lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: it's alright

1997-05-03: shameless: an interview with the indigo girls' emily saliers, poets, artists, madmen:

"amy was using the female genders in her songs before, but it is more subtle than it is like on a song like 'it's alright', where it comes out and says 'i don't care if you hate me 'cause i'm gay'. but it wasn't a conscious decision. in particular, on that song, i was just thinking about ways that people oppress other people, and homophobia is just one example of that. i just came out and said it blatantly rather than masking it in some way."

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1997-xx-xx: it's alright, southern voice :

"not really, i think when i was writing 'it's alright' i was just thinking about forms of oppression against people, and the way gay people are oppressed. i think rather than trying to say it in a poetic way, i came out and said it plain and straight, you know, there are those of you out there, 'you might hate me because i'm gay.' i just thought of it as stating the facts, and why a song comes to you at a certain time instead of another time is a mystery but, you know, there it is.

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2014-12-02: es.1996, official indigo girls "a year a month blog" on tumblr:

in 1996, we started recording shaming of the sun and ended up working on it in nashville (woodland studios), atlanta (southern tracks), and austin (hit shack, arlyn studios). we were in a period of growth, change and experimentation. although we'd had great success and experience with scott litt and peter collins as producers, amy and i decided to co-produce shaming with david leonard who had engineered swamp ophelia. taking on the role of co-producers was indicative of our desire to stretch.

i wanted to play more electric guitar and then, as now, i wanted to break out of my natural instinct to write a ballad or a mid-tempo pop song. one of the many great things about working with amy is that she has an innate ability to rock, and i got to live my desire to play rock music through some of her songs. she continued in that rock vein on shaming with songs like "cut it out," which was blistering and raw, and "scooter boys," a fierce commentary on colonialism. i got to play electric guitar on both. even though "it's alright" is musically sunny in nature, i was writing about hatred in the world, and it was a song of self-empowerment ("i know i'm small in a way, but i know i'm strong"). i played slide electric guitar on the track to give it all the bite i could muster. when we played the song live, i used a hamer duotone guitar that switched back and forth from acoustic to electric. i could play the body of the song in acoustic mode and switch to electric mode for the slide solo; picked that trick up from michelle malone!