

and work together on all the songs.

Is there ever a time where you go,

"No, Emily, I really think you should do it this way"?

- Sure! - Well, I mean, yeah.

She doesn't listen to me, but...

No, we give each other suggestions.

But usually only when asked.

I think we depend on each other for mutual support.

I don't want to paint a picture

that it's been rosy the whole way.

You know, when you have two completely different personalities,

there are tensions that arise.

We're so different.

I mean, we are... we are opposites in so many ways.

How does that work?

- She wears shorts, I wear... - I shop at the Gap.

Amy's vintage clothing store queen.

We're so different, but it's also what makes us, like, work.

Because we respect each other so much,

it's only just another texture we can have

and I think those contrasts are important.

What do you want your audience to feel?

What do you want them to experience?

Self-esteem.

Shared experience.

Okay, so basically, the song "Ghost" came out,

and I had to learn it,

and "Galileo" came out and I had to learn that.

And then I was like, oh, yeah, and I'm gay, and so...

I came out in 1997,

and their music helped me deal with that fact.

Discovered them when I was coming out.

Just to know that there was people out there

who were saying the things that you were feeling.

We spent a lot of good times rocking out to the Indigo Girls

and getting married to the Indigo Girls.

So we love you girls for that.

We're going 24 years strong, so...

I've been clean and sober 29 years now.

They were almost like this unspoken permission,

that it was okay to, like, let all that go.

And a lot of healing went on.

Probably the second third of my growing up.

And I think I'm just on the last third now so, finally.

I went through a divorce ten years ago,

and I, like, would blare the Indigo Girls

on Saturdays when I didn't have my kid with me.

And, you know, it's it- at times it's helped me survive

and made it so that I stayed here

and didn't, didn't check out.

And that's been true over the course of, you know,

the 30-plus years I've been listening to them.

So...

Growing up in the '90s, as a queer kid,

it was huge to have the Indigo Girls as role models.

It inspired me to pursue a career in music.

I sing opera now.

So it was, it's great.

I mean, just that message, inspiring message of,

of not only your accountability to the community,

but also to be who you are,

has really made a difference in my life.

Thank you so much for sharing.

You're welcome. Thank you.

We've heard many, many, many, many times that,

you know, "The Indigo Girls saved my life."

And I would imagine that it's hard to truly absorb that fact.

Do you believe it?

And is it something that you keep separate from you in a way?

We, we...

A lot of people say, have told us, you know,

their stories and...

I don't feel, uh... I don't feel ownership of that

when people tell us that.

I mean, I know we wrote the songs and I know...

The phenomenon to me of it is, it's not, it's not just us.

I mean, I know that's... I'm not trying to deflect it.

I really have this mystical opinion.

"1, 2, 3, 4".

I'm talking about synchronicity and like critical mass.

People feeling the same response to that song

at the same time and you just having this sense

that you're being held by something.

Music is such a mysterious force.

It's so physical. It's so in our bodies.

I know what it feels like to have music save you

at a particular time.

But I never feel, ah, I can write a song

that can change someone's life.

You know, it's never, never that, you know.

It's just music is so powerful, isn't it?

And your life hooked into our journey,

and we met in that journey.

And that is awesome.

One of our very favorite songwriters

and a great mentor of ours,

will you all please welcome Ferron.

The context of your song affects them too,

the people that mentored us.

Y'all please welcome to the stage Joan Baez!

The other people that are listening at the same time.

The person sending their friend a mixtape

and them sharing that song,

the sharing of that made it more powerful.

And that happened a lot with our music.

Our music wasn't just listened to

by one person in a vacuum.

And so you feel the embrace of more than just us.

You know you're not alone. That's really important.

Can we see? Can we see y'all?

Can we have lights? Yes, we can see y'all.

Yay!

- Good, hello way up there. - Beautiful.

It feels better if you know that there's actually people.

We felt detached for a little while.

Why do you think that people think

that you're dating?

Or have dated each other?

Probably just because we're two queer women.

And of course, we must have dated each other.

No, we've never dated.

We've never wanted to date.

There's never been an inkling.

It's like a chemical compound that won't compound.

We're both gay, and for a lot of people,

we were the only lesbians they knew, at first.

And so we must be together.

It's funny to me.

I've had people come up and they say, "Where's Amy?"

I'm like, "I don't know!"

Anybody who knows us personally...

...we laugh.

Even when I see a man and a woman

or two men in a band, I always think like...

Straight? Gay? Together or not?

Because it's just human curiosity.

We just, we love to put people in boxes.

And we feel really uncomfortable if we don't know.

Like, what is their gender and who do they sleep with?

And I want to get to a place in the world where,

like, it doesn't matter.

It's a person and that does not define them.

But I think we're a long way from that

because I even do that still.

Now I read that when you first met each other,

- you didn't get along. - Right.

I was perfectly willing to get along with Amy.

- It's her problem. - I was jealous.

How did it all come about?

How did you meet? Let's go back to...

Okay, we'll go back to it.

I grew up in Decatur, Georgia.

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut.

We were so sheltered.

My parents were good people.

But like, were just very conservative.

My family was progressive.

And we grew up talking about social issues.

And then when I was 10 or so, we moved to Atlanta.

It was like, "Where are we going?"

I noticed Amy right away

'cause I was in sixth grade, I think,

and she would have been in fifth.

And Amy was, well, she was

the other girl who played guitar.

And Amy always had a presence.

She was not brooding but quiet and strong.

And you know, and I was always like, "Laaaa!"

You know, it's funny, 'cause I considered her super popular.

You know, when she speaks about her time,

she doesn't think of herself that way.

She said that you were really popular.

In elementary school?

That's so funny.

I had this little group called the Blue Skies,

we used to sing about the clouds and the sun.

And I guess that really made Amy jealous or something.

I think I was blinded by my love for her.

And I think I just was like, enamored by this person

that's a year older, and she's playing guitar,

and writing all these songs,

and she's got all these friends,

and she seemed so intellectual and advanced.

And then we ended up going to the same high school in Atlanta.

And I was singing in the choir and then Amy joined the choir

and we got to be good buddies towards the end of high school.

Once we were in the chorus,

we were immediately drawn to each other.

And that could have been a queer thing.

I knew she played guitar and I play guitar

and one day we're like, "well, let's get together,"

and oh, my god, and then from that day forward...

When we started singing together,

I don't know what it was,

but it was just like an explosion went off

and I was like, "this is it."

We just talked and talked

and played and played and played

and we just, we never got tired of playing music together.

It was like a complete musical miracle for me.

And I felt like I had my place.

I mean, I really, I would say

that we were best friends.

Oh, yeah, I forgot this.

So these are all like cassettes.

Yeah, I've got rehearsal tapes from high school.

They're really like, they're really funny.

I don't even, I'm embarrassed to even listen to them

'cause we were just like so... young.

Take 16.

Take one, dancing shoes.

Well, let's be optimistic.

The sun always comes up.

Just think, Amy, now you're sitting in Florida

and you're listening to this tape

and I'm sitting back here at home

and having a bad time and missing you a lot.

- Say, hey Ms. Farmer. - Hey Ms. Farmer.

- Say, hey David. - Hey David.

- Say, hey Lisa. - Say, hey Lisa.

Okay.

- Da boo dah! - Okay, ready?

I can honestly say that music saved me in high school.

Oh, I forgot to introduce the song.

