|
For the past two decades, folk-rockers Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have melded their contrasting musical sensibilities into a common musical language that speaks to millions. Upon the release of Despite Our Differences, their tenth studio album of new songs, the Indigo Girls talk about their individual inspirations and songwriting strategies—and the fine art of collaboration.
By Drew Pearce
(Reprinted from the January 2007 Issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine)
Call it a Purple State album. Two years after the 2004 presidential elections divided the United States into opposing primary colors, Indigo Girls from the red state of Georgia return with a raw, revitalized sound showing how contrasts can coalesce rather than collide. And if anyone knows how to make differing sensibilities mesh together to make something stronger, it’s Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. Nearly twenty years since their signature harmonies made them a main attraction in an acoustic-pop revival, the Grammy-winning duo have teamed with veteran pop producer, Mitchell Froom (Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Crowded House), and created one of the most vibrant, topical records of the year, Despite Our Differences. If you had any doubts that the duo could surprise you at this stage in their career, listen to the blistering electric guitar and drum attack of “Rock and Roll Heaven’s Gate” and you’ll hear how much momentum they’ve gained in the past few years.
We spoke by phone with Saliers and Ray about the evolution of their new record, their first in a new deal with Hollywood Records (www.hollywoodrecords.go.com), and how they conceive the songs separately but combine cohesively, despite their differences.
What factors led to choosing Mitchell Froom as your producer this time?
SALIERS: I like the artists he’s worked with—Crowded House, Ron Sexsmith, Cibbo Matto, Sheryl Crow, Los Lobos; I like his approach to music, which is to keep the song intact and not overdo the production; I like him as a person. He’s got a great dry wit. We laughed a lot during the making of the record. The fact that he liked Amy’s and my music equally was apparent from the beginning and is very important to us, because she and I are so different musically. We have to find someone who can work with both of us enthusiastically, or else it gets tricky.
RAY: I wanted to work with him for a long time. What I saw in him was a way of applying his own genius to each situation in a different way. You’d know it was a Mitchell Froom record because it had a certain nuance of genius running through it. Nothing’s wasted. He has a lot of energy. It’s a certain thing he knows how to do with people. I knew if he would work with us, and we could be who we are, in the rawest way, he could build a bridge between us, and it wouldn’t have to be through layers and layers of production. It would just be through the experience that he gives you as a producer. As a keyboard player, he really knows how to play two notes over and over again and make the whole difference in the song.
What inspired you to write the opening track, “Pendulum Swinger”?
SALIERS: The way it starts, “I meet you for coffee,” is really how it began. My friend Susan Henry-Crowe and I get together and talk about the church and politics and terrorism. She’s a minister and Dean of Religious Life at Emory University [outside Atlanta, Georgia]. My mind is always buzzing after I have lunch with her. That song talks about all the things she and I talk about. Particularly, I’ve been fascinated—blown away—by the success of The DaVinci Code and what it says about what people are interested in right now. It was interesting to me that a lot of the people who got into The Da Vinci Code are people who have turned away from the church, but they’re looking for something. They’re looking for some aspect of religious life that speaks to mystery. I thought that was fascinating and wanted to write about that.
Is the title the first thing that came to mind?
SALIERS: Those words kept popping around in my mind. With the *2004 elections and the “blue” states and “red” states, I was just thinking about pendulums and how things do shift over time. There will again be a period of time where, politically, things will be very different in this country. The crux of the song is that only love can turn the tide. At the epicenter of it, that’s where we need to look. Love is what’s going to swing the pendulum back the other way.
Were you conscious of making the music something upbeat and uptempo as a counterweight to the lyrical content?
SALIERS: It’s not so self-conscious, but I do this, and Amy does too—either putting something heavy in a light musical contest or something dark in a ballad context. I enjoy hearing music like that. But it was also just finding the chord progression that seemed to fit the sentiment I was mulling over at that time.
Do you work with chord progressions that you already have and marry them with lyric ideas [“It doesn’t come from the bullwhip / It’s not persuaded by the hand on your hip / It’s not the company of gunslingers / The epicenter love is the pendulum swinger”] that come up later?
