Indigo Girl Amy Ray Takes on the 'Beauty Queen Sister': Interview

In a pop music landscape too often dominated by auto-tune and soulless electronics The Indigo Girls’ 14th studio album Beauty Queen Sister –- out on October 4 -- offers up the duo’s signature intricately woven vocals and troubadour-like lyrics with a refreshingly modern sound.

In a pop music landscape too often dominated by auto-tune and soulless electronics The Indigo Girls’ 14th studio album Beauty Queen Sister –- out on October 4 -- offers up the duo’s signature intricately woven vocals and troubadour-like lyrics with a refreshingly modern sound.

For 25-plus years Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have continually delivered tunes that would become beloved ballads and anthems for decades to come. And Beauty Queen Sister is sure to churn out at least a few classics in the making, including the title cut, Ray’s funky ode to the minutia of small-town life and politics.

A multi-faceted activist who’s seemingly equally concerned with LGBT, Native American and environmental issues, Ray’s “Beauty Queen Sister,” is indicative of her knack for melding lyrics about political and social problems with infectiously upbeat music.

At 47, Ray, who hails from Decatur, Georgia, continues to challenge norms both musically and in her politics. While she’s made her mark as one half of the one of the world’s most famous “folk” duos, Ray’s also proved her mettle as punk artist and record producer to be reckoned with in her solo work that includes her acclaimed debut Stag. Although Ray and Saliers came out publicly ages ago, over the past few years, in interviews, Ray has exhibited a vested and timely interest in gender-identity issues and politics -- a prescient subject these days.

SheWired caught up with Ray shortly before the release of Beauty Queen Sister to discuss the album, the title cut, life on the road after 25 years and just why gender identity issues are important to her on a personal level.

SheWired: Your new album Beauty Queen Sister was produced by Peter Collins, who also produced some of your iconic albums Rites of Passage and Swamp Ophelia. Is this album a return to those earlier works in any way?

Amy Ray: When we made Rites of Passage we sort of said to Peter, “We really want you to make your mark on us.” Well, I don’t know if we said it that way because we were probably more closed-minded at that point of our career -- because we were young. But we definitely wanted his vision, and we wanted him to do something for us that would change the game for us musically.

Usually when we change producers it’s not we don’t like the person we’ve been working with but just because we want to have something that just makes a mark in a different way to kind of challenge us, so went back to him on this record.

Basically, when we started working with him on this one, I was like, “You know Peter, when you made Rites of Passage it was a real shift for us and I want that to happen with this record too.” He understood that we wanted his vision. Obviously we spent about twenty percent of the money we spent on that other record because of the way things are now (laughs), and we made it in like two-and-a half weeks. We really had an intention of trying to look at the songs differently -- being spontaneous. I wouldn’t say we take huge musical risks but we take them within our context.

What on this album constitutes a musical risk for you?

That’s a good question actually. For me, a song like “Yoke,” the very last song, I brought to the project pretty late. I had written it a while back but I had thought of it as being kind of in that Leonard Cohen tradition, in that folk song tradition of being kind of long and dark. I didn’t know if it was just too self-sulk, but I think the risk was, “let’s just do it” and see what happens. It’s a live recording basically, with a couple of string overdubs, but the main string is live -- everything is live, except for Emily’s vocal and one violin part or something. So for me, something like that –- it’s kind of an emotional perspective, and you’re just doing it and not worrying about whether it fits in, or whether its pop-y or anything like that.

And just an overall thing would be that we went in with some players that we didn’t know, like we ended playing with a bass player that ended up being amazing and sort of ended up being a really big key to the record. Things like that become risks because you could get in and have it be really bad as far as chemistry goes, and then it’s awkward.

We went back to Brady Blade as a drummer and that’s not really a risk at all because he’s one of our favorite people. But I think we kind of put the band together in a different way that we normally do and that made for a more spontaneous experience.

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