This is called "Song for Amy."

Or "Amy's Song," or something like that. Anyway...

It brought beauty to sort of

an excruciating social experience internally,

no matter how happy or popular I looked on the outside.

When you were a junior in high school,

of course, Emily was the senior so she was on her way out.

You've mentioned to me that it was almost like

you were chasing her in a way?

That's like the nature of Emily.

- Probably. - What do you mean?

People chasing her. You know? She's elusive.

I looked up to her and when she left high school,

we couldn't make music as much together.

That was hard for me.

I idolized her.

So I went off to Vanderbilt for one year

after I graduated from high school

and I was miserable there, I didn't fit in really.

You were either like a sorority girl or you were

a total, like, druggie and I was like ugh,

I was like the person that worked at the record store

and played racquetball as much as possible.

And I was very, like, lonely and depressed.

I was having trouble in my relationship

because it was so pressured by just us being gay

and she couldn't really come to terms with the gayness

and I could, just, there was so much shame around it.

That was like the discovery of shame.

I hated my body. I just I hated myself.

I was just a self-loathing time.

It blows your mind this is wrong to some people.

'Cause you think you're just in love

and then you're like, oh wow, no,

this is like, people think this is bad.

As soon as that bubble was burst

and you go from the idealism of your love

to like understanding that your parents don't approve,

their friends don't approve.

A lot of your friends are making fun of you.

You go to a college where everybody's

looking at you weird, then you turn on yourself.

That's internalized homophobia.

And you wrote the song "Blood and Fire"

while you were in Nashville?

Yeah, another one of my least favorite songs.

You know, I mean, I wrote that in, like, the midst of, like,

deep depression and self-destructive like,

literally cutting myself and,

you know, literally doing all that.

But when I sing it now,

I think, oh, my god, this is so narcissistic.

Like, it's not all about you.

Like, I say in the song, I mean, I felt intense about it, right?

I felt so dramatic about it.

And it's not that I don't feel that way.

I mean, I feel those things now.

I am still the same person that can feel

just as dark as that and just as self-destructive,

and it's not like I'm grown up, you know.

And so in that song, I feel like I could've just written it

just a slightly bit better,

would've been some kind of reaching out.

And I just wasn't old enough.

And I wasn't good enough at songwriting to do that.

One thing that can heal you is to reach outside of yourself.

I know you've got to put your own air mask on first.

I get that sentiment, but I don't always agree with it.

I don't really want to put my gas mask on first.

I want to help somebody, you know, and I get the sentiment

"You got to be whole to help and heal yourself" and all that,

but the healing for me is in the ability

to reach out to somebody else and empathize with them

and be in the same boat together.

That's the healing.

How many other people were in the same kind of pain

that I didn't even notice

because I was so wrapped up in my own?

I'm gonna do you this song

that I wrote when I was a sophomore in college.

And when you're a sophomore in college,

you get depressed and you gain 15 pounds.

And you take everything out on the world.

But this is a hopeful song in the end,

it just takes till the last line of the song

to get to the hopeful part, but it is there.

It's called "Play It Again Sam."

Songs like "Play It Again Sam" and "Never Stop".

They make me cringe.

I see this, like, little English major nerd.

"Play It Again, Sam," so taken from Casablanca.

I don't even know if I'd seen the movie.

I wrote about the Lady of Shallot

in "Left Me a Fool,"

like, who fucking writes about the Lady of Shallot?

You know, like, like, God, it makes me laugh and cringe.

I think it takes you back

to a time where you haven't grown up yet.

And it feels embarrassing.

When I look back on all those lyrics,

they're just really about interpersonal relationships.

Which is, I mean, honestly,

it's been my favorite topic all along.

It's always been much easier for me

to write a ballad and a sad song.

So easy to get into pain.

This is a song of mine about spring,

and how it could get to your heart.

In college, I started to realize I was getting mad,

mad crushes on young women.

But when Personal Best came out,

I went to the movie theater by myself and was terrified

that I was going to run into someone I knew

and I was terrified to be in that room.

I'm really scared.

Why?

What are you thinking?

I don't know.

The things that come along with being gay,

all the signals that you get from culture,

from media, from the church,

the hatefulness towards queer people, is painful to me.

And I was sensitive, you know? I came in the world sensitive.

After two years at Tulane,

I didn't want to stay there, I wanted to go home.

And Amy wasn't happy at Vanderbilt,

she transferred to Emory.

The fact that Amy and I both transferred to Emory

at the same time, it was grace.

I really believe that.

The real work started

when we both were at Emory, playing a ton.

We didn't have a manager,

it was just me and Amy.

It was a lot of legwork, a lot.

- Thank you. - Thanks. Song by Amy.

So we were really a working band, we worked.

- Thanks! Solid gold dancer. - Song by Amy.

Indigo boy!

Your type of music, it's hard to classify.

Somebody says, "Oh yeah, they play folk music,

they play rock music."

- Intense. - Intense?

One thing that was different about me and Amy,

we had acoustic guitars,

but we had pickups in our guitars

and we liked to plug them in and turn them up.

And there was a whole folk club scene.

At that time, those folk artists

were a little bit intellectual, elitist, way too quiet,

way too serious about themselves.

We tried a couple of those gigs.

And we sort of got the feeling that we didn't belong.

There was something about our queerness,

the forcefulness of our energy that was a turnoff

to a lot of those folk clubs.

I had this feeling that where we needed to be,

to really do what we wanted to do,

was more in the world of alternative and post punk,

because we would be free to have influences

that were different, and to play loud,

and to have crowds that were raucous,

and to express ourselves in this bigger way.

And we didn't have to be polite women

that were singing and sitting down with our little guitars.

And that was the biggest part.

Something about what you had to be as a girl

didn't fit in with what we wanted to be

as the Indigo Girls.

What are y'all doing right now?

I know y'all keeping real busy with a lot of things.

Um, right now we just released an EP,

and right now we're just working with that record,

trying to promote it, you know, and, um,

it just takes a lot of work.

It would take a lot of time to...

We're doing everything possible to get the album out there.

You guys work a lot too, I've seen you.

Yeah, right now we've done everything ourselves,

but it's getting a little bit too big for us to handle.

- What'll it be today? - How about the usual?

Thousands of people in this country have AIDS.

Because the vast majority of those victims are homosexual,

there have been complaints that not enough effort

is being expended to find a cure.

We're the Indigo Girls and we play

mostly Little Five Points, which is right over there.

Little Five Points was so formative.

That is the place that fomented everything for us.

You didn't have to be any certain kind of person

to be there, you didn't have to be any certain kind of person

to play there.

It was just a mish-mosh of humanity.

It was a freak show there, it was incredible.

It was the best place in the world.

We were able to sing whatever we wanted to sing.

We all supported each other.

And it was a bar.

I loved a bar.

And it was really exciting because we packed the place

again, and again, and again.

It was incredible.

It was incredible. It was like our community.

I have a couple of things to tell you.

One. Thank you, Emily, Amy, for being here,

for giving us Strange Fire to the pub in Atlanta.

So this is the guy that ran Little Five Points pub,

and basically was the start of our career.

John Blizzard was like one of our best, best friends.

And that's him at the pub.

John Blizzard was a gay man

and the music community was critical to him

and the queer community.

And he was an activist for the homeless population

for soup kitchens, for HIV.

And so he was a mentor to us.

