For the 2023 documentary It’s Only life after allNow streaming on Netflix, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach and Indigo Girls members Amy Ray and Emily Saliers focus on the duo’s lives as performers and people over the 40 years the Grammy-winning folk-rock duo has been together. That’s a long time and It’s just life It doesn’t approach the subject matter in a linear fashion, but is based on thoughtful new interviews with Ray and Saliers, where they address the themes that have defined Indigo Girls’ music and career: inpidual acceptance, shared experience, the visibility of women and the LGBTQ community, and an ever-burning spark of activism. Footage of Indigo Girls in performance appears throughout the book. After all, it’s just lifeboth classics you know: “Closer to Fine,” “Galileo,” and selections drawn from a rich cross-section of material straight from Amy Ray’s personal archives.
AFTER ALL, IT’S JUST LIFESTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: “One thing that was different between Amy and I was that we had acoustic guitars, but we had pickups in our guitars and we liked to plug them in and turn them up loud.” To better accompany the Indigo Girls shows, which After all, it’s just life They are often caught in collective singing mode. But Emily Saliers is also making a broader point about how they were never easy to categorize. “A new female folk duo,” Kurt Loder says in an old MTV News broadcast. “It’s not folk music for wimps,” says another news clip. “We don’t suggest it,” Amy Ray offers in Just life“But people thought of us as some kind of… is there a category that is lesbian Christian rock?”
The Indigo girls themselves were so surprised like anyone When their 1989 hit “Closer to Fine” appeared on Barbie in 2023. But being slightly subversive has always been a part of their music, as has a sincere intensity that is well documented.After all, it’s just life reserves an entire segment for Ray and Saliers to applaud in 1989. Critical pan in the New York Times. “Women who are frank and somewhat candid—for rock critics, that’s hard, you know?”) Although they are interviewed separately, Ray and Saliers have the familiar ability to finish each other’s thoughts, recollections and anecdotes. Just life The documentary continues without frames, allowing the protagonists to look back on their four-decade history together as musicians and friends; it takes on a friendly and accessible air. These are the personalities they have established: Ray is frank, funny and admits she has never put up with a fool, while Saliers is sincere and more cerebral, but amplified and tempered by age and experience.
As insistent as the media has been over the years regarding Ray and Saliers’ respective sexual identities, After all, it’s just life The documentary is anything but, offering each woman the space to talk about it in her own words. As a child, Ray says, “I definitely suffered from gender dysphoria, but I didn’t have a language for it.” And Saliers reflects on how her decision to come out in the early ’90s is a reflection of a personal life she continues to protect. The documentary also delves into Ray and Saliers’ dedication to activism, and mixes gentle reenactments with real-life fan testimonies to portray the emotional reach of Indigo Girls’ music. “The person sending their friend a mixtape and she sharing that song — sharing that made it more powerful, and that happened a lot with our music.”
What movies will it remind you of? The last time a documentary had this much access to the Indigo Girls was director Kathlyn Horan’s. A lost daywhich appeared in 2015 along with the album of the same name. (Horan is a producer of After all, it’s just life.) And Joan Baez, who starred with the Indigo Girls and receives recognition here as one of their mentors, was the subject of a very insightful documentary of her own, 2023. I am a noise.
Performance worth watching: Let’s preserve the physical media! A shout out to Amy Ray for unearthing reams of Indigo Girls-related videotapes in many dated/archaic formats – “I used to basically carry a camera everywhere we went” – and a double shout out to Past Woody Harrelson, who appears twice in all of this Indigo Girls bonus material.
Memorable dialogue: All the time, people say that the music of the Indigo Girls changed their life. More than one person says that even in this documentary. And while Amy Ray respects those feelings and doesn’t wish to minimize them, she also characterizes her own opinion as a bit more mystical. “I’m talking about synchronicity and like a critical mass. People feel the same response to that song at the same time, and you just have this feeling that you’re being held for a reason.”
Sex and skin: The sex lives of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers are a recurring theme throughout the series. After all, it’s just lifejust as the topic has followed them throughout their careers, whether or not they’ve wanted it to be a focus. “We’ve been so hemmed in,” Saliers says of society and heteronormative expectations. “Binary systems hemmed in by gender, sexuality. They’re constructs. Like all of these things, they’re human constructs. Some people might want us to identify a certain way, and some people might not care, and some people might want us to say queer, but we all are who we are.”
“What it’s really about is loving and accepting each other as we completely are.”
Our opinion: After all, it’s just life It often feels like opening the door of a creaky old closet and letting the memories and recollections pile up. Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met as teenagers (“She was the other girl who played guitar”), performed as the Indigo Girls in college, and signed to Epic at Little Five Points, their local club in Atlanta, back in 1988. There’s a lot to reflect on; that metaphorical closet holds a lot of stuff. That’s why it’s cool how It’s just life It lives up to the lyrical reference of its title. As much as we’re told how it all happened, Ray and Saliers are given real space to reconsider their past selves. Thus, we see Saliers analysing who she was as a young composer – “I look at this as a little nerd with a degree in English; who the fuck writes about the Lady of Shallot?” – and Ray admitting that her various onstage tantrums were self-centred and musician-like.
Just as often, those moments of reflection tie into one of the broader themes of Indigo Girls’ music and career. “I was also a young woman in an incredibly patriarchal and condescending environment,” Ray says of those early days. After all, it’s just life The album looks back at all the moments that made a difference over the years, but also finds ways to illustrate how issues of visibility and empowerment are still present today, and is still able to locate the centre of power for Indigo Girls, who have been releasing records and playing live for four decades. “I’m overcome with the energy of togetherness.”
Our calling: STREAM IT. Superfans of the duo will want to see and hear every snippet of the stacks of recordings, old videotapes, and pages of handwritten notes for songs found in Amy Ray’s physical archive of Indigo Girls material. For them, the benefit of It is Only life after all The goal of Indigo Girls is to include as much of that ephemera as possible. But there is also a larger, more rewarding story: that of acceptance. For 40 years, Indigo Girls has explored what it means to have more than one answer to these questions that lead us all down a twisted path.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
