ARCHIVE
INDIGO GIRLS
DUBLIN
MARCH 2007Nine years and a few thousand miles have passed since I last saw the Indigo Girls at a theatre in Boston, but the Girls haven’t changed in the quality of a show they can deliver, and the crowd they can draw. Considering how difficult it can be to find any selection of their albums in local record shops, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Ambassador Theatre in Dublin was fairly packed for their show on Sunday, encompassing a broad spectrum of the city’s population.
After an opening set from Catherine Feeney (who earned some respect from the crowd for her singer-songwriter acoustic stylings, but clearly wasn’t the main event), Amy Ray and Emily Saliers took to the stage with no backup but their guitars, to a huge welcome from the crowd. It was amazing, there’s no other word for it. Most bands on tour to promote a new album tend to play mainly songs off the album, with a couple of their top hits to keep the crowd happy. During their nearly two-hour set, the Indigo Girls celebrated their back catalogue as much as, if not more than, the new album that was released last September, playing songs off just about every album they’ve ever released. Early into the night, they were talking about being back in Dublin, appreciating the city for its history, and naturally congratulating the Irish audience on the rugby on Saturday, admitting that they didn’t really understand the game. Emily asked the audience, at Amy’s encouragement, about the rules of penalty kicks (referring to them, rather entertainingly, as field goals – like American football) and nearly got a lecture from a few audience members on the intricacies of the game before Amy started laughing that it might be too confusing for them.
Every time I looked around at the crowd there were different people dancing and singing along with every song, as they went through tunes going back through nearly 20 years of a back catalogue; from their Indigo Girls album with “Love’s Recovery” and “Land of Canaan” right up through the latest release, Despite Our Differences. “Power of Two” from Swamp Ophelia a few songs into their set bringing an initially fairly quiet audience out of their collective shell to sing along and earning the reaction from Emily at the end of the song of “See? We knew you could sing…”.
With an invitation like that, the audience wasn’t about to hold back for the rest of the set, and for every song there were people singing, if not the whole theatre. When they played “Kid Fears” (from 1987’s Kid Fears) which on the recording includes harmonies from Michael Stipe, part of the audience automatically sang the harmonies while others sang along with either Amy or Emily, and the Indigos just seemed a bit awestruck that the audience knew the song that well, nearly twenty years later. Shaming of the Sun got an airing with “It’s Alright” as the second song in the set, along with “Get Out the Map” and “Shame On You”, which found the audience in full voice and a group behind me singing the verse about illegal immigrants in the U.S., “I think we were all in the same boat back in 1694” with particular gusto. Swamp Ophelia also brought us “Wood Song”, Retrospective got a look in with “Devotion”, Become You was visited throughout the set with “Yield”, “Become You” and “Bitterroot”. Naturally Despite Our Differences – the album they were officially touring after all, featured with made-to-be-classic tunes such as “Pendulum Swingers”, “Little Perennials”, “Three County Highway”, “Money Made You Mean”, “Run” and “Lay My Head Down”.
When they launched into “Closer To Fine” toward the end of their set, the audience were more than ready for them, with every voice in the theatre raised at full volume with every word of the song - so much so that for the third verse, Amy and Emily stopped singing and playing altogether and let the audience carry it, all but shouting the words at the top of their voices and with all hands clapping to keep the beat.
After an extended rendition of “Chickenman”, the Indigo Girls treated the audience to a well-deserved encore, opening the short set with the exquisite “Last Tears” from Despite Our Differences, following with Amy Ray doing “Let It Ring” from her 2005 solo album Prom at the request of an audience member. Partway through the song one of the strings on her mandolin broke and she didn’t even miss a beat as the guitar tech brought out a second mandolin, switched instruments and plugged the new one into the sound system. While much of the audience may not have been as familiar with the song as with some of the others, everyone picked up the beat, and as the instruments were being changed the audience clapped the beat, keeping it up for the rest of the song. When they finished with a show-stopping rendition of “Galileo” with everyone in the audience once again raising their voices in song, no one seemed to want to leave, vaguely aware that we had all been part of a night that couldn’t be replicated.
Lisa Brooks