This is John Blizzard,

manager of the Little Five Points pub.

And that's why Little Five Points

was what it was, 'cause he was a community builder.

There'd be like a bunch of lesbians sitting at a table

and the waiter was Benjamin from Opal Foxx.

He'd be dressed in drag and waiting tables

and come up and read a poem, and some hooligans over here,

just drunk as skunks, you know, and my dad and mom, you know...

Amy's dad, he always had a video camera

and at night, I could see that red light,

and I'd know, Dr. Ray's in the house, you know?

Yeah.

My dad and mom both were, like,

a lot more conservative than our audience.

I kind of started to worry about it.

But I had to just let that go.

At one point, my dad and mom did say to me

something very complimentary about how they had been exposed

to a lot of different kinds of people through me

that they never thought they would like.

Hey, Frances. Claire.

And my dad said something about not judging a book

by its cover, like for real.

Hey, Amy. Look at me.

Look again, I didn't get you.

Yeah, you did, you're filming me.

Hey, there.

And that he had misjudged people.

Turn toward the pretty camera.

The pretty camera.

And I was surprised because even when he said that,

my parents were still not totally okay with the gay scene.

So I think in a way, Little Five Points

was an easier entry point for them into that part of life.

Because he had met some people that were really different

who he realized were really smart

and had something worthwhile to say and to offer society.

Join me now in a toast to Atlanta's Indigo Girls.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to help welcome

our 2003 Georgia Music Hall of Fame performing group,

Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, Indigo Girls!

We want to thank a man who died of AIDS in the early '90s.

Um...

His name was John Blizzard.

And he really gave us our start

at a club called Little Five Points pub.

Have a great time.

Indigo Girls will be back on in a few minutes.

Two more sets to go and lots of albums to sell.

Thanks for coming.

You want to start asking questions now?

What did you think you'd be doing when you were 20?

Let's see, you would have been a senior in college.

I thought I was gonna go to grad school

and be an English teacher.

I was getting ready to apply, and we were also playing music.

I knew I'd always play music,

but I thought maybe I could do both.

When you gave me the ultimatum

on what I wanted to do, then I decided it would be

really cool to just keep doing what we're doing.

She gave you an ultimatum?

Yeah, because Amy was doing all the work

and I was kind of waffling, you know.

I was having meetings about what schools I would apply to

and Amy was hanging up all the posters.

Oops.

You put that all together yourself, all original music,

and you also do the PR yourself.

That's got to be a difficult task.

- It is. - It's fun.

- It's fun? Is it easy? - No, it's not easy.

I know, Amy probably gets personal pleasure out of it.

- Yeah, I guess so. - When you think about all...

Amy is the kind of person that believes

anything can be made to happen.

Like, if we're playing a concert

and she thinks of, like, several people who could join us in.

She'll say, "Well, why don't we have so-and-so sing harmony

and then she could play guitar on this," and I'll just be like,

"Okay, okay." You know.

But she just has a vision on how to make things happen.

I'm not that person.

You know, I have compared myself to Amy over the years

and fallen short, in many, many, many arenas, you know,

but she always was a driving force.

And I just focused on the music

and tried to hold up my end of the bargain.

I remember just feeling like

we could not work any harder than we'd been working.

And we needed help, and we can't do it all.

Our manager now, Russell,

he was like helping us out for free.

And Roger Klein showed up.

And he was with Epic Records.

And he was eccentric.

He was like, out of like a goth Victorian novel or something.

And he just happened to come

into Little Five Points pub, and he just happened to like us.

It's like the classic archetypal story

of a band playing at a club and being discovered.

That, like, actually does not happen that often.

How did that happen?

I mean, it was crazy.

More great music coming at you.

Downtown Julie Brown back with you...

And this year, she made headlines in style

with a raging controversy over her bizarre

"Like A Prayer" video.

Lay out your concert itinerary for the summer of '89,

which will bring us Edie Brickell, Don Henley,

Elvis Costello and REM.

I mean, we've always handpicked the bands that open for us,

Driving and Crying, the Indigo Girls.

Making their network television debut

right here on our program, please welcome Indigo Girls.

Girls?

And the best contemporary folk recording goes to...

Indigo Girls!

This is really fun.

We're very thankful.

Yeah? Go? Okay.

So much has happened to you, both of you,

in such a short period of time.

How overwhelming is this?

It's pretty overwhelming.

Well, with the REM tour, I mean, walking out

and seeing ten thousand people, that was overwhelming.

We both got sick to our stomach the first day and...

and since then it's been fun.

Yeah. It's overwhelming.

How has all of this success

changed both of you?

- Are we successful yet? - I don't know.

- Hasn't changed us yet. - No.

How has the success affected the both of you?

Has it really kind of affected you in any way?

Are we successful now, Amy?

- Hmm. I guess. - You guys are on your way.

We thought we were successful five years ago, though.

- Yeah. - When we were, like, making art.

Everything has been icing on the cake for so long.

They are winning raves for their new album,

which is I think Epic's fastest moving album.

Good morning. There always seems the need

to place your music somewhere.

- What do I call it? - Acoustic.

- Acoustic? - It's a little less contained.

Is that kind of music gonna have a hard time

getting airplay on the nation's radios?

- Probably. - You sound like you've already

dealt with the fact maybe what you do isn't going to be

the most commercial possible but you're gonna be happy with it.

Yeah. That's fine with us.

We have the review, the one I was talking about yesterday,

and I wanted to see how you would respond.

- What is the writer? - I totally want to read it.

- Okay. - No, God!

You said you would!

Okay. But I'm so, like, embarrassed

for how I acted about that.

Okay, ooh this is fun. I like games.

Oh, it's John Pareles. That's why.

Oh, God. It's John Pareles, of course.

He wrote for The New York Times.

"2 With Much to Tell."

"Earnest pretentiousness has new standard bearers:

the Indigo Girls."

"Their music revives the strummed acoustic guitars

and close harmonies of early 1970s,

arty, confessional songwriters."

You can just, you can hear him being derogatory, right?

"And their lyrics push obscurity

and preciousness towards hyperbole."

Oh, great journalism right there.

"They can harmonize to gorgeous effect."

See, that was complimentary.

"Each Indigo Girl has a slightly different style

of pretension."

Yeah, see, that's why it pissed me off.

Would it piss you off, if you read this?

What a dick.

I'm not bitter.

"Ms. Saliers is the more verbose songwriter."

"Ms. Ray, whose songs are a little terser,

sings every tune with exaggerated ardency

and performs with stagey self-congratulatory gestures."

He's not wrong about some of this stuff.

That's the thing that's hard.

I feel like I was too exaggerated

and ardent sometimes

and did have some stagey self-congratulatory gestures

that were... annoying to me now to look at.

So I'll agree with him about some of that stuff.

This is why I don't think Amy reads reviews,

you start to believe your critics.

"What draws listeners apparently is not just the folksy sound

of the music with its warming harmonies,

but also the songs' promise of a healing spirituality."

"Yet atop what may be heartfelt beliefs,

there's a nearly impenetrable layer of flowery, bad poetry."

"John Pareles."

I mean, that is so mean.

Well, you know, we are pretentious.

And we are... and we are bad poetry.

And I am self-congratulatory most of the time.

But that's okay.

We're just doing it for the money!

Talking about that at the Uptown Lounge,

oh, my god, that was pretentious.

Like, you think you're so cool that you can like...

