From the first moment they started singing together, Amy Ray felt like her head was going to explode. They were in her parent’s basement learning cover songs — she’s pretty sure the first that they same was “A Junkie’s Lament” by James Taylor — and she remembers thinking, “‘This is amazing.’ Not, we sound amazing. But this feels amazing. It was always about. It was like, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had. So, I want to keep doing this.’”
The pair, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, soon formed their band, Indigo Girls, and now more than 35 years later, they’re still making music, both together and separately. And thank God, right? Their storytelling ability is unmatched; there aren’t two better musicians alive who know how to create what can only be described as magic. More than any other band, it’s their music that the queer community, and very much me included, keeps returning to again and again.
I spoke with Amy Ray in 2021 about the lasting legacy of “Closer to Fine,” identifying as genderqueer, and what on what was going on behind-the-scenes of the Indigo Girls before she came out publicly in the ’90s.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jeffrey Masters: You met your bandmate, Emily Saliers, in elementary school. You became friends in high school, eventually forming the Indigo Girls. You’ve known each other for more or less your entire life, but at what point did you come out to each other?
Amy Ray: Oh yeah. God, I feel like it was unspoken at first. I was in love with a girl in high school my senior year, and she was off at Tulane, because she was a year older than me. I know she knew that I was in love and everything, but we didn’t talk about me being gay necessarily. I didn’t even know how to describe it, honestly, I didn’t know what was going on. I just know I was in love. So I think it was the next year, we were at like a Wendy’s or something, eating some food before we played, and I just remember talking about it to her, and she wasn’t yet aware that she was gay. She was very much in her own world.
Even though we played together, that separation of being at different schools at that time was almost like this chasm between us, where she had her world going on and I had mine, but we got together and played. It was tender, you know? I think I was going through so much, and she was kinda wondering what I was going through, because I was kind of getting more radical, and I had some problems with depression, and I was a cutter sometimes, and just kinda going through this real struggle with my body and my sexuality and everything. And finally I just told her, I really laid it out. She wasn’t gay yet, or didn’t know it, and was still dating guys, and it wasn’t like, “Oh, great, you’re gay, so am I,” anything like that.
JM: Even though she didn’t even know she was gay at that point, did you have your own suspicions about Emily?
AR: It’s funny, because things were a little freer than that. During the time that I had a girlfriend, at one point we were sort of separated and not together anymore, and I had a boyfriend for a while. I really was in love, but he wanted to marry me, and I said, “I can’t, I’m gay. I can’t marry you. I love you, and I’m attracted to you, but I think that this is not our destiny. I’m really gay, and there’s not an ounce of bisexuality in me.” So it was more free, I think, because we were in college, and I don’t think it was important to completely define yet exactly who we were.
JM: I love hearing that Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls was in love with a man.
AR: Yeah, I mean, I was confused by it, because I really was so taken by him. But I think, in later years, I might have been able to not have to say to myself, “No, I’m gay, I can’t go down that path.” Because I think in later years I really felt like you really can go down whatever path you want. People defy sexuality and gender often, and change in a heartbeat, and discover something different about themselves. And I think, in my 30s or 40s, I might have been more like, “Yeah, I’m gay, but let’s hang out and sleep together and have fun.” I would’ve been a little more like, it doesn’t have to be so strict.
When I met the Butchies, some of them had been in Team Dresch, and they formed this band, the Butchies, in Durham. I didn’t have a good analysis of genderqueer-type stuff. I didn’t know what my gender dysphoria meant, I didn’t know, I was older and I had not even talked about it. They were in a different generation, and I was like, “Oh my God, I feel so free now to be able to articulate this.”
JM: Articulate what specifically?
AR: I felt so not at home in my body, and I struggled so much when I was really young, wanting to be a boy. And when I got to a certain point, I just honored the female part of me too. I started understanding that this thing that I have in me is not unique, and that so many people feel at odds with their body. And it made me have company around that, and not feel so lonely. And I made a decision that I felt equal parts enough to just stay who I am. But I was very drawn to the idea that there is this male in me that is so at odds with this female body, and now I understand that other people feel the same way, and that it’s gender dysphoria, and that there’s people that are trans, and they go through, they decide to transition, and there’s people that don’t, and there’s all these options.
