By Kylie Phillips
The deliberations earlier that day in Washington about gay marriage may have been contentious, but last Tuesday night (March 26) at the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale, the Indigo Girls and their audience had reached a visceral consensus.
Fans packed into a sold-out house on the unseasonably cold night. Long crocheted vests, flannel, and double denim peppered the venue. The women-centric crowd was a mixture of older moms and daughters, couples, and even a few ladies that could’ve passed as Large Marge doppelgängers.
During the opening set by Atlanta-based band The Shadowboxers, you could hear fans discussing Indigo Girls concerts from the late 1980s and ’90s, which evoked subsequent conversations about smoking pot and the rise of MTV. By the time the Girls ― Amy Ray and Emily Saliers ― casually took the stage around 9:30, the crowd’s eagerness was palpable.
Fan favorite Least Complicated opened their set. Ray and Saliers have a nearly four-decade friendship that greatly informs their power as a duo, a feeling of collaboration that shone even brighter when they took the stage at the end of the concert with the Shadowboxers, who worked with them on their 2011 disc, Beauty Queen Sister.
By their second song, Heartache for Everyone, Saliers traded in her acoustic for an electric guitar. Throughout the show, both ladies were switching guitars more than an Oscars host switches outfits. A banjo and a mandolin were subsequently brought out multiple times as well.
Ray winked at the man up in the sound booth. He smiled back. “Y’all are fun,” Ray proclaimed before delving into 1995 hit The Power of Two.
The more intimate moments of the concert came when they played older material such as Watershed. While there is the obvious sense of camaraderie that Indigo Girls exude on stage, their lyrics express individual crises of love, sadness, and discrimination (the Girls are longtime advocates for LGBT causes). Saliers closed the song that focuses on the fears of a failed life, whispering, “When you’re learning to face the path at your pace/Every choice is worth your while.”
Close to two hours into the set, a fan yelled to hear 1992 hit Galileo. Almost on cue, that was their next song. To describe the crowd as overjoyed would be an understatement. During both this song and their climax of Closer to Fine, a few verses were left to the audience to sing. Bracelet-bunched wrists and tattooed arms waved in the air, the crowd crooned, and Saliers and Ray went into their respective acoustic/electric zones.
The sheer volume of cheering only seemed to increase once Saliers and Ray left the stage. They returned with the full band for an encore of Share the Moon, a track off their latest album, and a cover of Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue.
This is the kind of music that seems ideal for a cold night wrapped up in bed, or maybe an evening of drunken lamenting at an old-fashioned bar with lots of wooden furniture. There was nostalgia in the Girls’ sentimental and powerful lyrics, in the superb sounds of banjo, mandolin and acoustic guitar. The intimacy of the show seemed to be meant for longtime fans of Indigo Girls, but there was plenty to enjoy for fans new to the duo.