For the 2023 documentary It’s After all, it’s just lifeNow streaming on Netflix, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach and Indigo Girls members Amy Ray and Emily Saliers focus on the duo’s lives as performers and people over the course of the Grammy-winning folk-rock duo’s 40 years together. It’s a long time, and It’s just life doesn’t approach it in a linear fashion, but instead draws on thoughtful new interviews with Ray and Saliers where they address the themes that have defined Indigo Girls’ music and career: individual acceptance, shared experience, the visibility of women and the LGBTQ community, and a spark of activism that’s still burning. Footage of the Indigo Girls in performance appears throughout the album. It’s just life after allboth the classics you know – “Closer to Fine,” “Galileo” – and selections drawn from a rich sampling of material directly from Amy Ray’s personal archives.
The essential: “One thing that was different between Amy and I was that we had acoustic guitars, but we had microphones in our guitars and we liked to plug them in and turn them up.” To better accompany the Indigo Girls’ shows, which It’s just life after all The songs are often performed in sing-along mode. But Emily Saliers also points out that they have never been easy to pigeonhole. “A new female folk duet,” Kurt Loder says on an MTV News news segment. “This is not folk music for wimps,” another news clip continues. “We didn’t suggest it,” Amy Ray suggests in Only life. “But people looked at us as some kind of… is there a category of lesbian Christian rock?”
The Indigo Girls themselves were as surprised as anyone when their 1989 hit “Closer to Fine” appeared in Barbie in 2023. But being slightly subversive has always been a part of their music, as much as a sincere intensity that is well documented.It’s just life after all devotes an entire segment to Ray and Saliers to respond to a 1989 review in the New York Times. “Women who are outspoken and kind of serious, for rock critics, it’s tough, you know?” Although they are interviewed separately, Ray and Saliers have a familiar ability to finish each other’s thoughts, memories and anecdotes. And as it happens, Only life The documentary proceeds without a frame, letting its subjects walk through their four decades of shared history as musicians and friends, and takes on a friendly, approachable air. These are the personalities they’ve established—Ray is frank, funny, and admits she’s never suffered a fool, while Saliers is sincere and more cerebral—but developed and tempered by age and experience.
Although the media has been insistent over the years regarding Ray and Saliers’ respective sexual identities, It’s just life after all The documentary is the opposite, giving each woman the space to talk about it in her own words. Growing up, Ray says, “I had gender dysphoria, but I didn’t have a language for it.” And Saliers reflects on how her decision to come out in the early ’90s reflects a personal life she continues to protect. The documentary also delves into Ray and Saliers’ dedication to activism, and mixes gentle reenactments with real-life fan testimonies to illustrate the emotional reach of the Indigo Girls’ music. “The person who sends their friend a mixtape and shares that song—sharing that song makes it more powerful, and that’s what happens a lot with our music.”
What movies will this remind you of? The last time a documentary had this much access to Indigo Girls was director Kathlyn Horan’s. A lost daywhich appeared in 2015 alongside the album of the same name. (Horan is a producer for It’s just life after all.) And Joan Baez, who played with the Indigo Girls and is credited here as one of their mentors, was the subject of a deeply told documentary, this one from 2023. I am a noise.
Must-see performances: Preserve the physical media! Special thanks to Amy Ray for digging up stacks of Indigo Girls-related videotapes in many outdated/archaic formats—“I used to carry a camera everywhere we went”—and double thanks to ol’ Woody Harrelson, who appears twice in all this Indigo Girls B-roll.
Memorable Dialogue: People all the time say that Indigo Girls’ music changed their lives. More than one person even says so in this documentary. And while Amy Ray respects those sentiments and doesn’t want to diminish them, she also characterizes her own opinion as a bit more mystical. “I talk about synchronicity and critical mass. People are feeling the same reaction to this song at the same time, and you just have this feeling that you’re detained by something.
Sex and skin: Amy Ray and Emily Saliers’ sex life is a recurring topic It’s just life after alljust as the subject has followed them throughout their careers, whether they intended to make it a central topic or not. “We’re so boxed in,” Saliers says of society and heteronormative expectations. “Binary systems boxed in by gender, sexuality. They’re constructs. Like all of these things, they’re human constructs. Some people may want us to identify a certain way, some people may not care, some people may want us to say queer, but we are all who we are.”
“What really matters is loving and accepting each other for who we are completely.”
Our opinion : It’s just life after all often feels like opening a creaky old closet door and letting the memories pile up. Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met as teenagers (“She was the other girl who played guitar”), performed as the Indigo Girls in college, and signed to Epic at Little Five Points, their original club in Atlanta, in 1988. There’s a lot to ponder; this metaphorical piece of furniture holds a lot. Which is why it’s great to see how It’s just life The album lives up to the lyrical reference of its title. While they simply tell us how it all happened, Ray and Saliers are given real space to reconsider their pasts. Thus, we see Saliers analyzing who she was as a young songwriter—”I see it as, like, a little English major nerd; who the fuck writes about the Lady of Shallot?”—and Ray admitting that her various onstage tantrums were self-centered and musicianly cerebral.
These moments of reflection often tie into one of the larger themes of Indigo Girls’ music and career. “I was also a young woman in an incredibly patriarchal and incredibly condescending environment,” Ray says of those early days. It’s just life after all The album looks back on all the moments that mattered over the years. But it also finds ways to illustrate how issues of visibility and empowerment are still relevant today, and it still manages to locate the Indigo Girls’ center of power as they’ve released records and performed concerts for four decades. “I’m just overwhelmed by the energy of solidarity.”
Our call: Stream it. Superfans of the duo will want to see and hear every track from the stacks of recordings, old videotapes, and pages of handwritten notes for songs in the physical archives of the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray. For them, the advantage of It’s After all, it’s just life One reason Indigo Girls decided to include as much ephemera as possible is because of its commitment. But there’s also a bigger, more rewarding story here. One of acceptance. For 40 years, Indigo Girls has explored what it means to have more than one answer to those questions that lead us all down a tortuous path.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor based in the Chicago area. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
