Nomads * Indians * Saints – Indigo Girls

Not a desert island album for me, but the soundtrack for a troubled time in my life.

A quick note before we dive in: I was inspired to visit this album again after years because I had fallen ill with a cold that quickly went to my lungs. I struggled with severe asthma as a child, then suffered bouts of bronchitis for months on end. I hadn't dealt with bronchitis for decades until this last cold, which gave me such racking coughs that my abs grew excruciatingly sore with every effort I took to expel the tickling mucus from my lungs. In my travails, I recalled this album, which was a balm to me when I was sick.

After having fallen in love with the Indigo Girls in the summer of 1989 upon hearing their eponymous album, I was excited to get their next album once it was released. And Nomads*Indians*Saints, released in the fall of 1990, did not disappoint me. Roughly ten years my senior, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray still had a very collegiate, academic, politically liberal purview of life, and I ate it up. Moreover, their music went down like sugar as their voices melded in some of the most gorgeous harmonies since Simon & Garfunkel. Unlike that duo, though, both voices had more character apart from each other. Emily has held the higher, more graceful voice, and crafts songs that are often more intricate and nuanced. In contrast, Amy commands an earthier, more weathered alto, and her songs are punkier and often go for the gut. They are a folk duo, often not needing anything more than their guitars and voices to create awesome music. Their production on Nomads by Scott Litt (of R.E.M. fame) is likewise straightforward and unadorned, leaving their talent out for all to hear.

Nothing on Nomads comes close to the immediate anthem "Closer to Fine," but that's a once-in-a-career song; nothing else on Indigo Girls does either. Still, Nomads sports great music that allows you to just listen and enjoy, but it also encourages deeper exploration of its lyrics. Other than the easygoing Dixie tribute "Southland in the Springtime," every song addresses struggle of some sort, and often the hope that the struggle will bear fruit. Despite the sunny music on the opener "Hammer and a Nail," the lyric "I see my face on the surface/I look a lot like Narcissus/A dark abyss of an emptiness/Standing on the edge of a drowning blue" shows that these two did not come to play in the shallow water. Likewise, the sprightly introduction to the lovely "World Falls" is squelched by Ray's first lines: "I'm coming home with a stone/Strapped onto my back," representing the weight she bears. It shades her joy in the chorus as the duo exults, "Everywhere I turn/All the beauty just keeps shaking me."

I have to interlace my life in with this review, because, as I mentioned, it came at a big time of struggle in my life. Take "Watershed" as an example. Its lyrics are deadly serious about starting to live your life on your own terms ("They say that it's never too late, but you don't/But you don't get any younger"; "You can stand there and agonize 'til your agony's your heaviest load"). In the middle of a workload that was clearly flattening me and causing major health issues, I felt the need to change something. (When your parents ask if you're doing drugs because your personality has changed so much, but you wouldn't even know where to get drugs because you feel trapped under the pressure of school, something is seriously wrong.) "Watershed" gave me validation to, for example, leave journalism for choir and in the process, feed my soul. It's not much exaggeration to say this song has probably changed thousands of lives—mine included—for the better. The album is teeming with similar songs—"Hand Me Downs" and "Welcome Me" come immediately to mind—for those seeking for meaning behind their struggles.

The Indigo Girls's musicality is unimpeachable, and their subject matter is admirably ambitious. What suffers, though, is their command of language, which sometimes comes across stilted and academic. In "Welcome Me," Amy sings "Who's gonna give me a weapon/A pacifying weapon?" like a high schooler discovering how to use an oxymoron for the first time. Then in the ponderous "1 2 3," she asks, "How long can you be agile/Dancing 'tween the altar and the mercy seat?" a line that only theology scholars and a handful of others will get; knowing that "the mercy seat" refers to the Ark of the Covenant doesn't help much.

The final song, "The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands," is beautiful and heartfelt, but lugubrious to a fault. The Indigo Girls have never been anything less than earnest, but this album closer is enough to make even Morrissey or Robert Smith cry uncle. It tells the story of a girl who suffers so, trapped in her identity as a noble victim. (This is the song I would play as a sick teenager before going to bed, and no one understood my suffering more than the Indigo Girls.) More meaningful and hopeful are the two songs that precede it: Emily's thoughtful "You and Me of the 10,000 Wars" and Amy's bracing "Pushing the Needle Too Far." (Again: I'd play the latter song the morning after my sorrowful night to get courage for the day ahead from the lyrics "Well, I woke up this morning/Gray dawn/With a prayer on my breath.")

Having established their identity as earnest folk rockers with much to say about the human condition on their first two albums, the Indigo Girls dig their heels in and proclaim this ground theirs with beautiful songs and even deeper sentiments than before. Fans who haven't heard this one before should consider Nomads*Indians*Saints required listening; newbies will still get a lot out of it, but should strongly consider the Indigo Girls' eponymous debut as well.