When I heard about transgender, I didn’t know that there was such a fluidity, and so many options within that, that you didn’t have to be like, “I’m gonna be this,” or, “I’m gonna be that.” And it was very liberating for me, because I was like, it’s okay for me to feel at odds with my body but not necessarily feel so at odds that I need to transition and live in a different body and live as a man. I can live as a lady man, or whatever, it’s like I can live this life however I want to live it. And I think I had met so many people in different places in their life around that, that it made me just realize, there’s not one right way to do this. And the one thing that I do know is that you honor everyone’s way of doing it.
JM: Do you identify as trans or genderqueer or anything like that?
AR: I ID often as genderqueer. I don’t ID as trans, my pronoun is she. I think because I’ve lived for so long in my life and struggled to be at peace with she, that that’s what I embrace. But I definitely call myself genderqueer, and I definitely relate to people more that are fluid, and I feel so at home when I’m with people that understand that. It’s nice. Before, when I was a kid, I went through a lot of time when, when I was really young, people would call me a guy and I would think it was cool, and then when I was a teenager it was embarrassing to be called the wrong thing, and I would be in a bathroom and I would be looked at oddly.
And even into adulthood, when I was at the Home Depot checking out and a woman would say, “Thank you, sir,” and I would be like, “I’m ma’am,” or something like that. And I’m like, “Why am I saying that?” It doesn’t matter to me. I’m saying it because I’m trying to take care of them, because I realize that they’re embarrassed when they realize that they don’t know who I am, and that they need to have a sex to define in order to talk to me, and it’s just an awkward moment. And it’s taken me all these years to just be okay with whatever anybody says. And I’m always wanting to take care of people and make sure they don’t feel bad, probably because I’m a Southerner.
JM: You’ve always presented more butch, especially in the early years of the Indigo Girls. Did you feel like people didn’t know how to process your gender performance back then?
AR: Yeah, that’s an understatement. I think our audience knew how to process it, because they were right there with us. But the business end of things was a mess. Radio people did not know what to do, especially with me, because it’s like, how do I relate to this girl who’s really kind of a boy? They couldn’t use the same old flirtation and lines with me, because I was just kinda like a brick wall.
And then I think on an industry side, as far as the label went, I think they didn’t understand how to market us, necessarily. They were like, “Should we dress them a certain way? What do we do with these ladies?” Sometimes I had to be very, to the makeup person, like, “Just pretend I’m a guy and you’re putting makeup on a guy.” I don’t wanna look like a real estate agent, not anything against real estate agents, but when I get made up in a female way, I look like something different from what I am. They very quickly understood that our audience was just who they are, and they’re gonna be supportive of us if we’re just honest and genuine. But we got a lot of crap from press people, we got insulted constantly, for our appearance, what our audience looked like, for being butch, for being lesbians with guitars, and how mediocre it was.
And a lot of it, I think, had to do with sexism and not understanding how to deal with masculine women, and I think a lot of it had to do with homophobia, like some kind of weird ism against lesbians playing guitar. Anything but the music, anything they could talk about except the music.
JM: Something that I find so interesting about your relationship and dynamic is that we as a society know how to talk about and celebrate romantic love, but when it comes to Emily, someone you’ve known your entire life and have been making music for 35 years with her, that’s astonishing. But I don’t think we honor those partnerships like we do romantic ones.
AR: Yeah, it is a primary relationship, for sure. I know what you mean. I’ve thought about that sometimes with other friendships I have that are so intense, and they’re around music, and they’re not romantic at all, they’re musically romantic, I guess, but they’re art, and it is hard to figure out where to put those, because they do sort of dominate your life, and you prioritize them often over your own, your romantic relationship. Because I’ve been with the same person for 18 years now, and often I’ve had to prioritize, well, a lot, I’ve had to prioritize Emily over everything.
But I’ve always had models for that, because bands that I knew coming up were very closely knit, like families. I’ve always considered Emily like a sister, I call it a sibling relationship more than anything. But I do understand what you mean, because someone would be like, assume, because you have that kind of intense relationship with someone, that it is sexual. People always thought Emily and I were together, and I’m like, “No, no, that never would’ve occurred to me ever.”
