Poseidon and the Bitter Bug
by The Indigo Girls
IG Recordings
TOGETHER, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers form the Indigo Girls, the Grammy-winning folk-rock act whose new album, Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, marks the pair’s return to an independent label—their own, in fact, which they dubbed IG Records—after releasing eleven, major-label studio albums since their debut in 1987 (with Strange Fire). The homecoming must have been catalyzing, because they recorded Poseidon in just three weeks inside an Atlanta studio.
Now 45 and openly gay, the Girls have thoroughly outgrown their band’s name, but their personal lives have long run on parallel tracks. They met as classmates at Laurel Ridge Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia. After college, they joined the vibrant music scene in Athens, Georgia (the incubator for contemporary acts like R.E.M. and the B52’s). From the start, Ray’s brooding alto and inclination toward the minor keys were brightly balanced by Saliers’ clever sing-a-longs on such unlikely topics as reincarnation (“Galileo”), America’s dependency on oil (“Fill It Up Again”), and even novelist Virginia Woolf, about whom, in a live recording from 1200 Curfews (1995), Saliers confesses to the crowd: “I wrote papers about her in college, but I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Amy Ray, conversely, always knows what she’s talking about, and does so with a raw ferocity. The band’s magnum opus, Swamp Ophelia (1994), dead-ends with the song “This Train Revised,” which offers a grim look inside a boxcar containing “100 people, gypsies, queers, and David’s star” bound for a Nazi concentration camp yet ultimately “bound for glory.” The 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the 19th century, furnished Ray with the germ for her “Faye Tucker,” a protest song that excoriates the death penalty. “What did you learn Faye Tucker?” Ray growls. “Nothing would move us/ To rise above just being cruel.” Harmony for the Girls, then, isn’t just a musical mode but a political commitment as well.
If the titles of past studio albums aren’t evidence enough—“Come On Now Social” (1999) and “Despite Our Differences” (2006)—there are always the flyers for various nonprofit organizations rustling around in the lobbies outside their concerts. At a recent concert at the Granada in Santa Barbara, T-shirts were sold beside flyers for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Amnesty International, and Honor the Earth (a nonprofit co-founded by the Girls in 1991). In conjunction with Rock for a Remedy, part of their concert proceeds went to local food banks.
The ten songs that comprise Poseidon and the Bitter Bug (sequenced, like all of the Indigo Girls’ albums, with alternating works by Saliers and Ray) work together to place the listener in a boat on the open sea. In “Sugar Tongue,” Ray transports us to a colonized land and leaving her vocal comfort zone, sings airily from the perspective of an imperialist in the “blackest boots” and “whitest skin.” Saliers, as is expected, steps in to supply the album’s more romantically reflective ballads on love and longing. Her “Fleet of Hope” sees the sea god Poseidon as the real god to fear, and Saliers, the daughter of a librarian, imagines herself on the shoreline with a “book in my hand.” Could the image of a drowning victim who “layered [her]pockets with stones” be Virginia Woolf resurfacing once again, a reference to her suicide? “You’re all washed up,” sings Saliers, “when Poseidon has his day.” Having expanded from indigo to all the colors of the rainbow, the Indigo Girls are the very antithesis of “washed up” and still possess every ounce of their gorgeous, girlish charm.
Colin Carman, PhD, has taught English Lit. at Santa Barbara City College and Colby College.
