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?
If I had to pick just one song I most connect to the salad days, it would be this one.
I have many opinions about the Indigo Girls… that all their songs sound alike, that I hate what they did to Dire Straits’ ‘Romeo & Juliet,’ that their self-titled album is pretty much perfect from start to finish.