SALIERS: It’s more like the thoughts are there, floating around, almost like a collective consciousness thing, and I feel them. Some of the words are distinct, like “pendulum swinger” or “I meet you for coffee.” The rest of it just gets fleshed out. I think
about the structure of the song or how I want it to rhyme. Actually, the structure of “Pendulum Swinger” is a little unorthodox for me. “It doesn’t come by the bullwhip” doesn’t feel like a chorus to me. It’s more like a B section. And then the “She is” is really the chorus, but all it says is, “she is.” Structurally, it’s very atypical for me.
Were you thinking in terms of theory when you were constructing the chord progression?
SALIERS: Not to sound too mystical, but I think a lot of channeling goes on. There’s a lot of stuff that happens by accident that in the end is very rewarding. Those are things that you can’t really break down. By no means was I saying to myself, “I’m going to play a flat seven here and then go up into the release of the chorus.” But I think the lyrics took me there.
How did the song “Dirt and Dead Ends” evolve from the seed of an idea to its final mix?
RAY: That’s actually a demo that we built into the song. I started that song a while back. It was really important to me emotionally. It was a personal story from my life. I just sat down in front of my DATman and started singing this song about this situation. It just started coming out. I just recorded myself for 20 minutes, just kind of blathering on about this thing, and then I sat down and listened to it over and over till I found stuff that I thought made sense as a story. Then I wanted to get a recording of it that sounded a certain way, word for word. Something I really felt. I must have recorded it 50 times on my DATman over the course of few days. I finally got exactly what I wanted, emotionally. I try to record a version of every song by myself, so the producer can really hear what I mean. It was just a demo, though. We were going to do it with me and a drummer and bass player playing sparse stuff, and try to get the best live version in the studio. But as I was practicing to the demo, I realized, “I’m never going to get what I want, because what I want is this.” You can’t ever duplicate a demo, you know? So I went into the studio and told David Boucher, the engineer, and he was like, “Oh, this is cool. Let’s just use the demo.” [Laughs.] It was really noisy, the mic level was weird, and I kept hitting my harmonica on something. But David worked on it with this really complicated EQ structure and compression and pulled out the best he could of the guitar and vocal. The drummer, Matt Chamberlain, went in and did two drum parts—the same part twice, basically, but a little varied so we put it in the left and right speakers so it would kind of surround me. Then we put the bass in the middle. They did it live to the demo as they were listening. Mitchell came in and did some really beautiful, low-key organ parts. Basically, it’s still the demo. I made it in my house and we created stuff around it.
How has your songwriting evolved since your first record, Strange Fire?
RAY: When I listen to the old records, there is some sentimental attachment to some songs. There are a few I think stand out as pretty good, but I definitely wasn’t that great a songwriter. I really had a lot to learn about development of melody. Go somewhere else with your melody, work with it a little bit more. Lyrically, when you’re telling a story, make sure that you’re paying attention to the fact that there’s an audience—try to say something that can be understood, instead of being introspective and abstract for the sake of being abstract. I just started focusing on telling stories and not always talking about myself and my life or my relationships or my pain. Talk about somebody else’s pain that I’ve witnessed. Tell their story. For me, it’s about sitting down and doing it every day—playing scales and chords over and over again trying to see how many melodies can work over one chord progression. Or listening to a writer like Kristen Hall of Sugarland. She could use the same three chords in five different songs and you would never know it, because the melodies change so much. I’m really into punk rock, so I listen to a lot of bands I like and study their melody structure and figure out how to apply that to acoustic rock. Everybody asks, “How do you become a good writer?” First of all, I’m not there yet, but second, just write. It’s not about sitting around waiting for the muse. The people who are really good labor over what they write.
Do you also labor over whether a song is going to be in a particular key or tuning, or fingerpicked versus strummed?
RAY: We use different tunings or chord voicings to give a song more depth. I’ll put a capo on really high up the neck and see how it sounds. Or try mandolin and see if that works, or a 12-string, or a classical guitar. We do a little bit of wrestling in that area. We’ll try different stuff to see what sticks. A lot of times you’ll think you know what you want, but you really need to try other stuff to get outside the box and not get caught in old patterns.
Do you keep a journal for song ideas?
