lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: happy in the sorrow key

2015-05-20: spotlight on indigo girls' amy ray, pollstar:

some songs, like on this record, you can definitely hear it, there's layering. we might have gotten the core - bass, drums and vocals, for "happy in the sorrow key" but then we laid in track-by-track the strings, the horns, emily's part ... anything else that went on. but on a song like "the rise of the black messiah" ... emily and the violin, her guitar, were done afterwards, but all the other stuff, the performance, was one take. in fact, i'm even standing in front of the drummer, singing ... playing my mandolin. it's really live.

"southern california," though, emily's song, is layered track-by-track. i went in there and built my guitar part, built my harmonies, didn't even know what i was going to do at first.

----------

2015-06-18: indigo girls bring full band to asheville's orange peel, the asheville citizen-times:

as far as the songwriting on the new album, ray says "there's been no shortage of things to draw on." among them, "the rise of the black messiah" was inspired by the angola three case, one of whose inmates wrote her a letter from prison seven years ago, while the passing of her father in the same 10-day period in which her child was born influenced "happy in the sorrow key" and "fishtails."

"i started those songs years ago and picked them back up with new information from those new events," said ray, who writes separately from saliers. "after playing for so long together and not having a new record, it was good to dig back together and work on arrangements and refamiliarize ourselves."

----------

2016-02-11: indigo girls at golden state, the monterey county weekly:

and one lost day's debut single, "happy in the sorrow key," was inspired by the death of ray's father, who passed two weeks after the birth of her first child.

"a lot of [the album] was influenced by a change in perspective," ray told usa today ahead of its 2015 release.

ray recorded "happy in the sorrow key" with her guitar plugged into a "bad-ass amp" that she picked up in seattle. the result is clean grunge in the vein of r.e.m.'s "what's the frequency kenneth" - minus the feedback.

----------

2018-08-24: an interview with amy ray of indigo girls, qnotes:

gs: what were the parameters that the university of colorado symphony orchestra met?

ar: number one, they're just really good. the conductor was someone we felt like we could work with on a project like this. where we could say, "we're going to need to come in and have an extra-long rehearsal, record rehearsal and then record the show, and may have to do a song over." they're grad students and community members. they're at a university, so it's not under the guidance of a union, which gives us a lot more leeway on how many times we can do a song and how long it takes. with a union symphony, they kind of changed the rules around. it used to be where you paid one set cost to record with the whole symphony. now you pay each member individually. for us, we wouldn't sell enough records to cover that. we had to find a way to record it where we could pay the symphony what they deserve, but it would be a smaller symphony and more student-oriented. in the end, it was probably a better move. they symphony was made up of grad students, community members and professional players, running the gamut of different styles and approaches. the dynamics end up being a little more engaged in a way. the players are fresher to what we're doing. some of them are younger. every orchestra we played with was amazing! it was already on another echelon from what we were doing. but the thing that makes it special with this particular symphony, and we had played with them before... as soon as we played with them, to emily i was like, "this is the one!" their dynamics are incredible. they're totally engaged. they're excited about playing. their conductor is super-easy to work with. the conductor is the key to everything. they build that bridge. we've had quite a few conductors that we really love, and gary is one of them. for me, it was a no-brainer [laughs]. we talked about it, made the arrangements, and a year later they had the time in their schedule for us to go back and have the time to do rehearsal, a show and record and work it all out.

gs: of the 22 songs chosen for the album, were there any for which the transition to an orchestral setting or arrangement proved to be more challenging than expected?

ar: yes. i would say that it depended on the symphony, too. there are songs where some symphonies would nail a song and some symphonies wouldn't. it's all about people's preferences and the way they play and the way we're playing that day. there are certain ones that are inherently more difficult, like "happy in the sorrow key." "come on home" is a pretty hard song. one of the measures of who we wanted to record with was a symphony that landed the difficult songs, too. it's not a judgment on who's better, symphony-wise. some symphonies get some songs, and others don't. or that particular night, maybe we weren't in the right vibe, so we couldn't get it; and that doesn't reflect on the symphony at all. some symphonies are just easier to play with and it's not because they're better [laughs]. is the conductor in the space that you're in? every symphony has their own symphony hall and that had a lot to do with things. the way the symphony is in that space and how you can work together as a team.