lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: yoke

amy ray quote from 2011-10-04: indigo girl amy ray takes on the 'beauty queen sister': interview, shewired:

for me, a song like "yoke," the very last song, i brought to the project pretty late. i had written it a while back but i had thought of it as being kind of in that leonard cohen tradition, in that folk song tradition of being kind of long and dark. i didn't know if it was just too self-sulk, but i think the risk was, "let's just do it" and see what happens. it's a live recording basically, with a couple of string overdubs, but the main string is live - everything is live, except for emily's vocal and one violin part or something. so for me, something like that - it's kind of an emotional perspective, and you're just doing it and not worrying about whether it fits in, or whether its pop-y or anything like that.

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

gm: i like how you fit in some more "traditional" sounding indigo girls songs, like "john" and "feed and water the horses" with some stuff that just really changes the game- stuff we've never really heard from you- like "damo" and "yoke." those first two are emily songs and the last two are yours. what was the conversation between you and emily in reconciling all of these songs?

ar: a song like "damo" came later, because i'd already worked on that song with john reynolds, who produced come on now social, and together we'd been working via email on "damo," where i'd send him the song and he'd send me a loop, where i was using my 8-track machine and he was doing things digitally, and so we created this piece that, as the record developed, became something that i wanted to bring to the table even though it was pretty much finished, because i felt it could add this other element that was needed for the album, soundscape-wise. and emily's always open-minded with things like that- she definitely is not only open but interested in hearing those sorts of things.

and with "yoke," it was somewhat similar, in that we'd gotten fairly deep into the song selection process for the record, and i'd written "yoke" but was sort of unsure about it. i ended up sending it to peter just saying that i thought it'd be a nice moment where we just let the song be and not try and have another pop song sort of thing. so for me and emily, towards the end of choosing the material, we start to look at the totality of the project, having the conversation of how the songs fit or need to fit together, and then asking questions about refining pieces, like debating putting a loop in "john" and wondering how that'll effect the song(s). we just talk through all that stuff, but the majority of the bridge between our conversation and the end process is the producer, so peter was vital for that. we go to them and often defer to them, because that helps keeps us together and also keeps the songs in sync. emily and i are so different, and we definitely produce each other's songs in a very different way, but in the end i always like what happens, but it's often not my first impulse.