RAY: I keep a writing journal of lyrics. When I’m in my normal mode, I write every day. I’ll spend part of the time just playing guitar, coming up with fun things on guitar, trying to get better as a guitar player. I’ll play scales for 20 minutes. Something about playing scales puts intervals in your head and makes you able to write melodies.
What advice would you give to upcoming artists who are working in duos?
SALIERS: I’d say just celebrate what each of your brings to it. That’s been the key for me and Amy—our differences, hence the title of this latest record. It’s the way we’ve brought those differences together in a musical dialogue and community that’s worked for us for 25 years. I find more and more that what makes life interesting is how we’re different from each other, not how we’re the same.
ARRANGING HARMONIES AS A DUO
Though the end result sounds effortless, Indigo Girls spend a good deal of time crafting every interval of the intricate vocal harmonies that made them famous.
SALIERS: Usually whoever wrote the song has a pretty clear idea of the direction she wants to go. I made solo demos of my songs, and on the drive up to Amy’s house, I would just sing ideas out loud in the car, trying different stagger ideas and harmony parts, so when I got up there I’d have some ideas. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. I think we’re both good about trying different ideas on each other’s songs. Whoever wrote the song gets the last say.
RAY: We bounce ideas off each other. Sometimes Emily will say, “Can you sing me a countermelody on the chorus that you think works?” And I’ll come up with something on my own, and I’ll give her three options. It just depends on the song. When we first started, I couldn’t write harmony at all. I didn’t know how to do it. I had to think of it as separate melodies. That’s why we started with countermelodies. In the past five or six
years, I started writing a lot of my own harmonies for her stuff. When I get stuck, I’ll ask myself, “What are some other note choices I could use here?” If it’s a really complex singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell-style harmony, it’s very hard for me to instantly come up with that. I’ll have to play around with it for a long time. I’ll labor over which notes sound best, where we’re crossing over each other, where it sounds awkward. We pick it apart like you wouldn’t believe.
WRITE APART, BLEND TOGETHER
Like the harmonies that start out staggered and wind up weaving together, the songs themselves are born in separate places.
SALIERS: I write my songs. Amy writes her songs. When we know we’re getting ready to record, we get together to start learning them and arrange them. “I’m going to play uke on this song, Amy’s going to capo it up on the 7th fret ...” We go through all the permutations until we decide what feels right. On one of Amy’s songs, “Money Made You Mean,” I was going to play banjo, and we learned it that way. But when we got into the studio, Mitchell said, “I don’t think so.” So he took us in a different direction, and lots of electric guitar parts that we hadn’t practiced were added in the studio. There was a very trusting relationship with Mitchell. When he wanted to make changes, or felt that things didn’t work, we bought into what he said, unless we felt very strongly about something. On my song, “Fly Away,” he made a couple of chord changes that made the song so much better.
RAY: A few months before we start recording, I start thinking about how songs feel together. I might think, “We need a song with this feel to complement this other song.” Or, “We need a piano song.” I never think it’s going to be cohesive until the very end. [Laughs.] Every time we make a record, in the beginning we’re both like, “Oh, my God, these songs are so different; how are we going to make these work together? It feels like night and day.” We’re so different from each other. I’ll think it won’t work. But it always does.
HOW POP DIVA PINK BECAME AN HONORARY INDIGO GIRL
After guest starring on the song “Mr. President” for Pink’s album (title?), Indigo Girls decided to keep the collaboration rolling on their hardest rocking song to date.
RAY: I thought “Rock and Roll Heaven’s Gate” was going to be a song for a solo record, but I was talking to Emily and it felt like we could use a song like this to offset the other stuff we were doing on this record. So we started playing around with it. At that point, I felt like the chorus and verse sounded alike, and I wanted to make the chorus differentiate itself. So I created a call-and-answer section, which meant we needed a third person, distinct from us, to do the answer lines. We had just recorded “Dear Mr. President” with Pink on her record. And I was like, “We need someone like Pink to do this. We need Pink!” Then I basically finished the call-and-answer lines with her voice in mind. I wrote a melody for the demos that was much simpler, and I asked her to expand on it. In the studio, she went through it five or six times and eventually she made her mark on it. |