On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, when it looked like Joe Biden could defeat Donald Trump by holding the Blue Wall and flipping some reliably red states, Jason Isbell took to Twitter:
“If Biden wins Georgia I’m gonna make a charity covers album of my favorite Georgia songs- REM, Gladys Knight, Vic Chesnutt, Allmans, Cat Power, Precious Bryant, Now It’s Overhead, etc… And damn is that gonna be fun.”
I initially skipped Indigo Girls’ ‘Closer to Fine’ when picking which songs to blog about during this exploration of my readers’ favorite songs, despite it showing up on both Amy and Dana’s lists.
I simply assumed I had chosen it as a Song of the Day at some point during the past 12 1/2 years. But alas, this fan favorite and college radio hit has yet to receive its moment in the spotlight. Until today.
I give Indigo Girls a lot of crap for their college-lit pretentiousness and the fact that their songs all sound alike. I don’t even know if the latter criticism is true, because I own only two of their 14 albums, but it sure feels true.
I come today not to attack but to praise. Today’s random iTunes selection, ‘Love’s Recovery,’ is a stunningly beautiful song, and the best thing on the duo’s wonderful self-titled 1989 album.
I’m not a big Indigo Girls fan — they’re too studied and too repetitive for my taste — but I have to give props to their 1992 album Rites of Passage.
On their fourth album, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray introduced a host of new sounds, including strings and exotic percussion, to add muscle to one of their strongest batches of songs.
My final song in this two-week theme is the second Dire Straits tune. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ appeared on the band’s excellent 1980 album Making Movies (you can hear the original version here, but be warned, it has perhaps the lamest video in the history of music television).
I’ve been in love with this song since I first heard it on the band’s 1988 greatest hits collection, Money For Nothing. So four years later, when Indigo Girls cut their own version on their album Rites of Passage, I was skeptical. Why cover a song as beautifully conceived and executed as this one?
Meet Me In Montauk 