You know what's cool, is not mentioning it.

That's cool. Ah...

Okay, listen, I understand what he's saying.

And we're young and we were very, um...

earnest, we've always been accused of being earnest,

and I mean accused. And we were earnest.

I also think this is a very, very sexist review.

Men folk singers could get away

with a lot of these sort of sentiments without being,

you know, just destroyed in a review like this.

Sorry.

My default, unfortunately, has been anger or distrust.

I have, like, wrestled with that my whole life.

When I was younger in our career,

I did not know how to temper myself.

And I did not think it was necessary.

I remember throwing things at monitor men

because I would be trying to explain what changes I needed

to make on the sound and they would kind of act like

they were doing it, and I knew they weren't.

I couldn't just like hang on to myself and be confident

and just muscle through.

I could not suffer fools.

Hey!

I was just like, wow, you're really mad.

Why are you so mad, so fast? I don't like a hot temper.

It's hard to know how to deal with a hot temper, I think.

Wes!

Emily was really annoyed at my temper

and did not have a lot of patience with it.

And sometimes I think she felt like

she needed to handle the situation instead of me.

And at some point, I knew that and I would say,

"Can you deal with this?"

Because I know I'm not gonna be diplomatic enough.

Thanks, y'all.

We were on tour, and I kicked a wall,

and I had to be on crutches and sit in a stool to play,

you know, that put me in my place.

Because it's embarrassing.

You know, I had that weird

entitled perspective of being a musician.

I was selfish, self-centered and self-righteous

and self, generally.

I also was like a young woman in an environment

that was incredibly patriarchal and incredibly patronizing.

And I could not deal with it.

Early on, were you experiencing

any kind of resistance?

Well, we always experienced resistance.

Yeah, I mean, sexism is rampant in our society.

That's just the way it is.

Amy knew what she was talking about, about the equipment.

I can remember when she was right about something

that had to do with equipment and the sound guy would be like,

"Yeah, right. You know, whatever."

That's blatant stuff.

Do you have a graphic just on my side, like a graphic on...

- Only one layer. - Okay.

- Whoah! - Can you put some stuff in it?

Are you talking about...?

Well, It's... If you add volume,

I think it'll be, like, too thin.

Right There. There's that frequency.

I hear it!

And we've got action.

Y'all have sort of the reputation now of being

like a "woman's group" that if men listened to you,

something horrible will happen to.

Critics had first claimed

their music attracted a lot of women.

When people go, "Oh, it's a woman's group..."

Well, we're women.

One of the hottest bands to come out of Atlanta

in years is breaking the rules

of the rock music success formula.

They have no male voices...

Can you make people cry with these songs?

Is that a thing you can do?

Well, some of them were sad,

but it's not, it's not like crying music or something.

I don't think they'd like us to do that.

I'm just kidding.

So, girls, what's up after the show?

Gonna go eat Indian food.

Bye, guys in the band.

- Does that bother you at all? - Yeah.

Yeah, that's really true.

I mean, sometimes you can really feel

like a product, you really can.

But also, Amy and I believe that you can make a stand

about what you will or will not allow yourself to do.

And probably a lot of artists just don't do that,

for whatever reason, I mean...

It's hard to.

- Amy's taught me to be - It's hard to take a stand.

a lot more aggressive about things like that.

I used to be like, "Oh, okay, whatever, whatever."

- Thanks, Ame. - Sure.

I wanted to talk a little bit about

"Closer to Fine" and the video, the song itself and the video.

Let's talk to some more people.

Can we talk to you a little bit for MTV?

Can I talk to you?

Do you find that you're put off

because their lyrics are political, or too active, or...

- Or religious sometimes? - Right.

No, not at all.

They're not following a trend. I mean, they're really sincere.

I think that's what anyone would realize who sees their music,

that they're playing from the heart, completely.

Just nice to see people that can sing, you know,

coming back into style.

I really like what they stand for, that they follow Greenpeace

and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Amnesty International.

They stand for a lot of good stuff.

- Thank you. - Thanks.

Would you group the Indigo Girls

with the Suzanne Vegas and Tracy Chapmans?

No, not at all.

- Why not? - Well, because they're gay,

and I think that means they have a special message.

You wouldn't believe it but back then,

there were very few artists that were out, you know?

Very few.

I think that people feared for their careers.

In the media, you never see

headlines or stories about lesbians.

You experience invisibility all the time.

This is sickening.

God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

- I'm disgusted. - Why does it disgust you?

I don't know, it's just a little scary to me.

Gay couples say they are denied family rights

like Social Security, medical benefits,

and inheritance that are automatic for straights.

Reports of anti-gay violence are rising.

So, we were out to our local communities,

but then when we got signed,

national press started asking questions about that.

Okay.

I just was ready before she was to talk about it.

And I'd be like, "We have to talk about it."

And she would say, "I don't want to, this is my private life."

Hey!

It's funny, I've chosen this career,

but I don't really like being observed.

Reading stories about artists

or people that you're interested in,

everybody wants to know what happened in their life,

like what was the tragedy

or the dark thing or what was personal?

Fans want to know most what is personal,

and I've had a tough time with that.

I feel protective of a lot of my very, very personal life.

Emily's argument was, you know,

"I don't want to be pigeonholed as a certain thing."

And I agreed with that, to a certain extent.

'Cause I was like, everyone's afraid of being pigeonholed

as a gay acoustic artist.

Because it seemed like the most derogatory thing you could be

is a female, gay singer-songwriter.

That's like, everything's so mediocre about that.

'Cause I was totally homophobic and even misogynist myself.

There was no way that Epic Records

could promote us in terms of sexualizing us

in a heteronormative way.

And that's all everybody was doing.

You sell sex, you sell heteronormative image.

That's the way it was.

Now I'm reading this right off the MTV fact sheet here.

- Wow. - What is sexy?

The Next Generation is sexy.

Country music is sexy.

Uh, great. Uh...

- Here's another one, here's another one. - I knew right away.

Emily and I disagreeing about when we should be out

and being frustrated when press would want us to come out

and we wouldn't be able to.

And just, it was a mixture of so much stuff

and chaos and emotion, like you can't win.

The gay community is going to be mad at you

for not standing up for them, or the press

is going to insult you all the time because you're gay.

They're gonna crucify you, either way.

Many people were disgusted by gay people.

You're never really safe, because you don't know

who you're going to set off.

I was hanging out with some friends at a bar in Atlanta.

And we got gay-bashed by a guy.

We got into an altercation with him.

And he called us gay slurs

and actually punched me in the face.

It must have been around 1989 or 1990.

Yeah, right around then.

I don't know what processes you go through internally

to go from being "No way, I can't talk about that,

I'm too scared," to being free.

Amy recalls some,

I don't know, it was a press conference or an interview, or whatever.

And then this person asked a question and she answered it.

It was something about being gay.

And she just said something that was forthright.

And I was like, "Okay, it's happened."

What's the date? Oh, it's up on the screen.

Once I'd made my mind up that I wanted to do this,

and I wasn't afraid in the way I had been, then it was like,

"Oh, this is what we are. Yeah."

And I think it made Amy happy and that made me happy.

Because it was important for me to be in it with Amy

in the same way.

I admired her.

She always seemed just a step ahead

in terms of evolution, in some way.

Coming out was such a liberating experience.

But they also say, you don't come out once,

you come out again and again, and again and again.

