‘Lost Day’ helps duo find peace
This week in Playing CatchUp, USA TODAY’s spotlight on veteran artists returning to the spotlight, we talk to the Indigo
Girls, the folk-rock duo known for such late-’80s and ’90s hits as
Closer to Fine and Galileo.
LOST AND FOUND. Since releasing their last album four years ago, the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have become mothers. Also, Ray’s father died as she was writing songs for the Georgia-based pair’s new album, One
Lost Day, out now. “For some reason, his passing shook a lot of things into place, in a way that settled the songs,” Ray says. “A lot of (the album) was influenced by a change in perspective.”
BRAND-NEW ‘KEY.’ After Saliers and Ray recorded the first take of single Happy in the Sorrow Key, they played it back and discov-
ered the whole track was slightly sharp, forcing the musicians to retune their instruments when they recorded overdubs. “We still haven’t figured it out,” Ray says. “I think something happened technically, but all the technical wizards swear that nothing did. It has its own intonation, the whole song.”
A SOBER TAKE. Saliers has stopped drinking since the release of the duo’s 2011 album, Beauty Queen
Sister. “My life is so much better for it,” she says. “Another part of the writing of this record is clarity and a real joie de vivre that gets lost in drinking too much.”
SOLO WORK. Ray released a country-infused solo album, Goodnight
Tender, last year. Saliers has been working on a solo album as well, to be produced by Indigo Girls violinist Lyris Hung. “It’s a work in progress right now,” Saliers says, adding that the album is half-arranged and more than half-written. With One Lost Day being released in the middle of the year, “it didn’t make sense to release both at the same time. I think the solo record will come out at the beginning of 2016.”
MUSIC AND THE LOVE OF FOOD. For several years, Saliers has coowned the award-winning Watershed on Peachtree, a restaurant in Atlanta’s historic Brookwood Hills neighborhood. The restau- rant specializes in seasonal dishes with locally grown ingredients, humanely raised meat and linecaught fish — “all the things that are important when you keep in mind our relationship to food and the earth and the seas,” she says.
BY SPECIAL REQUEST. Ray and Saliers will begin their summer tour June 17 in Grand Rapids, Mich. In July, they’ll appear at the Eaux Claires Music Festival in Wisconsin, performing their 1994 album,
Swamp Ophelia, in its entirety at the request of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who curated the festival. “He said it had been his dream to hear that record from start to finish live,” Ray says. “I think he felt like he could ask, because we’re friends.”