JM: With all the speculation that you guys are secretly lovers, I wondered if, in the back of your mind, you’re hearing that and wondering, “Okay, but are they seeing something that I’m not seeing? Actually, are we in love?”
AR: Yeah. It’s like, am I repressing for this many years a physical attraction? No. Because we’re not each other’s types, it would be weird. I always felt that way. I definitely felt intensely in love with her in an artistic and musical way, and like a high school crush, a year older than me, writing songs already. I was just enamored by her abilities. But it was more like a looking up to somebody, putting someone on a pedestal type of thing.
JM: It’s astonishing, to use that word again, that 35-plus years later, you’re still able to impress each other with your songwriting.
AR: Yeah, we still support each other. When she writes a new batch of songs, I talk about how great this one is or that one, or point out things that I love, or if she does a great vocal, I tell her. One thing that we do is we egg each other on and support each other. And we still do that. So you have to, you cannot be in a partnership this long and not be supportive, it would feel terrible.
JM: Are you able to articulate why you’ve been able to achieve this longevity?
AR: I can articulate it in the practical way of how to keep a partnership together for a long time, because I think some of it is a bit of a mystery, and I think some of it is just our faith in the process of how we do things, and that the sum is greater than the parts, kinda thing. And I think we know that, so first of all, we respect that, it’s an entity unto itself.
And second of all, we give each other a ton of space, and so that’s like a lesson right there. A ton. We write separately, we have solo careers separately, we have our own friendships with other people, we don’t hang out with the same groups, we live in separate towns, we’re very opposite each other. We honor the difference, and that’s the secret, probably.
JM: With that thing that you have together when you are making music, that magic, was it there from day one, or did you have to work and find that?
AR: I feel like it was there from day one. I don’t know what she would say. When I heard us singing together in my head, when we first were in my parents’ basement learning like a cover song, I was just, my head felt like it was gonna explode, because I was like, “This is amazing.” Not, we sound amazing, but this feels amazing. It was always about, this feels amazing. It wasn’t like, “We’re gonna be famous.” It was like, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had, so I wanna keep doing this.” That’s how I felt.
JM: What was the song?
AR: It was “Junkie’s Lament,” by James Taylor. I think that’s the first song we learned. We had a lot of covers. We would go to the high school and sit in my English teacher’s classroom and play after school, and people would come and sit around with us and listen. It was very high school.
JM: With “Closer to Fine”, which is arguably your most famous song, looking across your entire catalog, 35 years later, does it surprise you that it’s “Closer to Fine” that has been the most famous?
AR: It does not surprise me. Emily knows how to write a song that resonates with people in this way that I can’t do, but she has, I don’t know what it is, it’s some crazy quality she has, to just put her finger right on the pulse. I can even look at it from the outside and be like, “It’s a classic song.” It’s written in a certain way, it’s got this chorus, a lot of people can relate to it at different stages of their life. It’s just taken on a life of its own, as a singalong, so it’s kind of unstoppable.
JM: The two of you have never shied away from writing about serious things. In “Ghost”, one of my favorite songs, is the lyric “There’s not enough room in this world for my pain.”
AR: Yeah, Emily wrote that too. That’s one of my favorite songs that she’s written, actually, because that melody is so sweeping, and she can write a melody. It’s almost so epic to me that I never take the words apart and look at a sentence on its own. I just think of it as this force that’s so married to the music, it’s so evocative. For me, if I just heard the melody, it’s so evocative on its own even. It’s always been one of my favorite songs of Emily’s, for sure. It stands the test of time, and probably one of the ones that’s the most requested too. But that is a very serious lyric, it’s a statement, for sure.
JM: When you first heard that lyric come out of her mouth, did you stop in a studio and process that together, or do you just continue?
AR: No, we’re not allowed to process each other’s lyrics together. It’s an unspoken rule. Every now and then I’ll be like, “What did you mean by that?” Or, “What are you writing about?” But she doesn’t really say, she holds her cards pretty close. But I’ve heard her say something that she thought one of my songs was about and be totally wrong before, and I’ve done the same thing to her songs. So I know that we don’t know. It’s great, because we still can have these, our own inner life that the other person never figures out, which is nice, because it gives you that space.
