lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: winthrop

1999-12-14: (interview transcription), louisville, kentucky:

i: you had a lot of songs to weed through right? like "winthrop", and "chiapas bound", how do you weed through what is going to be on the album and which doesn't?

e: well, in the case of "winthrop," "leeds" ended up on the album (the last album). leeds was lyrically a stronger song, when ulali came into the studio, what they did to the song was just magic. its just a stronger song in general and personally, more meaningful me. as time goes by, you sorta leave songs behind, its easy to do that and its hard to go back and say oh, its hard for me, i can't imagine wanting to pick that song up again.

i: so, you wouldn't want to put that song on an album?

e: anything is possible, but it's not my inclination.

a: if we were putting together a record where we remembered something that might fit in really well, we would probably go back to it. for me, i have so many songs that i don't feel a place for or didn't on this record. songs that are really personal and i wrote it to write it, and not ever necessarily or i'm not ready to put it on anything and i don't really know if it's a good song or not b/c i'm too close to it personally. so, that happens a lot.

e: we just discuss which songs are stronger or work well together and we have left over ones. with philosophy of loss, i didn't want to let that song go but it didn't fit into the whole. each of the 12 songs, was so strong and each song is so dense as it is, and you listen to the whole record and you have space at the end and you get a little treat like you said, better to have done that than to stick it somewhere in that mix and imbalance it in someway. so we made that choice.

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2001-xx-xx: (excerpts from an interview with amy ray), (unpublished):

i asked her if some of the stuff floating around on napster will ever make its way onto a record, specifically chiapas bound, nueva senoritias, moment of forgiveness, point of hope and emily's winthrop.

"yeah some of those things might end up on an indigo girls record. i hope people will still like it if we put it on an album. sometimes people get stuff on napster and it's cool and fun because they got it on napster. and i wonder how they'd react if it then shows up on a record. the next record for us is going to be more of an acoustic folk record so-"

i interruppted and said "you guys have said that the past three times ive interviewed you over the past four years. is this for real"

"yeah. this is really for real this time. it's going to be acoustic. this is for real."