Taking Sides: Indigo Girls "Closer to Fine" vs Edie Brickells "What I Am"

edie wins.

Oh bingo bingo. Between that and the fact that the guitar player in the video is wearing denim overalls (inna Jerry stylee) just made me want through a fuckin' hockey puck at the screen everytime that video came on. Fuck those guys.

i'm not a big edie brickell fan -- i just can't stomach the indigo girls AT ALL.

i won.

The opening act was some earnestly oppressed woman with an acoustic guitar no one had yet heard of. Tracy Chapman.

if only morrissey were american and female ...

and a l'shana tovah to you, too!

come back when you can spell 'portentous'

there are like two Edie Brickell songs as good (' ') as 'What I Am'

Both songs suck. Bad. "What I am" is an update of Popeye's theme song.

And the verse "I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind/got my paper and I was FREE" makes me cringe every time.

that combo of acoustic strum with blah girl-girl harmonies and
offensive bullshit-self-help lyrics on the indigo girls stuff, along with natalie merchant's voice and pete yorn's ouevre define for me the GREAT MEDIOCRE, which is a trillion times worse than anything else, even cancer.

I might get annoyed by them if I had to deal with them more often (the lyrics I hear are a bit much - so are Ted Leo's but he's got groove at least on Hearts Of Oak), but I have no real beef with the Indigo girls. "Closer To Fine" sound great, and well, I've had some classic futile crushes on girls like them before.

The best thing about Edie Brickell is that when I saw them in concert back in high school, Steve Forbert opened up, and he was GREAT. I'd never heard of him before.

http://www.brunching.com/yourroommate.html

when i lived in chicago, my wife worked for Anderson Consluting and they gave us a free concert at where ever the Bulls play. it was Natalie Merchant. we went and laughed at all fucking, yuppie consulting fuckwads. Merchant opened the show by saying, "chicago, you guys sure do like your BEEEEEEEEEEEEER!" and just kept saying "BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER" really long and drawn out like that. of course she was making fun of the audience, but they really did like their beer, so they cheered along.

Alex, the Newport is a real shithole though, you gotta admit.

I don't have any Paul Simon jokes, but my reaction to the 'four years prostrate' line has always been 'in your case, it was probably at least six'.

come back when you can spell 'portentous'
actually, I was almost going to write 'pretentious', but that would be mean-spirited and unfair as well as being a cliché

haha true story: I only know "Closer to Fine" because K@hleen Edwards, who was then in my chemistry and world issues classes, used to play it all the time at high school coffeehouses. An early stepping-stone on her route to fame!

I still hear "What I Am" in pubs sometimes. I really don't like the lyrics, which do strike me as pretty blatantly anti-intellectual and in a gratingly smug and corny way, and I don't find the music at all interesting or appealing enough to overcome this. I can tune out lyrics but the music doesn't do much for me.

I think we have that one at the radio station! I'll check it out.

No, duh. I may have misinterpreted amst - I thought he was saying these people were awful because of how they were fans, rather than awful independent of their fandom.

I prefer the remix that some Italian DJ did in 1989. Andrew Weatherall must have really liked it too, 'cause he sampled it for "Loaded"!

No, duh. I may have misinterpreted amst - I thought he was saying these people were awful because of how they were fans, rather than awful independent of their fandom.

-- gabbneb (gabbne...) (webmail), September 17th, 2004 4:37 PM. (gabbneb) (later) (link)

def. the latter

Indigo Girls' "Virginia Wolff" has the Worst Lyric Ever: "You weathered the storm of cruel mortality." If that means what I think it's supposed to mean, no, she didn't. She's dead. (By drowning suicide, which makes the line even worse, as my friend Becca once pointed out.)

anyway, thanks to the virginia wolff story, i now take back even the most tentative reassessment of the indigo girls i ventured on this thread.

maybe they mean she lived through a lot of other people's deaths? like those movies that just keep coming out these days

No shit.

I have to agree that it's the vomitous guitar solo that well and truly kills "What I Am."

Yeah I was surprised how much I liked that record, given my low tolerance for all things Indigo. It's not great or anything, but it's nice and fuck-offish (even though the Joan Jett cameo is kind of a letdown).

Of these two songs, the Edie one has a pretty good groove, which is more than the Indigos ever had.

Strange Fire
Left Me a Fool (Back On The Bus, Y'all version)
Closer to Fine
Kid Fears (Back On The Bus, Y'all version)
Land of Canaan (self-titled version)
Southland in the Springtime
Hammer and a Nail
Hand Me Downs
Watershed
Three Hits
Galileo
Ghost
Chickenman
Cedar Tree
Mystery (1200 Curfews version)
Touch Me Fall
Language or the Kiss

This is 78-79 minutes. The last song I left off was "Secure Yourself"

(I have no opinion on either of the originals)

"Love Will Come To You" is terrific, gabbneb was right. Rites of Passage and the debut are totally classic.

I can't hear "Closer To Fine" without thinking of this:
http://www.brunching.com/yourroommate.html

― Tantrum The Cat (Tantrum The Cat), Friday, September 17, 2004 3:53 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

yay brunching shuttlecocks! i still have some tina the troubled teen jpgs saved on my hd

I used to hate both these songs and now I like both these songs

haha, I didn't know anyone who played "Closer To Fine" in the dorms but I can see that; on my hall it was Pearl Jam's "Black".

kinda feeling that Pearl Jam are the male Indigo Girls in some ways (note that I had a really high fever yesterday so my cogency ought to be taken with the usual grain of salt)

I keep wondering if we are ever going to have a collective change of heart and all accept that Closer to Fine is a tremendous song.

closer to fine is great but galileo is better i think

Was hanging out with some people who were playing the first two Indigo Girls albums all evening, and remembered how "Closer to Fine" was my freshman year of college and was so much a song about education and liberal arts. And sounded so different from anything on radio, being almost entirely just voices and acoustic guitars (+ a little tambourine and pennywhistle).

Anyway, I heard "Closer to Fine" and thought: wow, what a solid song. And heard "Kid Fears" and thought: wait, is this the best R.E.M. song? And remembered riding around in cars listening to that first album with the rest of the otherwise all-women literary-magazine staff.

I absolutely love their first album. The third one is great too.

I get how people can find "Closer to Fine" cheesy but are there really people who don't see it as a sterling instance of the kind of song it is?

Great Natalie Merchant:
Trouble Me
Candy Everybody Wants
These Are Days

Ok Natalie Merchant:
Kind & Generous
Carnival

I Hate it Never Want to Hear Again:
Wonder

Open to liking it, haven't found the melody after 25 years:
Photograph w/REM

1-2-3 is my Indigo Girls jam btw

I meant the s/t btw not Strange Fire

though that's good too

I ride for them through Rites of Passage. "Virginia Wolff"!

Listening more to s/t, realized that the first songs have few/no drums in a way that keep it from sounding dated.

a little tambourine and pennywhistle

Which I found out recently is by Irish band Hothouse Flowers!

Old-Skool ILM very much living up to the "bag of dicks" stereotype on this thread.

Is this truly the closest thing to a general Indigo Girls thread on ILM(??)

I'm realizing, very belatedly, how great they are... but intimidated at the idea of getting a grasp on an act with 15 studio albums (not to mention solo / side projects). Beyond the S/T (which I revisited for the first time since, probably, high school – it made me laugh at how good it is, on a song-by-song basis), and the Best-Of / Essential playlists, any tips on how to "get into them"?

Light some incense

Goddamn, for decades now I assumed they were saying "The closer I am to find," which I always assumed was an awkward but deliberate grammatical mistake.