Yeah, I did want to address the fact

that you did choose this year to come out as lesbian.

- We've been out. - You've been out? Yeah, well...

- That's a common misconception. - I forgot to mention that.

There you go. That's one of the biggest...

Uh... I've been out the whole time.

I've never been in the closet. Ever.

I think Emily, Emily felt more hesitant to talk about it

because she didn't want it to become a central issue.

And I did talk about it.

And, uh, I do resent, I resent the media

choosing when you come out.

That's something we feel pretty strongly about.

- I do, anyway. - Yeah.

'Cause for me, I spent a lot of my life...

I mean, I've been, I've been living out.

We've just been so hemmed in.

Binary systems hemmed in by gender, sexuality.

They're constructs, like all these things,

they're human constructs.

You know, for instance,

I have a very strong sexual and physical attraction to men.

But I can't do the emotional thing the same way.

So I'm queer, I'm not hetero.

But for me, I can speak to the absolute certainty

of that attraction.

I started identifying as queer within the last five years.

- It's been quite freeing. - Okay, there!

1, 2, 3!

Some people might want us to identify a certain way,

and others may not care, and others may want us to say queer,

and others may be like, "Ugh, she's attracted to men,

that's disgusting," you know, but we all are who we are.

What it really is about is just loving

and accepting each other for who we are, completely.

And everything that gets in the way of that

I truly believe can be distilled to fear.

- Y'all are so sweet. - Thanks for listening, y'all.

Thanks for listening to a new song.

Thank you.

Dad!

- Hey! - Welcome back.

And here's Beasty!

Cinnamon roll, Beasty?

I don't know, Meems, where are these from?

It's from Goldberg's Deli.

Hey, Dad.

- Okay, anyway. - Cream cheese.

- What? - Cream cheese.

- What? - Oh, you got it.

You know, this is the thing about raising four daughters.

They always know when there is spinach hanging...

And I was kind of like the son you never had.

Wanna play ball, Dad?

Mom made us dresses out of matching material.

Emily had Easter pants.

So sweet, she didn't bat an eye.

Do you remember you and mom having any feelings

about wanting to mold us in certain ways that,

well, girls should wear dresses, and...

Yeah, no, that was the wonderful thing about her.

We wanted you to be honest, open, creative folks.

And you individuated in such an interesting way.

I had a hard time

validating my own relationships in life

compared to my sisters,

even though they didn't see a difference for them.

But they had weddings, and the pictures,

and the ceremonies, and the baby.

And I always thought my life will never be as valid

as those heteronormative things.

And I can tell you that when,

when, like, when my wife had our daughter,

and then we went to the courthouse for me to adopt her,

I was like, I have to go through an adoption process

because I'm a lesbian

and the kid will never love me as much,

we'll never be as close.

I'm kind of like a fake parent.

You know, I'm not valid.

I didn't make that up by myself, feeling that way.

I don't want to feel that way.

This is like old everything.

All my notes from all the records

and all the arrangements.

And unfortunately, I haven't scanned the whole thing in yet,

so I'm always freaking out

about whether I'm losing it or not.

Amy, Emily, Amy, Emily.

No, it's totally fine.

I don't know what I'm... not sure what's...

Let's start with you, because we always start with you.

It's gonna be light outside the whole gig.

- Yeah. - We could do like

a relaxing beginning and then ramp it up, I guess.

Nah, that's just stupid 'cause you're right.

I'm trying to think something new after 40 years.

- What can we do? - Tonight's the night!

What numbers are we on?

- Six. - Six.

"Power of Two."

It's almost like a card game or something.

Like how you do it, like...

You laughing at us?

I'll see you and raise you power of two.

- I like the process. - Yep. Every night.

This thoughtful of a process?

Sometimes it takes forever and sometimes it goes at a clip,

and sometimes we have to rewrite it

because we change our minds and...

You won't just pull from last set and say "That worked!"

Basically, I think I'm coming up with something new,

but it's basically the same setup every night.

- Okay, okay. - No, it's not, it's not.

We throw some obscure ones in there.

I'm trying to, like, reach down deep.

But sometimes, like, I want to play things that we play well.

Yeah.

Of course, of course.

And Emily's got more better songs than I have.

- No, that's... - More better.

- More better. - More songs that are...

I think Emily has more songs that are really good.

And so my personal opinion is,

I have less to choose from when I pick mine.

She's the worst, isn't she?

I just don't agree with that opinion, but that's all right.

"It's Alright." That's the song I'm writing down, right now.

- That's all right. - "It's Alright."

She's a great songwriter.

And she often has her finger on the pulse of her audience.

Not even on purpose,

but just naturally has this voice that they relate to.

She has the songs that become those big Indigo Girls songs

and I think producers know, you know, they feel it.

But sometimes the producer that we would be with

would prefer and be biased towards Emily's music.

For a lot of our career, I think her writing

was more developed melodically

and chordally a little more interesting,

kind of more for a producer,

you know, more to, like, work with.

And I felt like I'm not contributing enough,

I'm not like musically advanced enough.

I'm like at a roadblock 'cause she's so good,

that it just is easier just to go that way

and not work on myself more.

Emily's like a crutch.

I think we should do that again, Scott.

Eww!

The singing was right though,

except it dropped flat on the last note.

- Yeah. - But it sounds good.

You wanna just do it again?

Yeah, I mean, are you sure you want me to...

Are we just gonna go through and sort of do

an experimental track the whole way or...

Why don't we get the...

Why don't we get this as good as it can be

and then we'll do another track with Emily

and see and decide, you know, if any harmony,

which one sounds better, okay?

That was really close though, I thought.

Should we get that once more?

Should sing that second part, sorry.

- Wonder's good? - Let's check that.

Do you want to tell Susan this might not be the thing

that she wants to be filming?

- Oh, no, I don't care. - Okay.

How long have you been a fan of the Indigo Girls?

Uh, at least, at least three years.

They're not gonna be able to hear me.

So you need to say, "I've been a fan for at least three..."

How long have you been a fan of the Indigo Girls?

At least three years.

What do you like best about their music?

I like, I like their acoustics and their words are like poetry.

They're spiritual!

- They're very spiritual. - Spiritually endowed!

- Very spiritually endowed. - Okay.

- Excellent job. - Thanks.

Looking forward to seeing you at Chastain.

What was the show like tonight?

Lot of energy, they were hot.

Those girls can work those guitars.

What do you think of the show, man?

It was real good. I liked it a lot.

Tell us about the new music, what do you think about it?

It kind of gets to things that nothing is...

- I'm, uh... - Okay.

It kind of, it kind of gets to the way I feel

and the way I see things.

It kind of gets deeper than

most of what I've heard in a long time.

Now I'm gonna introduce

an act you guys have been waiting for.

We have some women who are very committed.

Yeah!

Welcome to Earth Day.

It's a beautiful day.

When we started doing activism

around environmental stuff,

it was completely middle-class white girl stuff.

It was like Save the Whales,

"give a hoot, don't pollute," recycle.

The easy side of Greenpeace.

This says "make oxygen, plant a tree."

Up until that time we had been aligned with white,

mainstream environmental groups.

And it's not that they weren't doing good work.

Take an environmentalist on the road with you,

try to green your tour, the low-hanging fruit.

It was very like issues

that the public could take a big bite out of and be okay with.

So does everyone have their little

Environmental Action booklets?

Really concise and easy to follow.

