Wednesday was a gorgeous fall night in Minneapolis, and I spent it at a backyard hangout with 2,000 of my closest friends. OK, technically we were inside the State Theatre, which was full. It didn’t feel like a theater. It felt like the kind of night where you’ve invited everyone you know over, the fire is going, and then the Indigo Girls and Linda Perry show up with their guitars.
If you’ve ever been to an Indigo Girls show, you know how it goes. You say hi to half a dozen people on the way to your seat whom you haven’t seen in two or three years. You find out who has kids now, who broke up, who still has the same haircut (everyone). You look around to see who you’re accidentally twinning with in your flannel (everyone).
Linda Perry opened, hat and all, moving between guitar and piano like she was in her own living room and we had just dropped in. She told us she’s working out new material and didn’t pretend otherwise. The new stuff felt raw and vulnerable. You could almost hear her thought process as she worked through chord changes, and she restarted a verse once mid-song, maybe because she remembered she had changed that part. It felt like a privilege to be in the room for it. Before one of the new songs she described a kid hiding behind a couch, watching things she should not have had to watch, and said her older self wishes she had just looked away, because she took on baggage that was never hers. Then she sang it. The refrain was “Look away, child.”
Between songs she talked about growing up on Karen Carpenter, about honesty being the only thing she trusts, and about her mother: being a survivor was the one thing she got from her, and her mother ended up as her muse.
She also told us about breakfast. A friend had taken her out that morning, and a woman named Heather, who was not even there, heard Perry was in the building and picked up the check. Perry squinted past the stage lights trying to find her in the house. “Heather, where are you? I can’t see you.” The production crew brought up the lights as she looked around and we all wished that we were Heather. That’s that living room feeling.
Then she sang “Beautiful” and “Hurt,” two of the songs she wrote or co-wrote for Christina Aguilera. Something happens when a songwriter sings the song she gave to someone else. You hear it the way she meant it, almost for the first time.
The room stood up for her, and she did not take the ovation from the stage. She climbed down and left through the crowd, up the center aisle and out the back doors, high-fiving and fist-bumping the whole way. I got a fist bump. She is tiny. I am hoping some of the cool transferred.
Linda, you can work your shit out on us any time.
Everyone stood again before the Indigo Girls played a note. They are beloved here in Minnesota, and I think they know it. Oh, and that thing everyone has been quietly wondering about: in April, Emily Saliers told fans she had been diagnosed with cervical dystonia and essential tremor, and said that her voice wouldn’t be what it was. Wednesday night she looked great (the whole band looked so effortlessly cool) and sounded great. Her voice is different than it was on the albums. I didn’t care, and I can guarantee you no one else did either.
They played the twenty songs on the handwritten setlist and one that wasn’t. “Devotion” opened. “Ozilline,” “Cordova” and “Dairy Queen” for the people who know every record. Amy Ray took “Chuck Will’s Widow.” Somewhere in the middle they added “Power of Two,” not on the list, and handed a verse to the house: “Y’all sing this verse.” We did, and kept singing. “Galileo” closed the main set.
Partway through, Emily acknowledged what Minneapolis has been through this year. They wished they could be here with us on the ground, she said, but they are always with us. From a lot of touring acts that’d be a line. From these two, in this city, it landed like a steadying hand on the shoulder.
Behind the band hung a backdrop of a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services waiting room: rows of empty chairs, VOTE taped across the counters in red paper letters, and a board tallying entry bans and ended protections. A government seal read “Denying Human Sanctuary.” A recruiting poster promised no experience needed, remote work, apply now. A cousin of this backdrop hung behind them at the State Fair Grandstand with Melissa Etheridge last summer. This one is new, and in Minneapolis this fall it was poignant.
The encore opened with “What’s Up,” and Perry came back out for it, hat and acoustic guitar. Then “Closer to Fine.” They asked us to sing it to them, and we did, all the words, full volume.
I looked around during that last singalong. The couple holding hands and swaying behind me. The straight people I keep forgetting also love the Indigo Girls. Two thousand people who know every word to a song about not knowing the answers. It felt like home, if that makes sense. In this room, in this week, it did.
Minnesota has loved these two for decades, and a changed voice has not changed that. If anything, it makes them more endearing. They play the State Theatre again Friday, October 23. Go be social and hang out with your friends. All 2,000 of them.
See the full set of photos from the night by a.m. photography.
Q Minnesota attended on press credentials provided by Hennepin Arts. Hennepin Arts did not review this piece before publication.
