Indigo Girls Tickets

Indigo Girls News and Information The Indigo Girls gained fame in the late '80s when acoustic sounds and soulful lyrics and harmonies were all the rage, but the combination of talents and personalities from Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have kept them on top of the game decades later.

The duo has two distinct styles of writing and performing. Ray clearly has more abrasive tendencies when it comes to music - she includes Jam and the Pretenders as her influences, focusing on punk rock sounds. Saliers has a softer sound, a la Joni Mitchell, and often takes her lyrics to more abstract topics and the harmonies tend to be more complex. Interestingly, Ray and Saliers rarely collaborate together in the writing of songs- they also tend to write without any outside collaborators.

The combination of spirits caught the attention of Epic Records in 1988, after the duo had been performing together for almost a decade. The Indigo Girls were included with the wave of new female folk artists, including Suzanne Vega, 10,000 Maniacs and Tracy Chapman.

In 1989, the girls released their self-titled debut, which received some help from R.E.M.s Michael Stipe on the track "Kid Fears." The biggest hit off of the album, however, was "Closer to Fine," which took home a Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording of the year. When the group released "Nomads Indian Saints" in 1990, it sold slowly but was eventually certified Gold by the RIAA and it was nominated for a Grammy Award.

"Rites of Passage" from 1992 was much more commercially successful than their other efforts-it debuted at No. 22 and eventually was certified platinum and included their first Top 10 rock track "Galileo." In 1994, "Swamp Ophelia" produced another massive hit, "Least Complicated."

Several albums later, including some live tracks and a collection of rarities, the band has a very loyal following. They were able to lend some of their high-profile stature to the Lillith Fair festival tour, which has become legendary in the folk industry.