But we’ll process lyrics if one of us thinks that someone needs to define something better, or polish it up, if it’s clumsy sounding, but only if the other person asks. I’ll say, “I wrote this line, I’m having trouble with it, can you help me figure out what’s wrong with it?” That’s the only way we do it, if the other person asks.
JM: Do you have an example?
AR: Oh, God. Sometimes it’ll be like she has an extra verse that doesn’t really need to be there, and she’ll say, “Do you think this verse needs to be there?” And I’m like, “Eh, it’s good, but you could probably use it somewhere else, like in another song, save it.” Oh, I know what it was. It was in a song called “Shit Kickin’.” There was a lyric in it where I’m talking about my granddad. He was a minister, but when he was in college, he talks about, in a journal that I read, about going to a party that was hosted by the Klan in the community, because the Klan would host these parties and invite everyone to go, and it was building up community support, like the Klan trying to whitewash what they were doing by having these big parties where they would feed people for free. It was terrible, insidious.
And I was like, “Oh my God, my granddad went to one of these parties,” it’s sort of like a shocker, right? And so I had a line in there about that, like, went to the party hosted by the Ku Klux Klan or something, and I said to Emily, “This seems to me to take away from the song, because it’s so specific, and it’s gonna be the only thing that somebody remembers, and it’s not the point.” The point of the song is your legacy kind of growing around you like kudzu, and you’ve gotta get out of the weeds and figure out where you stand and understand that there’s skeletons in your closet. And I asked Emily, I said, “I think I should leave,” and we talked about it for a while, and she helped me decide to change the line, and it was really better for it. She’s a great songwriter, and she teaches people how to write songs, and so I can ask her questions and she can be a teacher.
JM: I also don’t want this entire conversation to make it sound like Emily is the good songwriter and Amy is—
AR: That’s okay, she does write all the classics.
JM: That’s not true. “Land of Canaan,” I believe you wrote.
AR: Yeah, I did. But it’s classic, but it’s not like this well-crafted, technically accomplished song. It’s like a passionate song with two chords, which is fine.
JM: I love it, because when you perform it, I can just tell that you’re working hard. That’s what I want to see on stage.
AR: I’m working hard on that one, for sure, it’s true. That one’s so old, it’s got a certain sentiment that just takes on a life of its own, in a way.
JM: Has your own relationship to it changed?
AR: No, not really. When I sing that, I can still feel the feelings I felt when I wrote it, and be in it, and it doesn’t feel, it’s a very young song in a lot of ways. In its writing it’s young, and I’ve learned a lot about writing since then, but I don’t shy away from singing it because of that. For that song in particular, I can still feel passionate about the feelings I was having at the time, and I don’t look at it and think, “Oh my God, I was so overwrought.” I look at it and I think to myself, “Wow, I was in a real bind in that moment in my life,” and I can remember that, and it’s good.
JM: With these early songs that we’re talking about, the early albums you put out when you were not publicly out, did that affect your songs, where you were changing them to make them not so overtly gay?
AR: Not me. I didn’t. In fact, I relished the protection of a song to be who I was. I felt like a song was like a shield. I had spent so many years singing cover songs and never changing, I never change pronouns when I sing a cover song. When I was a kid, I didn’t even do it, I didn’t change to sing about a guy instead of a girl. I just embodied the person that wrote it. There was a song by James Taylor called “Millworker.” He sang it as a woman that worked in a mill, and I was young when I heard that, and I was like, “Huh, I like that, that’s cool.”
When I sing “Romeo and Juliet,” when I first learned that song, Mark Knopfler wrote it, I sang it as a man singing, and I could really go there, and it was before anyone on the outside would even talk about gender fluidity or anything like that. I didn’t really change my writing ever. When you look at those songs, you don’t even have to have pronouns to know how gay they are. It’s this perspective of writing when we were young, is very much outsider, and loneliness, and disenfranchisement, and questioning ourselves, and all the things that you feel when you’re struggling as a kid who’s gay. It’s in there.
JM: When you were starting out making music too, we didn’t have the ability to just Google, “Hey Google, are the Indigo Girls gay?” We couldn’t do that. So I think everyone was listening to your music and saying, “Yeah, they’re gay.”
