While
Amy Ray is best known as one-half of Indigo Girls with Emily Saliers, Amy has a thriving solo career, too, much of it based on her acclaimed 2014 solo country release, "Goodnight Tender," her modern take on the early Nashville Sound, dogs, pills,
Duane Allman, and heartache. She talks about the making of that album
here.
On
Saturday, October 1, at 9pm, Amy brings her band with her to
Club Helsinki Hudson to perform songs from "Goodnight Tender" and her five other solo efforts. Singer-songwriter, author, and gay-rights activist
Chely Wright will share the bill with Ray.
For decades, Amy Ray has performed with Emily Saliers in the Indigo Girls, and their ongoing success derives, in part, from intricate, ethereal harmonies, from the interplay of their distinct voices and sensibilities. Ray also has turned up the volume in her solo career as an axe-slinging rocker, producing six albums
with punk edges and defiant, powerhouse vocals. In both capacities, she integrates the personal with the political, the dynamics of relationships with principles of progressive social justice.
"Goodnight Tender" marked a dramatic departure from those formats and themes, though her vocals, even when snarled at high decibels, always convey a rending ache that serves folk, punk, country, or any refrain tinged with pain. Ray convened artists she trusts with fiddle, banjo, dobro, pedal steel, guitar, mandolin, bass, and drums, and then arranged their microphone placement like an old-school sound engineer to create an authentic, vintage sound, gently imposing Strum and Twang on her Sturm und Drang.
"I love to scream and growl, but I also love the soft, sweet singing of artists like George Jones," Ray says, "so I slowed the tempo, got into a lower register, and let the songs and the musicians around me dictate a different direction. I was tempted to slip a political song in here, but I wanted this album free of anything that defines identity in any way."
What she strove for instead was the rush of pure feeling.
"I didn't want the laborious arrangement process - I wanted recordings I didn't have to mess with too much," she says. "So these songs are more visceral than intellectual, with a strong, wistful sense of setting that enables you to sense the creek and the dirt as well as the unrequited love. I wanted a record that sounds good and feels right when you're driving down a rural road."
Ray enjoys plenty of opportunities to road-test these songs on her secluded, wooded property in north Georgia, where banjos and bluegrass still echo throughout the mountains. "At some point, those sounds are bound to seep into your life," she says.
Inspired by her neighbors, Ray, who is a vegetarian, penned "Hunter's Prayer" for this album. "One night this huge buck appeared in the fog - his antlers still hadn't shed their fuzz -- and stopped and looked at me in this long moment, in the way animals have of seeming to see right into you," she recalls.
Ray played a half dozen tunes from "Goodnight Tender" on a visit to NPR's "Mountain Stage" program, which you can
listen to here.
Singer-songwriter, author, and gay-rights activist
Chely Wright grew up in a musical family in the small town of Wellsville, Kansas. The young Wright starting singing professionally at age 11, and by her senior year of high school was working as a performing musician at the Ozark Jubilee, a country music show in Branson, Missouri. After graduating, the young Kansan went directly to Nashville. It didn't take long for her innate talents to be recognized. In 1995, she was named Top New Female Vocalist by the Academy of Country Music, then scored her first Top 40 country hit in 1997 with "Shut Up and Drive." Her songs have been recorded by Brad Paisley, Richard Marx, Indigo Girls, Mindy Smith, and Clay Walker, among others.
Chely shows up at Helsinki Hudson having just released her latest album, "I Am the Rain," this past week. She offers
a video introduction to the new album here, talks about her new song, "Holy War,"
here, and you can view the official music video for her country-pop hit, "Shut Up and Drive,"
here.
