Issue # 18: The Indigo Girls, movie soundtracks and an incessant question

But how DID you get into country music?

Photo: JEREMY COWART

By Marissa

I’ve been lying and I didn’t even know it.

Let me explain: being from New York City, and liking country music, the most frequent question I am asked is, “how did you get into country music in the first place?” People always ask it like they’re trying to figure out the ending of Lost, or like I’m a character in Green Acres, a Jewish Eva Gabor who somehow got sidetracked on the way to Zabar’s. How could it be? You? And I get it. Sometimes I try to figure it out too.

When people ask, I tell them the story, which is true, in part: Shania, the Chicks, 90s country radio in the back of the car, a brother who played the fiddle and banjo in old time bands. Falling in love with Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead and digging back to their influences, wanting to understand how they became who they were and learned what they learned. It didn’t seem weird for me to like country music because I liked folk music and it was OK to like folk music (if it was the cool liberal kind), but it seemed weird for everybody else.

I thought that was basically it, until I found myself at the Ryman in 2021, singing along through the mask on my face to the Indigo Girls performing “Power of Two,” a song I first heard on the soundtrack for the movie Boys on the Side in 1995, thereabouts. I was thirteen or fourteen when that film came out, a film I only saw once and only vaguely remember – but I can tell you every song on that soundtrack and every artist, a CD I bought with allowance money from the Tower Records in Boston, where we were living at the time, my mom and I. It’s a perfect compilation if there ever was one, and while a bulk of my friends still swore by Singles, this was what I listened to almost every day when I got home from school for an entire year or more: the Bonnie Raitt opener, the Sarah McLachlan cover of Tom Waits’ “Old ’55,” Joan Armatrading doing “Willow,” Sheryl Crow tackling Derek and the Dominos. If there was a man on that soundtrack it was through a woman singing his songs and making them her own, and that was radical to me. My friend Lewis hated that McLachlan dared to cover his beloved Tom Waits, as if she had to get express permission from The Men to do something like this. He thought her performance was too sentimental, too saccharine, which was hilarious to me because it meant the only thing he heard in Tom Waits was the scruff in his voice, a not a word of his songs.

My favorite track, though, and the one I put on every mixed taped I made for my friends and sung quietly to myself in my loft bed, was the Indigo Girls’ “Power of Two.” The duo of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray wasn’t new to me at that point – thankfully my friend Ali from camp made sure I already had a copy of Rites of Passage, and “Galileo” and “Ghost” had become part of my teenage oxygen. At the time, I didn’t think of the Indigo Girls as folk music – it was just music, rock music I guess, playing through the same speakers as everything else. “Power of Two” begins with more jangly, rootsy guitar, and is centered around those exquisite, perfect harmonies that Emily and Amy make together, a harmony that makes a third person entirely, a person that is them and you and me and everybody else.

It was there that I fell head over heels for harmonies for good, and it was there – and now we come back to the lie I was telling you about – that I think I started down my road to country music, because I’ve been searching for that feeling ever since. The feeling of guitars and harmonies and a song that tells the truth. I saved more money and bought Indigo Girls, their self-titled record, and covered myself in “Closer to Fine” until my friends got sick of hearing it, hanging out in my apartment while we did whatever on earth it is that teenage girls do. I did not get sick of it. I have not gotten sick of it.

Did I just not see till later how much the Indigo Girls shaped me, nor understand the connection between those harmonies and where I am now, and what I love now? Had I so deeply embed the misogynistic lens of the world around me into my own self, that I did not give them the credit they deserved in my own personal development and love of country music, let alone the cultural canon (where I now know they deserve to sit amongst any of your fav male legends with a guitar). I know now, and I will answer that question differently now: the “How did you get into country music in the first place?” question. I will mention them, the powerful two.

I still haven’t seen the Barbie movie (I know, I know), but the last thing I expected was that the next notable time the Indigo Girls appeared on a Blockbuster soundtrack would be for this one - though I hear it makes total sense in the film. Even better is that on the expanded version, there’s a cover by Brandi Carlile & Catherine Carlile of “Closer To Fine.” As with the Indigo Girls, I don’t spend much time worrying about what category of music Brandi Carlile is, and I suspect that young people - young, like I was in 1995 - don’t worry about it at all. They hear music that sometimes has loud guitars and sometimes quiet harmonies, and it all works just as well. It connects because of those things and more, it resonates because it feels real and true. Like with the Indigo Girls, I listen to Brandi Carlile almost every day. I am sure some of you know this about me by now.

The scene where Barbie is belting “Closer To Fine” is, I hear, on a road trip, escaping Barbie world - which was part of the premise of Boys on the Side, too. Not from Barbie world - but a world where men are the center ("Guyville,” if you will), to a place where we can lean on women alone for everything we might need, and break free from the plastic expectations. Barbie director Greta Gerwig is around my age, and I have to imagine that there is some sort of continuity here, even subconscious: did the harmonies of the Indigo Girls set her free, too? Is Brandi’s continuing to keep that freedom within reach?

I wonder if a young kid will download a copy of the Barbie soundtrack and play it over and over again, zeroing in on the exact harmonies of Brandi Carlile and her wife Catherine and feel their world shift in a turn of a kaleidoscope, suddenly all mixed up colors and new possibilities.

I wonder if they might fall in love with country music because of it.

It would be even closer to fine.