Indigo Girls leave Austin ‘Closer to Fine’ with packed ACL Live setlist

“When you get a day off in Austin, it is a blessing,” Amy Ray of beloved folk-rock duo Indigo Girls told an ACL Live audience on Sunday. The band spent their Saturday in town, she explained, before packing the house on Willie Nelson Boulevard.

Ray and longtime musical partner Emily Saliers swung through the Live Music Capital on their current tour, which supports latest album “Look Long.” (It came out in 2020, in those early pandemic days.) For a couple of LGBTQ icons from Georgia, Indigo Girls’ mutual love affair with Austin popped up a few times in a juggernaut of a set — 21 songs, minimal banter and more karaoke from the seats than not.

“Y’all keep singing, alright?” Ray said after talking about that blessed day off.

Here are three things you missed if you weren’t at the show.

The Indigo Girls songbook is stacked.

You’d think there were hymnals under the seats at ACL Live, the way that the fanbase echoed all of Ray and Saliers’ words. A stripped-back stage and clear-throated vocals helped the casuals understand why the lyrics burned themselves so deeply in these devotees’ minds.

The Indigo Girls catalog overflows with barroom poetry. Sweat smelled clean on “Hammer and Nail.” Boiled peanuts warmed everyone’s fingers on “Southland in the Springtime.” You could hear the baying on “Howl at the Moon.” (To be honest, there was a whole lotta howling going on in that concert hall).

I also was struck by how much their songs — while sonically of a piece, for the most part — sounded like little daily revolutions.

The radical romance of songs like “Power of Two” brimmed with defiant sweetness: “Chase all the ghosts from your head/ I'm stronger than the monster beneath your bed/ Smarter than the tricks played on your heart/ We'll look at them together then we'll take them apart.” Don’t get me started on “Get Out the Map”; I’m still drinking that sun.

Ray and Saliers are known for their outspoken political activism (it’s even a tab on the navigation bar of their website). On “S___ Kickin’,” Ray sang about being a “little bit left of the salt of the earth.” The rollicking “Shame on You” was full of potent commentary, like this traffic stop comeback: “They say, ‘We be looking for illegal immigrants/ Can we check your car’/ I say, ‘You know it's funny/ I think we were on the same boat back in 1694.’”

Often, Indigo Girls dipped into the storytelling, like on “Country Radio,” Saliers’ evocative, heart-tugging ode to queer longing in smalltown America. She sang of working in the mall food court, taking her girl out in the silver moonlight and trying to see herself in the country songs that gave her youthful solace.

For all their sonic cohesion, each Indigo Girl has their speciality on stage. Time has brought a patina to both of their voices. Still, Saliers sang with honeyed clarity from behind her banjo, while Ray’s vocals came in like a dusty gale through a barn door when she wasn’t marching in time with a mandolin in her hands.

The best musical moment of the night was also a bit of local love. The gorgeous, emotional “Texas Was Clean” found an intense Ray unleashing a flood of melancholy into the air. “In the Austin night under vapor lights/ You laughed at me then you took me in,” she sang.

“We don’t do that song very much because I can’t get through it without crying,” she confessed to the audience after the song was over.

There was some serious musical firepower surrounding Indigo Girls.

The biggest wink to Indigo Girls’ host city: Texas country music institution and “Austin City Limits” hall-of-famer Lloyd Maines, who sat in on the band’s set with a dobro on his lap. His twang took that “Texas Was Clean” to the next level.

Midway through the evening, Saliers asked Maines to tell the audience a joke about the mandolin. “These girls are desperate,” he cracked before quipping that if you’re going to choose the mandolin as your primary instrument, “you’re gonna spend half your career tuning and the other half of your career out of tune.”

He had another joke later: “What do you call a really good looking woman on a banjo player’s arm? A tattoo.”

Saliers said, “Never heard that one.”

Ray joked, “We live in a bubble of political correctness.”

Saliers added, “Lloyd brings a whole new level of dad joke to our life.”

The band’s arsenal also included violinist Lyris Hung, who joined Indigo Girls on most songs. She unleashed a string storm that would beat the devil in a duel on songs like “Go” and “Shame on You.” The pair even gave Hung the spotlight for an extended solo interlude. Hung used a loop pedal to create a fantasmagoría of bumblebees, feline screeches and good old-fashioned bluegrass riffs. Ray gave the customary “we’re not worthy” bow when it was done.

Alabama singer-songwriter Kristy Lee, who opened for Indigo Girls, brought her A-game to the evening, too. The band tapped her bluesy roar for the dark and stormy “Kid Fears.”

‘Barbie’ got something really right about ‘Close To Fine.’

Of course, you can’t talk about a night with Indigo Girls without “Closer to Fine,” their breakout hit single from their 1989 self-titled album. The song has enjoyed a renaissance lately, thanks to last summer’s culture-shifting “Barbie” movie. In the film, Margot Robbie’s existentially beleaguered living doll belts “Closer to Fine” in the car as she drives out of Barbieland and into the real world.The song’s a catchy folk-pop banger, for one thing. But it’s also concerned with the questions we all face as we spin on this rock for a few decades. “It's only life, after all,” a popular line goes.On Sunday night, fans left their seats and crowded the edge of the stage to dance with Ray and Saliers. The duo pointed into the house. The fans loudly, cathartically confirmed that after a night with Indigo Girls, they felt a little closer to … well, you know.

Setlist for Indigo Girls at ACL Live in Austin

• “Hammer and Nail”

• “Howl at the Moon”

• “Southland in the Springtime”

• “Land of Canaan”

• “Power of Two”

• “Shit Kickin’”

• “Least Complicated”

• “Texas Was Clean”

• “When We Were Writers”

• “Yield”

• “Country Radio”

• “Share the Moon”

• “Get Out the Map”

• “Shame on You”

• Lyris Hung violin interlude

• “The Wood Song”

• “Go”

• “Lay My Head Down”

• “Kid Fears”

• “Closer to Fine”

• Encore:

• “Three County Highway”

• “Galileo”

Eric Webb is an award-winning culture writer based in Austin. Find him at www.ericwebb.me..

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Indigo Girls thrilled Austin with a hit-filled singalong at ACL Live