All My CDs, pt 59: 1200 Curfews

1200 Curfews - Indigo Girls

I have been anticipating this for many months: a month of reviewing another of my favorite bands, the Indigo Girls. Only three other artists dominate my collection as much as this folk rock duo; I reviewed Faith and the Muse's discography earlier this year, and will get to Alanis Morissette's and Vienna Teng's sometime in the near future. But unlike with those others, I have not even come close to collecting the Indigo Girls' full spread of albums. That's something I have been working on, and hope to accomplish. In the meantime, I'm positively giddy over the prospect of fully re-digesting what I've already got.

I'll begin with 1200 Curfews, a two-disk live album and the first I ever got. I was in my teens, and an older friend introduced me to Galileo, perhaps their best-known song about the astronomer and also Reincarnation, spiritual growth, and other cosmic mysteries. I downloaded the song, loved it, and then skipped down to my local record store and to see if they had it. This album was on their shelf, and seemed to have a lot of songs including Galileo, so I bought it, only realizing later that it was a live album.

I did not mind, though. As a wide-eyed youth looking for a place to start with a band that had been producing music for decades, I found it to be the perfect introduction. With songs from several previous albums as well as some covers not appearing anywhere else, it was a great way to explore the duo's repertoire from a unique angle. It also gave me an opportunity to imagine what it might be like to actually see one of their live concerts - an experience I sadly may never have.

It also taught me that, despite my previous experiences, live recordings aren't all bad. It turns out that Indigo Girls do not lose much of their appeal in a live recording, unlike other more modern bands that rely heavily on synthesized effects and sound editing. That's one of the great things about folk rock; when the basic elements of the genre can be easily boiled down to a vocalist and an acoustic guitar, it becomes very difficult to get hung up on the details of any single studio recording to the extent that no other version sounds "right."

In fact, with a few of the songs here, I've had the opposite feeling: I've gotten used to the live version, and once I heard the studio recording for the first time, it does not compare favorably. The clearest example of this is Chicken Man, which appears on the album Rites of Passage. The version on 1200 Curfews is wild and rambling, like the old highway the titular man occupies, while the studio version I eventually heard is shorter and more tame, and less joyful. Even the words differ. For instance, in the studio version:

He said it's a long road to be forgiven

And live:

He said oh no child, you got a long road
I said good, 'cause I need to be forgiven

I perceive a significant difference in the meanings of those lines, and I know which one I prefer.

There is no time to detail my feelings on all these many tracks, but a few stand out as particularly significant to me. Ghost is a song that has come to personify my first experience of unrequited love, perhaps even more than any other that I listened to those months. Its words are so haunting that I am pulled quite unwillingly back to that tortured place, and yet still somehow enjoy the feeling:

And I feel it like a sickness how this love is killing me
I'd walk into the fingers of your fire willingly
And dance the edge of sanity. I've never been this close
I'm in love with your ghost

World Falls stayed out of my conscious awareness for years, until suddenly its words and melody reared up from somewhere in my subconscious mind and demanded my attention. That song is pure mystic poetry, as are many others of my favorites.

Some of my favorites on this album are covers, though, such as Joni Mitchell’s River, Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, and especially Buffy St. Marie’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The latter brings the anti-establishment rage of punk rock with into the completely rage-worthy subject matter of federal government’s treatment of Native American communities, felling some of the stereotypes of those communities in the process. It’s also awfully catchy and fun to sing along to.

Next: Beauty Queen Sister