Virginia is ‘Closer to Fine’ as Indigo Girls ride the ‘Barbie’ wave all the way to Wolf Trap

“It’s a true co-bill, so the first night Melissa will close the night and the second night Indigo Girls will close the night,” Indigo Girls co-founder Emily Saliers told WTOP. “We’re super excited for this tour. We’ve never done a tour with her before like this, and we’re gonna be out with a full band and of course Wolf Trap is one of my favorite venues in the country, so I’m just super excited to come back.”

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1963, Saliers’ family moved to Decatur, Georgia, when she was 10 years old, meeting future Indigo Girls co-founder Amy Ray at Laurel Ridge Elementary School. In high school, they began performing at talent shows and bars. Both initially went to separate colleges but reunited when they transferred to Emory University in Georgia, where they officially formed Indigo Girls in 1985.

“We went by Saliers and Ray, which bored us, then we were called The B Band for a while,” Saliers said. “I was a camp counselor in north Georgia and Amy called me and said, ‘What do you think of the name Indigo?’ I remember this really clearly, just standing there in the kitchen, and I was like, ‘Oh, I like that!’ … If we rethought it now looking at it at our age and history, the ‘Girls’ doesn’t make sense, but it’s just become synonymous with our band.”

After independently releasing their breakthrough album “Strange Fire” (1987), they signed with Epic Records for their second album “Indigo Girls” (1989), which went double platinum thanks to the hit song “Closer to Fine.”

“I remember where I was — my family stayed at this cabin in Vermont and I was sitting on the porch thinking about all the sources that I sought to get my answers in life,” Saliers said. “It was a little bit of a talk down for me, like, ‘It’s gonna be OK, you can get from this source, you can get from this source and it’s all gonna work out, you’ll be closer to fine, so just live, do your thing and seek the sources you have to seek, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

The album won Best Contemporary Folk Performance at the Grammys, while earning the duo a nomination for Best New Artist. They lost the latter to Milli Vanilli, who soon vacated the award in a lip-syncing controversy.

“I actually felt sorry for those guys because now you think of all the people that lip-sync,” Saliers said. “We did hear later on from inside sources, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but we were second in line for that award, but at the time just winning a Grammy for anything was just so exciting. It was a very head-spinning time for me and Amy, we were just not used to that, we were a bar band from Georgia, so to win a Grammy was otherworldly.”

Their next album, “Nomads, Indians, Saints” (1990), was certified gold, followed by the platinum-selling fourth album “Rites of Passage” (1992). It features the songs “Romeo & Juliet” (featuring Mark Knopfler of the band Dire Straits) and the cosmic tune “Galileo,” written by Saliers in another moment of transcendent pondering.

“I was in Georgia in my house,” Saliers said. “My friend and I, she’s passed on, we were drinking some beers and talking about reincarnation. The next day I got up inspired and intrigued by that conversation and I just started thinking about Galileo and reincarnation and all kinds of things and I wrote that song. Mary Chapin Carpenter taught me guitar tuning where you drop the low E to a D and the high E to a C, so I wrote ‘Galileo’ with that tuning.”

Indigo Girls went platinum again with the fifth album “Swamp Ophelia” (1994), followed by their sixth effort “Shaming of the Sun” (1997). It would be their highest-charting album in the U.S. at No. 7 on the Billboard 200, thanks to the leadoff track “Shame on You,” written by Ray as a response to anti-immigration policies.

“She lives in north Georgia and there’s a big poultry industry up in that neck of the woods,” Saliers said. “There were a lot of Hispanic people who came and worked their asses off, but there were a lot of crackdowns on immigration, even though they were doing the work to put food on our tables, so Amy was like, ‘That’s a shame.’ Steve Earle joined us on that song, he’s playing harmonica and singing background vocals, and I love that song.”

Beyond their 15 total studio albums, Indigo Girls have become political queer icons. In 2013, Saliers married Tristin Chapman, together adopting their daughter Cleo. She also donated money back to Emory University to help fund a music room named for her parents, Don and Jane Saliers, where Don was a theology professor. He joined Emily to cowrite the book “A Song to Sing, a Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice” (2005).

Now, the band’s full story is chronicled in the Netflix documentary “It’s Only Life After All” (2023), dropping around the same time as their soundtrack for the movie “Glitter & Doom” (2024).

And, of course, the band’s gotten even more attention with the inclusion of “Closer to Fine” in the “Barbie” blockbuster phenomenon last summer.

“Somewhere in the world at some point Greta Gerwig was listening to it and she chose it for the ‘Barbie’ movie, so thank God,” Saliers said. “We have definitely gotten a boost. We’ve seen a spike in younger, particularly younger women, coming to our shows.”

Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below: