I am a lyrical music person. I appreciate composition and mixing and all the other stuff but if I can’t sing along to it, if a song doesn’t have a killer twist of phrase or catchy chorus, I tend to lose interest. In hindsight, this makes sense since I was trying to deny the writer in me for so many dozens of years. I love me some singer songwriters: Indigo Girls, Paul Simon, the Eagles (including solo Don Henley), Joni Mitchell, T-Swift. Love them. But Indigo Girls stand apart. 

They don’t just write stories or develop great harmonies. They write poetry. And I challenge you to listen to some of their best and deny their position as among the best poetry written in the 20th century. That’s not hyperbole. Their lyrics are up there with Emily Dickinson. e.e. Cummings. Elliott. 

So, as a tempestuously angsty tween, an adorer of British gothic and the Romantics (Wordsworth, not the band, though that too), of course I loved them. They articulated my teenage pain SO well. Prepping for a concert tonight, I’m streaming their “best of” and I realize it wasn’t just teenage pain. It was human pain, nay, human existence. 

I cannot plead ignorance to the abounding memes that stereotype both the Indigo Girls and their listeners. I don’t remember if I was introduced to the Indigo Girls by my fellow counselors at the girls camp I worked at for 5 years, or if we brought a pre-existing love of their songs to camp with us. But I can’t hear them without thinking about my summers in a completely female environment singing at the top of our lungs. And while it was past my peripheral vision, the sexual awakenings and experimenting some of my fellow counselors were partaking in definitely occurred to the same soundtrack. That was just not something that my CIS-Methodist-good-southern-girl head could even comprehend back then. 

What I couldn’t miss was the Indigo Girls’ feminist call: the way they both well articulated and harmonized rage and pain. Depressed and alone in 7th grade and managing the heartache of unrequited love?

I am intense 

I am in need

I am in pain 

I am in love

Yes!!! Yes!! I was all of those things. 

The only one in my friend group not invited to Homecoming?

I say love will come to you

Hoping just because I spoke the words that they're true. 

Oh please! Let it be true! 

Not sure where I want to go or what I want to be when I grow up? 

Sometimes I ask to sneak a closer look;

Skip to the final chapter of the book

And then maybe steer us clear from some of the pain it took

To get us where we are this far.

Tonight I am going to see the Indigo Girls. I am attending with friends but I intend to drift into the crowd and find my own little place apart. And here my more confident and content 40-something self will close my eyes, reach back through time and hold the hand of my desperate and unmoored tween self and sing loudly the lyrics that saved and soothed her. I may even wear a flannel shirt in solidarity.