lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: shit kickin'

amy ray quote from 2020-02-28: indigo girls preview new album 'look long' with funky 'sh-t kickin", rolling stone:

ray recalled the formative experience, and the conflicted feelings that came with it, in a lengthy email to rolling stone:

"we had a house on a cove, in a rural area surrounded by farms, dirt roads, and woods. we had dirt bikes at the lake house in various states of functionality. we zoomed around the roads, both paved and dirt, without a care to any rules, and we discovered a series of trails in the woods that provided adventure and the much-needed privacy for childhood pondering and eventual teenage angst.

"when i think back on the landscape and the folks i ran across, i think a lot about what was happening in society at the time, the social injustices that ran rampant, and how abstract it all seemed until i had the courage and freedom to question the ingredients of my environment."

----------

2021-04-05: we sat down with amy ray to talk about the last 35-years of making music - and magic - with the indigo girls, gladd:

jm: when you first hear a lyric like that from her, do you stop and process it together?

ar: no, we're not allowed to process each other's lyrics together. it's an unspoken rule.

every now and then i'll be like, "what did you mean by that? or what are you writing about?" but she doesn't really say, she holds her cards pretty close. we'll process lyrics if one of us thinks that someone needs to define something better or polish it up or if it's clumsy sounding, but only if the other person asks.

jm: do you have a recent example?

ar: it was in a song called "shit kickin'." there was a lyric in it where i'm talking about my granddad. he was a minister. but when he was in college, he talks about, in a journal that i read, about going to a party that was hosted by the klan in the community. the klan would host these parties and invite everyone to go and it was building up community support. the klan was trying to whitewash what they were doing by having these big parties, where they would feed people for free. it was terrible, it was insidious.

and i was like, "oh my god, my granddad went to one of these parties." it's sort of a shocker. so, i had a line in there about that. like, "went to the party, hosted by the ku klux klan," or something. and i said to emily, "this seems to me to take away from the song, because it's so specific and it's going to be the only thing that somebody remembers."

and it's not the point. the point of the song is your legacy growing around you like kudzu and figuring out where you stand and understanding that there's skeletons in your closet. i asked emily and we talked about it for a while, and she helped me decide to change the line. and it was really better for it. she's a great songwriter and she teaches people how to write songs. so, i can ask her questions and she could be a teacher.

----------

2022-08-11: indigo girls' amy ray: looking at life, the philadelphia gay news:

what's the most dangerous stunt you ever pulled?

two things come to mind. we used to ride our dirt bikes and there were trails that had these big humps, and i'd take off and jump 'em! we'd crash all the time. one time the carburetor caught fire underneath me, but the most dangerous thing was when we'd take our skateboards and we'd sit down tip to tip across from each other and we'd put our legs on the opposite skateboard, so that you were looking at each other. you'd start at the top and ride all the way down this super steep hill and there was no way to break so you just had keep going until the next uphill slowed you down, or you fell off. the dangerous part was there was a stop sign at the bottom of the hill and we never worried about whether or not cars were coming. we never even thought about it, we just went flying through the intersection! when i go back and look at that hill, i'm like that was really stupid!