Editor’s Pick: The Indigo Girls Stream A Concert On Veeps
"Look Long: Together" will be available to stream for one week starting Sunday, May 8, and features "several surprise guests."
Two years ago, the Grammy-winning folk duo the Indigo Girls were getting ready to embark on a sold-out tour with a full backing band to support their early 2020 full-length album Look Long.
Instead, queer music icons Emily Saliers and Amy Ray started work on what has become Look Long: Together, a career-spanning concert special featuring multi-cam performances of their hits and rarities.
It was interspersed with a series of intimate home movie segments in which Saliers and Ray discuss songwriting and reveal the inspiration behind signature songs, in an effort to make this more compelling than your average livestream concert.
Look Long: Together will be available to stream for one week starting Sunday, May 8, and features “several surprise guests.”
It will also offer the first full-band live renditions of songs from 2020’s Look Long.
The driving inspiration behind the album, says Saliers, was to set out to find the balance between the need to acknowledge and grieve our shortcomings and limitations, but to also “look beyond what’s right in front of us, take the long view of things, and strive to do better.”
True to form, Saliers and Ray are sentimental yet honest songwriters, more clear-headed than nostalgic when it comes to reflecting on the past.
They revisit the messiness and complexity of the past in more personal terms on the gorgeously pensive “Country Radio.” The amount of sadness that Saliers packs into the line, “I’m just a gay kid who loves country radio” is a testament to the quiet power of the songwriting.
Meanwhile, it’s hard not to read autobiographical intent in “When We Were Writers,” a song about looking inside to rediscover a fire that still burns, even though the circumstances that sparked it may be long gone. “Wrestle the beast that leaves you diminished,” they advise, “it’s alright you will never be finished.”
When advice like that comes from two artists who have been at the top of their game for the better part of three decades, it’s best to listen. While you’re at it, you might as well look, too.
Streaming begins Sunday, May 8, at 9 p.m., and is available through May 15. Tickets are $17.99 for a stream offering unlimited views within a 48-hour window. Visit www.veeps.com.
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