lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: left me a fool

1992-06-07: indigo girls bring literature to songwriting, the st. louis post-dispatch:

q: what are the differences in the ways you and emily saliers approach songwriting?

a: emily is totally inspired by what she reads. that's the main thing that's similar about us. but she sits down at one point, in one area, and writes music. i write songs as i'm going through life, no matter where i am. she'll sit down in her house for two hours and work on one of her songs because she has to discipline herself and because we're always on the road and she can't write when she's on the road.

she probably takes more imagery directly out of the stuff she reads. i think she had some imagery from (alfred, lord tennyson's) "lady of shalott" in that old song "left me a fool" (from the 1989 album "strange fire"). and in the song "virginia woolf," she uses some of the images that virginia woolf used.

i think that happens more often in emily's songs. she's more verbose than i am - not in a negative way. i mean her vocabulary is just larger than mine.