My Life with the Indigo Girls

I have been trying to list down my top 10 bands of all time while looking after Paco at home when my thoughts hanged as I listened to ‘Hammer and a Nail’ of the Indigo Girls. I first met Amy Ray and Emily Saliers in 1994 when I was checking out cassette tapes during the yuletide season at Isetann Cubao. Of all places, it was in Isetann Cubao when a saleslady recommended that I listen to Indigo Girls after getting a Tanika Tikaram tape. Feeling humble and kind due to the season, I delayed my usual snotty judgment and asked her to play the tape. A solid guitar rhythm reverberated in the Isetann music station that immediately hit me and changed my life forever. It was love at first hear, if there is such a shit.

Indigo Girls’ Rites of Passage album redefined my musicscape. Their melody and lyricism weaves well with the steady folk rock genre that connects well with my advocacies and principles in life. I got almost all of their albums and even shelled hard earned dough to score their original two CD live album that I have to order in Greenhills shopping center around 1997 or 1998 and wait for two to three weeks. It was well worth it.

I got an original Rites of Passage CD and had the chance listening to it along the Nevada-Arizona interstate waxing romantic just imagining my two music goddess trod the same lands they cherish and love through their music. Their activism on environment and peoples’ issues all the more raised my appreciation of these musicians who continues to enjoy their struggle for a better world. Let it be Me from the Rites of Passage album is one of my all time favorites. It is a prayerful song of a person sincerely trying to serve well and act well for the people and the environment.

I loved them even before the mushy “Power of Two” song (Swamp Ophelia) that could have raised their bar in the popular music scene in the Philippines. It was viciously played in the radios in the late 1990s with the song even reaching primetime noontime television sang in duet by the latest love teams of the land. The song however did not make a dent to give Indigo Girls that needed fame in the country that might have made them consider doing a concert in the Philippines.

From my deep down emotions on love, pain, happiness, to my advocacies and angst in this world, my life’s MTV revolves around Indigo Girls music.

I am lucky to be alive during their time.