AR: Yeah, yeah. Gaydar, it’s real.
JM: Because while you were not publicly out early on, you also were not doing interviews and talking about boyfriends that didn’t exist. Was that something that you and Emily were always on the same page about?
AR: No, we weren’t. Emily didn’t want to talk about being gay. It was just an agreement we had, she wasn’t ready. She had good reason of her own for it, and we always also felt like people need to take their time. I felt like, “You’re not ready, it’s okay.” And she would say, “Well, you can do an interview and talk about your own life, but I’m not going to.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not gonna do an Indigo Girl thing and talk about that if you’re not ready.” And then at some, I think it was like ’91 or ’92, I can’t remember, we were doing some kind of college radio, press conference type thing, up in Western Mass, and she answered a question and kinda came out when she answered it, and I was like, “Oh, that just happened.” I talked to her afterwards, I remember we were walking across the quad, I was like, “What just happened there? What did you just do?”
And I was so happy about it, because my perspective was, it’s not like people don’t know, and it’s not like our families don’t know, and our friends don’t know, and even our grandparents know. And I get that we don’t wanna be pigeonholed as this lesbian folk duo, but we already are, either way you’re crucified. Let’s just be out, and we’re asking everyone in the audience to be individuals and believe in themselves, and we’re talking about believing in yourself and how important it is, and how everybody counts, but we’re not willing to be who we are, and it doesn’t make sense to me. And then she came around, and it didn’t take long, and that was it.
JM: It wasn’t that you were consciously deciding, “We are not going to air our sexuality in public,” you were just still on the road of figuring it out and getting there.
AR: Yeah.
JM: Am I articulating that correctly?
AR: Yes, it’s exactly what was happening. We were immersed in our own struggles around it, and pressured by our mentors to be more open, but resistant to that, because we were so afraid of ourselves, and of how fragile an audience can be, and we didn’t want anyone to feel alienated. And at the time, being very outspokenly gay did alienate people, because everything was so conservative and backwards. And so we were just suffering under fear. I mean, just fear. And I kinda was like, “I’m scared too, but we can’t go out there and ask,” it’s like an agreement with our audience. We’re asking everybody to be themselves, and we gotta do the same thing.
JM: Was there a camaraderie between you and other women, like Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang?
AR: Not really. Now k.d., we only met her a couple times, she keeps to herself, a bit. She’s private.
JM: I think in my fantasy you’re sneaking off to like the bar or the cubby hole together.
AR: Right? Melissa, when we first started playing, and we went to LA to play, like when we first started, when we got signed, and we were out in LA making records and playing out there, we did a couple shows together and tried to be comrades, but she was in a different place. It was very the difference between kinda California and Georgia. She was in a celebrity scene that was very much around compromise and sort of toeing the label line and all that, and we were like the South, kind of independent DIY scene, like you never compromise, you do what, you be yourself, if you don’t wanna do something, you don’t do it, if you don’t wanna change a song, you don’t change it. Sometimes to our detriment, because sometimes people are right when they give you advice. So she was much more on a different path, and each thing is fine, they’re both worthy, but the thing was, we just didn’t hang in the same arenas.
JM: Before I let you go, next week I’m interviewing Brandi Carlile.
AR: Oh my God, yes, one of my favorite people of all time.
JM: How does it feel to have inspired such a force as Brandi Carlile?
AR: I mean, the inspiration went two ways. When we met her I was blown away by her presence and her performance and her voice and her spirit and her writing and everything. I was immediately blown away. So I’ve never felt like, “Yeah, yeah, we gave her a hand up,” or something like that.
When Brandi started opening for us, Emily and I would sit by the side of the stage, and we’d be like, “Well, I give it about two years and we’ll be opening for her.” It was really so obvious that she was so ascending. Like lately somebody’ll be like, “Why don’t you get Brandi to sing on that song?” And I’ll be like, “No way, I know how busy she is, I’m not gonna ask her to do anything,” because she’s just crazy busy. Yeah, I’m glad you’re interviewing her, she’s very important to this community.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
Most newsletters are annoying. This isn’t one of them.
Subscribe and never miss an update.
You must be logged in to post a comment.