Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray & Emily Saliers – HuffPost 7.29.10
Mike Ragogna: What’s your advice for new acts?
Amy Ray: The Internet’s pretty important. I think the tools are changing constantly. Social networking–whether it be Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube video; some way of having a presence on the Internet and keeping up with that. It’s a lot of work, so I think you need to pick. You need to sort of choose your areas and focus on those so you’re not killing yourself and killing your creativity while you’re spending all your time doing that. It’s a pretty important thing. For me, I feel that, in any genre of music, it sort of about songwriting, unless you’re like a pure pop image where what’s more important is maybe videos and imaging and stuff. If you’re an artist that’s not about that, live performances are still really important if you want to have a long career. It’s got to be more than just Internet. It’s got to be something where people feel that they can build a community around you that’s visceral, that they can relate to you, and I don’t think you can do that unless you can go out and play live. So, that’s where my emphasis would be if I were a new artist. I think that it’s hard because there are a lot of artists that are trying to get shows, and it’s hard to get gigs sometimes. But you have to invent them. You have to do house concerts or play at this or that party and do whatever it takes to get started and start building a community around you.
MR: When you go onstage, it seems like you improvise your set list, like anything can happen.
Emily Saliers: Honestly, we are a bar band. Before we got signed and before we put our first record on a major label, we were a bar band. We played clubs and had our friends in the audience who were musicians and were a totally motley crew. We would invite them up on stage and had that spontaneity, so we were never a band that had a slick set list. Every night, we would change the set list and also allow room for requests from fans. If we could make it work with the set list, then we would put it in so that’s the spirit of the Indigo Girls. It’s what we captured on this record.