Spotlight Album Review: Indigo Girls "Look Long"

Look Long, the Indigo Girls’ 16th and latest album, is aptly titled. After 35 years together, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, look at life from a long-term perspective with songs boasting empathy, maturity, and their usual grace. The Indigos recorded the album at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath, England, with John Reynolds, who also produced 1999’s Come On Now Social. Although they might have been overseas, they sound right at home.  

As she often does, Amy leans toward the rockers. The lead track “Shit Kickin’,” is a nod to her Southern heritage. “K.C. Girl” is upbeat but bittersweet, finding the gap between generations. Her young daughter inspires the bouncy new wave feel of “Favorite Flavor,” while “Muster” is a cautionary tale of gun violence (“We got the river running, we got the animal cunning/The back of a turtle, the Garden of Eden, the cosmic dust/Why do we keep on gunning?).

Emily has the edge on melodies as usual, with an emotional undercurrent. She evokes small -town homophobia in the wistful “Country Radio” (“I’m just a gay who loves country radio”).  She offers wisdom for someone younger in “Feel This Way Again” and comes to terms with her younger sister’s death in the elegiac, ambivalent “Sorrow and Joy.” Thirty years after “Closer to Fine,” she channels her time in college in New Orleans on “When We Were Writers.”  As a student in English class, she writes, “The sentence gets tighter, the impact grows wider.” But, significantly, it’s not all nostalgia: “Well, I'm still burning inside.”

The title track, “Look Long,” also looks back to judge where we’ve come. In the first verse, Emily observes, “Everyone I know can sense Armageddon/We want to believe in something we're unsettled.” Then she evokes her grandparents’ faith in a simpler time (“I'm no awol patriot because I've dodged your party lines/I will always love my troubled nation, this beautiful land”). For all the Indigos’ commitment to social justice, we understand there has to be compassion and understanding: “God bless our brave little hearts and our inherent limitations.”

Yet again with Look Long, the Indigo Girls prove that, like Tom Brady or Roger Federer, their skills are undiminished; they maintain the gold standard for songwriting and integrity in their art, and we’re eternally grateful.

photo by Jeremy Cowart