So, just thought I'd say, be sure you read...

But when we heard Winona, it wasn't that,

oh, the environmental is more important than we thought.

It's like, oh, there's this whole other thing about activism

that we don't even understand.

You know, there's a lot of native people that are on

the frontlines of struggles to protect what remains

of their land or their territory and their cultural practices.

And this is one of those places.

It was like my life flashed before my eyes

and all the stuff that we had been involved in,

I was like, "Oh, my god, we have been so, like, off the mark."

The lens that she was seeing things through

was so much grittier, and so much bigger,

and so many more problems than we even knew existed,

and so much around environmental racism

that we didn't understand.

We were like, oh, my god,

if we want to be environmentalists,

this is the way we're gonna have to do it.

Oh, there's another one. Hey, how are ya?

- Fine. - What is this?

It's a video camera.

God, it's so bizarre looking.

Hello, Winona.

We're gonna traverse the southern portion

of the reservation and go over here,

which is where our office is,

and I'm gonna show you some land.

We have a little occupation.

And so we were like, "We gotta work together."

"What can we do to help?"

But it took years to figure that out, you know?

It was a steep learning curve.

If you... do Indians...

their juris...

they live on the reservation

and they're under the laws of the reservation,

but they're also paying taxes to the United States government?

I pay federal taxes, I don't pay state taxes.

State taxes, all right.

Robin, Robin, these are the Indigo Girls.

- Hello! - Hey, how you doing?

We met Winona in like 1991-ish.

So we've had Honor the Earth now for... 30 years?

Holy cow.

Started Honor the Earth with her, and I mean,

that movement's given us everything.

Welcome to the Honor the Earth tour.

We're on a 21-stop tour,

we're going to five different Indian communities.

We're raising money to fund

indigenous grassroots environmental organizations

who work in their communities.

I've always wanted one.

- It's your tail. - Now you can go to the Furry convention.

Hey, tuck your tail.

Actually they had the really great Mayday Parade

is right around here too.

- Oh, oh. - Love you.

- Mm, I love you. - So nice to see you.

My founders, my fellow founders, my founding mothers.

1:56 p.m. in the afternoon in Minneapolis, Minnesota,

and this is the board of directors meeting

for Honor the Earth.

Right, okay, well, the only segue of the conversation is,

is that I don't feel like Honor the Earth belongs to me.

And I don't feel like it belongs to us.

I feel like it belongs to the communities we serve.

And we've spent 30 years doing that.

...planning moving forward.

So that idea of this paradigm shift

of what's going to happen during this climate crisis.

How are we going... and the fall of capitalism,

like, then those are strategies that are really going...

I just like how she says that.

"And the fall of capitalism!"

But those are things that are really going

to draw young people in and that's the direction...

Winona has taught me and Emily so much about activism

and it's not just her, I mean, I want to, yeah, qualify that

because it's like Winona, but it's also like,

these indigenous women that she introduced us to,

they taught us about women's leadership and women's power

and helped us to believe in the power of women

as a community to change things and to lead.

You wanna ask any questions about this as we go through it?

And then from that point on,

we saw activism through the same lens:

grassroots, community-connected, Earth-tied, not of whiteness.

White people don't take over the conversation.

You go into a community,

you amplify the voices of the people that exist already

that are doing the work,

you are a silent and invisible partner.

This is the fourth Honor the Earth Tour.

I've been doing this since 1993.

What I want to say is that social change

is made by individuals...

...like you and I.

That is how change is made

and it's sometimes not very glamorous,

and it sometimes takes a long time to do.

So what I want to say is that there is no such thing

as a social change fairy.

The only way our future generations will be protected

is through the work of all of us.

Safeguarding and caring for that seventh generation from now.

And honoring the Earth.

- Good speech tonight. - Hmm?

Good speech tonight.

It was really good.

I like your new "there is no fairy for social change."

Yeah, this is my new... I wish there was.

I just wish there was, like, a social change fairy,

you could say, "Can you fix this please?"

"This really sucks."

I was so profoundly affected by those tours.

The incredible people that we met,

the things I was learning.

There is no word for radiation in Navajo.

What's your name?

You learn to make connections.

And then you start to really dig deeply into issues.

I'm from Noolaaghe Doh.

Makes you think a lot about who has power,

systems of oppression and systems of white supremacy.

And why all these things are connected

and why these things keep happening

in communities of color,

and communities with less political voice.

It's just becoming more steeped in the broadness of justice.

Changes the way you think about the world,

and life, and what can be done, and what your role is in it.

It wasn't like, this is how you do environmental work.

It was like, this is how you do grassroots activism.

So, the model that you learn here,

you can apply to gay rights,

anti-death penalty work, issues around poverty.

Any social justice issue.

This lens of community-based activism

is a model for how you work.

- What do we want? - Justice!

- When do we want it? - Now!

Does that fill you up? Does that inspiration come back?

Fills your life up. Yeah.

It's not just your career, it's your life.

I mean, we're doing this as part of our life,

we would be doing it anyway.

The Indigo Girls could easily stop caring

and simply capitalize on their popularity.

I was moved to see that, if anything,

their political activism has intensified.

What else are you involved in?

Anything that empowers disenfranchised people.

We're basic bleeding heart liberals.

Next part of this is media.

Indigo Girls, with 20 years of playing together,

and platinum records, and touring, and all this stuff,

never have been featured in a mainstream rock press magazine,

and I'm talking about Spin, Rolling Stone, et cetera.

It's okay, I'm not...

I just needed to make that point for the speech.

I'm also told that the reason...

I'm told the reason for our lack of press

is our lack of radio play, but I know that it's the fact

that we're political lesbians.

Couple times I've done photoshoots where I did, like,

a rockabilly thing and, like, combed it back

and put grease on it and stuff.

- I like that a lot. - That looks really good.

- Umm... That's fun to do. - I would love to do that.

I always wanted a mohawk, but my face can't carry it off.

- Faux-hawk, maybe. - Faux-hawk or true mohawk.

I like a faux-hawk too.

I always say, "pretend I'm a guy," which is not hard.

And "I'm a rock and roll guy," and do it like that.

Because whenever somebody approaches it, like,

I'm super female, I look like I'm in drag.

Seriously.

I just am who I am!

I know, but people do it.

They blow my hair up and all this, I've done it for fun.

Unless it's for like a certain, you know, particular thing...

I mean, I've definitely gone in drag with my hair blown out

like a real-estate agent, with a dress on, but it looks...

- It is... - It's never looked right.

Even since I was 7 years old, it hasn't looked right.

- I am who I am. - Right.

I'm probably, you know, one of those people.

I'm on the spectrum, a lot of different spectrums.

But I'm definitely on the gender spectrum.

- It's a good thing. - It is a good thing.

Get to experience a lot of different stuff.

That's right.

When I was really young, I wanted to be a boy

and wanted to do things boys do and, and in my mind,

I kind of was, you know.

I definitely had gender dysphoria,

but I had no language for any of that.

And in high school, my gender was like, I'm a tomboy.

And I got made fun of constantly.

I'm sure I internalized a lot of it,

but I was kind of a defiant kid.

I didn't let people see me sweat.

Like when I was little,

people called me a boy all the time by accident.

And it used to really drive me crazy.

I mean, every now and then I would revel in it.

But it was in moments of like, I'd be walking down the street

and some girl would ride by with a group of friends,

and like whistle or something, and I'd be like, that's cool.

