How the Indigo Girls Brought Barbie ‘Closer to Fine’

In Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, the place daily is the perfect day ever, pop stars like Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX present a bouncy soundtrack because the live-action dolls go about their cheery, blissful lives. That is, till Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical” Barbie cues a file scratch with a uncommon and surprising existential question: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”

To resolve this disruption to her in any other case excellent life, she hops in her pink Corvette and belts alongside to a monitor stuffed with strummed acoustic guitars and shut harmonies. “There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line,” she sings with a smile, earlier than thrusting a manicured pointer within the air.

Barbie’s music of selection on her approach to the Real World is the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.”

The Indigo Girls, a folks duo from Georgia who’ve launched 15 studio albums since 1987, featured “Closer to Fine” because the opening monitor on their self-titled 1989 LP. Emily Saliers wrote the music after she and her fellow singer and guitarist, Amy Ray, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta and have been recurrently enjoying an area bar known as Little Five Points. It turned a staple of the Girls’ dwell present that unfold thanks to school radio play and a gap slot on tour with one other Georgia band, R.E.M.

It’s a music about looking for, Saliers stated by telephone this month: “I searched here and I searched there, and if I just try to take it easy and get a little bit of knowledge and wisdom from different sources, then I’m going to be closer to fine.”

“Closer to Fine,” with its four-chord verses, octave-jumping refrain and barely inscrutable lyrics, has been a staple of dorm room singalongs, karaoke excursions and automotive rides for years, and it’s the Indigo Girls’ most identifiable tune. “Indigo Girls,” their first album for a serious label, went double platinum and received a Grammy.

“It’s got a very easy melody and really easy chorus, and the chorus repeats,” Saliers stated. “When you get to a chorus of a song that you’re into and you can just sing it at the top of your lungs, I think just structurally, melodically, it’s really a road trip song and I think that’s why you see it in those kinds of scenes.”

Ray stated “Closer to Fine” represents 80 % of the band’s licensing, however the duo are typically advised little or no about how their music will probably be used. They don’t permit commercials, however have had profitable soundtrack and onscreen placements in movies like “Philadelphia” and TV reveals together with “The Office” and “Transparent.” In 1995, the duo starred as Whoopi Goldberg’s home band within the film “Boys on the Side.”

“I think it was really important at that time for us to reach more people,” Ray stated in a telephone interview. “Those kinds of things are just invaluable for an artist.”

The Indigo Girls have an identical hope for “Barbie,” already a worldwide phenomenon with powerhouse advertising and intergenerational model recognition. A “Closer to Fine” cowl by Brandi and Catherine Carlile seems on the expanded version of the film’s soundtrack.

“I always felt that song was really defining of who they were in that era,” Brandi Carlile stated in an interview. “That, even more than lesbians, what they were was intellectuals. They were offering up a life beyond the life that young people knew. And it’s a very young person’s song,” she added. “It’s about seeking out more than you thought you believed.”

Still, given little context in an preliminary name from their supervisor, Saliers stated she was nervous. “I didn’t know who was directing it or anything, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is about Barbie? We better check to make sure this is kosher,’” she recalled. “But as it turned out, it’s in the hands of Greta and it’s just this amazing thing that happened. It was a complete surprise to me and Amy.”

Ray known as it a present: “It’s just absolutely wonderful that they’re using it.”

“Closer to Fine” recurs within the movie 3 times and seems in its official trailer, nevertheless it’s been recirculating in popular culture organically, too. In March, a video of the comic Tig Notaro singing it on a celebration bus alongside a crew that included Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Sarah Paulson blew up on-line. The band’s newest album, “Long Look,” arrived in 2020, they usually have been on a tour (sometimes closing with the tune) that touches down in Ireland and Britain subsequent month.

“You don’t imagine a folk lesbian duo to be in this hot-pink Barbie movie,” stated Notaro, who has been a fan since seeing the “Closer to Fine” video on MTV’s different rock present “120 Minutes.” “Kind of just selfishly and personally, I feel like, ‘Yeah, we were onto something all these years,’ you know? It’s validating. Obviously it’s been a huge hit forever, but this is so next level.”

“When I hear a song like that,” she added, “it feels like just my chest bursts open with joy and hope.”

The Indigo Girls are additionally the topic of a documentary, “It’s Only Life After All,” directed by Alexandria Bambach, which premiered at Sundance in January. The movie serves as a reminder of how Saliers and Ray, each overtly queer and from spiritual Southern backgrounds, endured scrutiny and prejudice as “Closer to Fine” put them in an early highlight.

“For the longest time I always felt we were the brunt of lesbian jokes in kind of a lowest common denominator,” Saliers says within the documentary. Ray echoed these sentiments within the movie, saying, “It seemed like the most derogatory thing you could be is a female gay singer-songwriter.”

Critics would consult with them as too earnest or overly pretentious, in the event that they lined them in any respect. The duo have been used to comedian impact on “Saturday Night Live” and “South Park”; even Ellen DeGeneres employed them as a punchline after her character got here out on nationwide tv on her sitcom “Ellen.”

“That time period that really was just so critical of women — of queer women, of women that didn’t present the way that a patriarchal system wanted them to,” Bambach stated. “I think it’s a really critical time for us to be looking back at, you know, just things that we scoffed or laughed off or said were OK.”

Brandi Carlile stated after watching the duo take so many photographs through the years, the “Barbie” second is additional candy. “The real injustice of how the Indigo Girls have been treated throughout these last few decades is that they’ve been used as kind of this dog whistling acceptable way to sort of parody lesbians, and I always felt destabilized by it,” she stated. “And so seeing something like this happen for them on this scale and watching them and that iconic kind of life-affirming song make its way to new ears is probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in years.”

The singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt, 29, discovered the Indigo Girls in highschool however additional embraced them in school, when she stated their music gave her the arrogance to jot down private and descriptive lyrics from her experiences as a homosexual lady.

“Representation in culture is the biggest, the single most important thing I think for people to fully embrace themselves,” she stated. “You need all these different examples of who you’re allowed to be, and the answer is anybody — you’re allowed to be anybody.”

Pruitt known as “Closer to Fine” the “northern star” of songwriting. “It’s incredible that it’s having a resurgence in 2023” in “a franchise that I grew up associating with extreme heteronormativity,” she stated. “I love how now they’re rebranding it as something incredibly inclusive.”

Bambach, who found the Indigo Girls throughout singalongs led by counselors at youth summer time camp, noticed “Barbie” on opening weekend in Atlanta and stated there have been screams of pleasure and recognition when “Closer to Fine” performed onscreen.

“It’s very gratifying to think that there’s something that this very fine director saw in the song that had cultural relevance in this day and time,” Saliers stated. But above all, she appreciates that point has allowed listeners to step again and admire the band’s music as merely music.

“We’re finally allowed to just be us,” Saliers stated. “I guess we’ve stuck around long enough and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just Amy and Emily.’ We no longer are the brunt of a joke and we’re flourishing in certain ways in terms of this relevancy, which is gratifying. It’s strange, you know, to watch culture change and move — and it really has changed for us.”