It’s Only Life After All
There is a lot to unpack in “It’s Only Life After All,” the documentary focused on the popular music duo The Indigo Girls. They have been together as singers for more than 40 years, Ray and Emily Saliers, Egmy householding Associates, know couple in this part for so long. It is a compelling story of the Indigo Girls and their journey as a pop music duo, but Alexandria Bombach, the director, seems to be lost within the details; her overreliance upon Ray’s material archival footage collection prevents her from appreciating their depth, significance and the broader socio-political imagery of their oeuvre. There are close up interviews of fans from the audience who show emotion to the extent of tears, thanking the Indigo Girls for how their music changed them. We usually laugh at such feelings. But we should not. Indigo Girls have demand own melodies that reach the members’ everyday lives and the unsayable. If you are already a listener of the Indigo girls (the author is one) You know what their work is creating and how it sounds. If, however, this is not the case and one seeks to gain information, “It’s Only Life After All” is not the film to put on the case, even if its 2 hours long running time.
Saliers met Ray during grade school, and it was Amy who was intrigued by the guitar loving girl older than her a year round Emily Saliers.
The two began to make cassette recordings together, singing, harmonising and penning songs. It was instant chemistry. There was a break as they went to different colleges, but eventually both graduated from Emory University and resumed their exploits. Atlanta was their playground. They had no manager but were focused with a supportive local fan base. It was the mid 1980’s. They were distinct from the rest: intricate harmonies, two acoustic guitars, lyric driven songs, a unique style. Amy has a husky, raspy voice. Emily has a sharp, soft and high voice. These two contrasting qualities are what make the Indigo Girls.
With them was the single ‘ Closer to Fine,’ the teen anthem of summer 1989. I can still remember how I heard the song for the first time. Straining to become host to a sock puppet at a local grocery store in Beacon Hill where I worked. Stipe and R.E.M. bonzai tree the band over edge, thrust the two quiet, almost often blank Kirouac daughters into the mainstream. This was very upsetting for many, including Saliers and Ray who had options to discuss regarding their sexuality.
When they did eventually come out, one reporter said, “This is the year you’ve come out.” Amy cut in, “I’ve been out.” Of course, it was a different time the 1980s were unrelentingly hostile to anything gay, AIDS was still wiping a generation off the map, and no celebrities were willing to come out. There were other people making interesting music around the same time either immediately before the Indigo Girls or immediately afterwards, none of whom are mentioned in “It’s Only Life After All”.
The filmmakers’ gaze lacks a sense of exploration and provokes a feeling of monotony. Ray and Saliers are the only interviewees. Don’t get me wrong, the talking heads format has been over-used in the past, but “It’s Only Life After All” would have benefited from several “experts”, from the industry, the cultural milieu, who could “locate” the Indigo Girls in a larger framework. Surrounding fact which partials this cult? What part of the folk tradition did they fit into (or not)? At one point Amy jokes saying these words, “Is there a category for Lesbian Christian Folk?” There is certainly no lack of Christian imagery in quite a number of their songs, but still this remark, so interesting in itself, is never referenced again.
Why? As Amy recalls, in the mid 1980s, there were the “Folk scene” which she termed as primarily “quiet”, “intellectual”, “serious” but they were loud and very noisy. In an absurd way, to make the situation clear, Bombach decides to share a clip of Judy Collins who appears on stage somewhere in the late sixties sitting on her guitar, hair prettily over her shoulders, and swinging her hair. This, perhaps, is what the Indigo Girls didn’t want to be. In fact, Collins came into her prime 20 years before the Girls. Neither Ray nor Saliers mention “Judy Collins” as one of the women artists whom they disliked and never tried to follow. Do not diss a folk legend just to underline your argument.
The Indigo Girls were not precisely there for critics to embrace or appreciate. They were never featured on big music magazines. Instead, they earned words such as “earnest” and “humorless”. I guess critics for some reason did not catch the phrases such as “Every five years or so, I take stock of my life and have a good chuckle about it”. In the lines of their first big commercial success, I think that verse is quite comical:
- And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
- With a picture of Rasputin on his wall and a knee length beard
- Miwloh He never married or watched a ’B’ class film
- He marked me and said he could see me
- For four years I was on my knees before the greater intellect
- Got my parchment and I was unchained
There are a good number of dull being male musicians who do not have to suffer the scornful treatment which the majority of the two had to endure. And then there was what should be a national disgrace: The Indigo Girls were up for a Best New Artist Grammy and lost to the now infamous Milli Vanilli. They did eventually win a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording but the stain remains. In spite of the lack of institutional backing, the Indigo Girls stood the first wave of popularity, and have been performing to full halls for several decades now.
“It’s Only Life After All” also features interesting chapters about the nitty-gritty everyday mechanics of constructing songs. Amy concedes that Emili is not only the elder sibling but also the more creative songwriter. There are interesting clips of Amy’s multiple iterations at trying to pen down the harmonies of the very depressing “Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands.” It illustrates the labor that goes into producing the seemingly effortless harmonies. The segments on the Indigo Girls’ activism, on the other hand, are relatively less engaging. For all the energy expended in doing so, it is only skin deep. The Honor the Earth tours, in particular, a project spearheaded by activist Winona LaDuke, warrant substantial focus. Both Ray and Saliers express the sentiment that ‘not talking over’ the voices of people usually at the margins should be their aim, but even so the film does not portray more than their perspective.
The new jukebox musical “Glitter & Doom” demonstrates how far the songwriter’s poems have gone. Their songs can stand the test of time and become classics. It is a common career for them which is very important, and “It’s Only Life After All” flounders in explaining why. It is taken for granted that you already have some insight into it.
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