And then I went through where I just was ashamed

if anybody called me "sir" because I was mixed up,

because I like probably enjoyed it, but I wasn't supposed to.

I'm in the generation where you did not know this thing.

So all these people that grew up in, like, the suburbs,

their discovery of gender and stuff was so much later.

I know a lot of people that, like,

transitioned much later, 'cause that's when they discovered it.

I didn't even understand gender stuff until, jeez,

like, 1999 or something.

I met a band called The Butchies,

and it was just part of their scene.

I was kind of late to that party in a way,

and I was like, oh, my god, like where was I?

'Cause this is all like so resonating with me.

These bands were feeding

this politicized identity part of myself,

discovering gender, having friends in the trans community,

just being very queer, and really digging into that

in a way that was much more political than Emily and I.

You know, I mean, it's hard to think you'd be more political

than me and Emily, but it was more like radical punk.

I started making music with them,

and then I started doing solo music.

You know, I still hate my body sometimes.

And I look in the mirror and I don't recognize myself.

And I definitely still feel like a guy a lot of the time.

But I guess I've just gotten to a place where like, well,

I fought really hard to be in this body.

And I'm just gonna stay here.

And also felt somewhat evenly split between male and female,

to the point where I was like, I don't know if I can choose.

Like, I think I'm going to have to just live in the center.

But the LGBTQ community that's coming up now, I mean,

I would not be able to understand my own gender stuff

without the younger activists.

I would not be able to understand why

there's no shame in it.

I mean, the language of the trans generation,

I mean, it's everything to me.

I want to have the full measure

of getting to just express all these other things.

I just got tired of feeling like

the Indigo Girls was this one thing.

Because I'm like, I'm not just this.

And Emily's not just this.

What I realized is that I'm a collaborator.

...in a song on my solo record.

Collaborating with these different people

to learn different things.

It made me a better songwriter, a better harmony singer.

I never thought, I'm doing this

because I don't want to be Indigo Girls.

I thought, I'm doing this because

I want Indigo Girls to be better.

There's a magic in what we do.

And the reason why we've been together as long as we have

is because we both know that we can't recreate that

separately from each other.

At least we realized that early on and we're like,

we need to protect this, whatever it takes.

Back with the Indigo Girls, huge fan of yours.

I'm so afraid to tell people, I mean, I'm just...

Susan, I'm gay.

We have got to talk about this show Sex and the City.

- Yes, we have to. - Well, no.

I want to hear about this. It has "sex" in the title so...

Tell me all about it.

We have a little thing here, the Indigo Girls,

the folk duo currently on a three week tour of high schools

and colleges were supposed to play Irmo High School

near Columbia, South Carolina next Thursday afternoon.

But that date has been canceled

by the school district

because the Indigo Girls are lesbians.

Oh, shoot! We just missed the Indigo Girls!

- Oh! - Aaah!

So this is Women Fest, huh?

God, I have never felt more beautiful.

God, it's just great.

Everybody doing their own thing out in public.

Nobody's afraid of being stared at or judged.

Oh, my god, look at those freaks.

This is part of the self homophobia that happens.

You hear a joke like that,

and you're kind of like, that's really funny.

And inside you're going, wait a minute, that's not funny.

That's not funny. And then the moment passes.

And it just gets, then it enters on a cellular level

and gets stuck there.

At this point in my life, I'm like, that's not funny.

I think the reason I think why it feels bad

is because it's like, there is still so much misogyny

and homophobia in society that

it is part of that joke, and you know it.

I mean, for the longest time, I always felt like we were

the brunt of lesbian jokes

in kind of a lowest common denominator way.

"Well, let's tell a lesbian joke."

"We'll put the Indigo Girls in the joke."

Hearing gay jokes and all this, it's very, it's hurtful.

I never really had a shield against it.

In the amount of time it took to do that introduction,

a thousand women were emotionally assaulted

by their spouse or domestic partner.

Find out more at www-dot-shame-police

my-body-is-my-own- take-up-the-fight-dot-org.

If you guys had asked us to play on Saturday Night Live

and then you made fun of us, that would be okay.

But it hurts when it's like,

you're not going to get that opportunity.

And you know why you're not going to get that opportunity,

it's 'cause you're not "cool," you know? And why aren't you cool?

Maybe because you're gay,

but it's probably not because you're gay anymore.

It's probably because you're, like, old gay and butch.

Instead of like back then it was just because you're gay.

Then those jokes feel like you're the butt of the joke.

It's not cool.

It's like a backlash against who you are

and everything you've done

and what you've tried to accomplish.

Oh, man.

There are things that have hurt my feelings

and continue to hurt my feelings

and to feel that we've been diminished by prejudice.

I do feel that, that we have been.

Although it's been worth it to be out, obviously,

unquestionably, it's important

to recognize that the homophobia stunted our career in some way.

I think my drinking,

I drank more to quiet voices

of being "other than" and...

um...

drinking started out as a way to lubricate me socially.

It just calmed anxiety

and noise.

And it served me well until it didn't.

But you're around alcohol all the time in this business.

I had the kind of job where I could sleep late in the morning.

I hardly know any musicians who don't drink.

Everything was a party.

There's always something to celebrate.

Alcoholism is such a lonely thing.

It's a disease of compulsion and denial.

It takes all your energy to maintain

your sense of normalcy, which you think you have,

which you don't have at all.

It's also extremely difficult for people

to know what to do with an alcoholic.

You just don't know, is today the day we should just

shut the whole thing down?

It's complicated.

What do you think?

Amy came to me three times.

"I'm concerned about your drinking, I really am."

I denied it.

But the denial that you go through

to protect your addiction,

it turns you into someone who you're really not.

For a long time, I was not who I truly am.

I can't speak for Amy,

but I know that she was worried sick.

I know that she was angry.

I know that she had absolutely no control over me.

I know that our shows were affected by my alcoholism.

Because my body was so shaky and damaged.

- Hello. - Hello. I need to...

She witnessed more than anyone else.

Because we practically lived together on the road.

And so she was closest to the horror.

- Day one. - All right.

- What song we starting with? - "John."

I put her through hell. Yeah, I mean, I did.

That's what alcoholics do,

they put their closest people through hell.

Okay.

We were on the precipice of falling apart.

Oh. Whooda whoodala!

How are we going to turn the page?

I think I know the chords.

I think I remember them, but I'm not sure.

I'll turn it because it's over here.

I like this song.

- Ready? - Yeah.

We were so fortunate to find each other

and grab on to a passion at such a young age.

So Amy is, she's at the center of me.

She's not just the other Indigo Girl.

And we're not best friends anymore.

We're like family,

and something different from family.

It's hard to describe.

Amy was going to quit the band and my wife,

she would have left me, she was going to.

And then my body broke down

and I would say that I was pretty close to death.

And then when the intervention happened, I was terrified.

I was full of self-loathing, confusion, anger.

I couldn't believe I was this thing.

But at the same time, I'm ready to be free.

I remember when I was in rehab, there were a lot of other people

there who were going through the same thing.

And that's what helps you, you're not alone.

She's coming. She's coming.

It's remarkable to me what people give to alcoholics

after they've fucked up so much.

I've fucked up so much.

And I was taken back in by Amy, by my wife, Tristan.

That's a lot of love.

It's a lot of love. It's beyond my understanding.

