lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: southern california is your girlfriend

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.