lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: let me go easy

2005-07-09: indigo girls bring "rarities" to napa, the fairfield daily republic:

is there a track you wanted that didn't make the cut?

not really. it's really geared towards things you couldn't get elsewhere, that was the focus, almost the theme.

"let me go easy," is a track recorded last year but is on this album.

it's a live version of the song, a song that we recorded for our last record, but the production wasn't right, the arrangement wasn't right and we took it off. i brought it back in a different arrangement, more original, more simple.

the song has a special meaning for you, right?

it's about a friend. she was a great person, a friend of the activist community, a native american who worked on to honor the earth. we visited a couple of times during the final stages and these were just thoughts and i wrote a song. at some point i felt she was tired of fighting (had ovarian cancer). she had been a strong warrior for so many causes and at some point someone has got to be allowed to leave.

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2011-12-19: thirty years on, the indigo girls continue to grow with beauty queen sister, glide magazine:

gm: "let me go easy" is an intensely spiritual song of yours that came out of the rarities era and yet quickly became a highly regarded piece among your other indigo girls work. will we ever see a studio version of that, or just the live one from rarities?

ar: you might... but i don't know. it's a song that we sing in that spirit every now and then, like a good friend of ours that passed away or something. we pull it out for sacred reasons, so to speak. i really like that song in that grateful dead kind of way- it has a certain spirit to it, and i wrote it for a few people who passed away that were huge activists and the ideas still stick with me. so that's definitely a vote of confidence for the song.

we definitely tried to do it in the studio- first with a band and it felt disingenuous, so we approached it acoustically and it didn't feel right that way, but then when we went at it from a live duo point of view, it really worked. so, it's a difficult question of how to do it and not have it betray the song.