Sobriety is the only thing I've ever done

that I'm actually proud of.

It was the hardest thing and the best thing.

I promise I didn't plan that.

And I feel like Amy was really glad to have me back.

My wife, Tristan, and I,

she always wanted kids and I never wanted kids.

But when I started to work on getting sober,

I could see having a child with Tristan,

I could see being a parent.

I had a vision of it.

And then all those fears about I'm not a real parent,

and she's not going to feel like I'm her parent,

just, they're not true, they're not true.

But the thing that has surprised me most

is that she came into the world her own person.

There's not a lot of molding you do.

Your job really is to love them unconditionally.

And then you just try to teach basic things like kindness

and don't chew with your mouth open, or whatever, you know,

and then you let them grow,

you just let them be who they are.

Ready? Go!

You're gonna have kids?

I'd love to. I really wanna have kids.

We'll show this to your kids. Kids?

I've decided not to, even though I am heterosexual.

Has anyone on this bus ever heard of that?

Nope.

- Kids? - Yes, I'm gonna have kids.

Are you gonna have kids, Amy? We'll get you on camera.

- Yes. - Amy, how many children

are you going to have?

I want to have one, and I want to adopt another one.

Any idea what sex or race?

I want to have a boy named Johnny Temple,

I wanna have a girl named Patsy Cline.

Aww!

Hey, Babba? Ozy's gonna say good night.

Oh, that's fine. I'm done. I'm totally done.

We're about ready to go out and go to bed.

Okay, so I'm going to play

and then I'm going to jump in bunk with you, okay?

- Okay. - Got it?

Can you try to go to bed earlier tonight?

- Like we did? - Mm-hmm.

I'll move you over.

I need help.

Come here.

Where I live now in North Georgia,

there were these neighbor kids

that started wandering down to my house

and Ozy would play with them and everything seemed cool.

At some point, they became more and more curious about me

and my partner, Carrie, and being gay

and they would ask questions.

And the mom had come down one time to sort of meet us

and then we would see them on the street.

They would kind of get scared and sort of move away.

And it was very obvious that their parents had told them

they couldn't play anymore with u... with, with her.

And it bothered me a lot, because my kid kept saying,

"Why don't they come down anymore?

Why don't they come down anymore?"

'Cause, you know, those kids are gonna grow up and like,

their parents won't be controlling

who they can talk to anymore.

And they'll talk to me, you know, and it'll be okay.

And I love thinking about that,

all these kids whose parents control them

and think that they can keep them from this. They can't.

- I'm a dog! - I'm a dog!

They're gonna discover this whole world of queerness

and people of other races and other faiths,

and you cannot shelter your child from all that.

We had this, like, time period, it was crazy,

like, time period when a lot of our shows

were picketed by anti-gay people.

And often there was kids with them, you know,

holding those, these signs up and I just thought,

this is like, it just felt crazy to me.

It was often like the religious right.

And, and I just, I just didn't want,

I don't think people should own Christianity like that.

So I wanted to write a song

about how I felt about that hate.

I'm gonna have to behave myself.

Hey. Do you want to do "Let it Ring" tonight?

Oh, gosh, yeah. Okay, I gotta practice it with you, though

- it's been a while. - I gotta practice it too. With me too.

'Cause I think it's gay pride.

Oh yeah, okay.

I realized that things take time,

and that they have gotten better,

but they're not great for trans people right now.

They're not great at all.

There's still a lot of pain and judgment and dehumanization.

I've had nights where I was sad,

didn't feel like playing a show,

and by the end of the night I'm just healed.

Just get washed over with that energy of togetherness.

It's so joyful, y'all! Incredible!

And so I have found through the course of my life

just me trying to reaffirm, and steel myself,

and validate myself,

and that's why you need your peeps, you know.

And that's why we need to get together in our queer groups

and have dinner, and laugh, and be queer.

Family can mean so much

and just be the most powerful relationship in your life,

and they can be chosen,

so I just want to say to all the queer peeps

whether you've come out or not, like, we hold you, we hold you.

You are valid and you are created in the image of,

if you believe a creator created you.

You have equal value

and we wanna all hold each other up.

Lindsay Fuller!

Whoo! That song makes me feel good inside!

...as the outbreak spread across the United States,

and public health officials warn things will get worse.

Large public gatherings are widely forbidden.

Y'all, we're getting it going.

Check 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, check, check.

Here we are.

- You're live. - Oh, we're live! Oh!

Yeah!

Indigo Girls are doing a live stream set.

It's a benefit for Honor the Earth.

I hope you are all enjoying tonight's performance

by the Indigo Girls

to benefit Feeding the Valley Food Bank in Georgia.

Oh, my god, you won't believe this,

but we've already raised $15,000.

What? Wow!

Oh, my god, you guys are awesome.

Thank you!

We made $200,000 for Honor the Earth last week.

And we raised $125,000 for Feeding the Valley.

Our fan communities, I mean,

we couldn't really do it without them.

We would be not near as effective

if they weren't willing to engage,

and we are always totally inspired by them.

We just want to do what white people have to do

to change things.

Thanks again for tuning in.

We're all going to be learning a lot.

You're kind of breaking white solidarity all the time

if you're doing it right.

We are here to heal generational trauma.

Let me tell you what I love the most about the Indigo Girls.

They are about that activism life,

social and environmental justice.

It's not about being a celebrity, right?

It's about not trying to take up too much space

but really taking the time to amplify the black voices.

They didn't even ask to come here to sing, y'all.

They were just trying to come chant with us.

But since we know we want them to sing...

I'm a nurse practitioner and I work in the ICU in patients.

I tuned in every week during Covid,

watching their live streams, it really helped a lot.

This has been such a tough year and it's so great to be here.

It's not just them. It's not just us.

It's like we're all here together.

The Indigo Girls kind of helped sustain us through the pandemic.

It was like a spiritual healing

that we didn't really know that we actually needed.

Oh, my god, It's great here.

Oh, my god, and it's the Indigo Girls!

Like everything's kind of blowing our mind.

Is there anything that I'm not asking

that you would love to say?

- I don't think so. - No.

I just want to sing with you,

if you would sing with us.

I trust your instincts.

I can already tell that you're not gonna bouf me out.

No.

Let me see.

- I like that. - Okay.

- I do. Do you? - Yeah, yeah.

Do you prefer it?

- Now that you say yes, I do. - You do?

Okay.

Now that I say yes.

- But it's still pretty natural, so. - Yeah, it's very natural.

I'm very fortunate.

I feel, sometimes being in the room

amongst such amazing talent

and, uh...

just in awe over people

that I've gotten to be around.

That's how I feel too.

All I do his hair and makeup,

and I'm getting to be amongst these geniuses.

You're the kind of person I'd like to have coffee with.

Aww.

- Me? - Yeah.

Aw, thank you. You guys are so smart though, I'm like...

Not really, I'm not smart.

- I mean, I'm not, really. - I would be boring.

I don't think so.

The only thing I know how to do is write a song.

- That's it. That's it. - That's a lot.

- That's fantastic. - It's only one thing.

Yeah, but that makes, that impacts lives so,

that's something that impacts,

it actually impacts people's lives.

Yeah, but so does our personhoods though,

you know, like you seem like a kind person.

I think kindness impacts lives in ways that we don't even know.

It's only life after all!

Do y'all know any of these songs?

You should sing them. You should sing them real loud.