Amanda Dyslin
MANKATO — Lisa Allen says over and over again, “The Indigo Girls are a big part of my life.”
But the truth of that statement doesn’t quite sink in until she starts listing examples.
There was the time she was on the road with her former husband (who wasn’t a fan) and she kept sneaking short listens to the Girls whenever he was out of earshot. Then there was the time she was being wheeled into surgery and the medical staff let her listen to the band on her headphones to help her relax.
The most recent example was a few weeks ago, when Allen, 33, and her best friend Lori Shores got up in the early hours of the morning to wait in line for hours at the Midwest Wireless Civic Center for tickets to the Indigo Girls concert Monday night. She was first in line, which got her front-row seats to the show for the first time in the 18 years or so she’s been a fan.
“I’ve been trying to get front-row tickets forever,” said Allen of Mankato. “I was so excited.”
It’s not enough for Allen to just be excited. She wants as many Mankato singer-songwriter fans as possible to be right there with her. So she e-mailed the Indigo Girls camp and volunteered to hang concert posters all over town — a task she’s been doing happily for weeks.
She’s also been telling everyone she knows to visit pendulumswinger.com to learn the dance that two Oakland, Calif., fans created for concert-goers to do during the song “Pendulum Swinger” at concerts. The grass-roots effort has spread across the country, and the Girls — Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — look for people in the crowd who do it during the song.
“We want a lot of people to do it,” said Allen, who’s a big fan of the song and the new album, “Despite Our Differences.”
The album is the Indigo Girls’ 10th release and marks the 20th anniversary of their career. The album also is a departure from their previous work, although it still maintains the melodious guitar-driven flavor that is their signature.
“Differences” took just six weeks to record in the home studio of Mitchell Froom, a producer they’d never worked with before. The result was a more raw, spontaneous album, said Ray in a telephone interview.
“It definitely feels different,” Ray said. “By not making a mark, (Froom) really made a mark. He’s a minimalist, and he brought something out of us — immediacy and energy.”
Ray and Saliers have known each other since elementary school in Georgia, the state both still call home, and have grown to be like sisters. Musically, however, their styles are different, creating a dynamic tension that sets them apart from other folk artists.
Ray is brooding rock ’n’ roll and Saliers is pretty romantic melodies. The two write separately and usually don’t hang out when they’re not performing, so the initial presentation of songs to each other can be a little tense.
“It’s difficult at first,” Ray said. “It’s always very jarring to hear how different our songwriting is for us. But we know it’s going to come together, and it’s going to be fine.”
What makes “Differences” such a rich and acclaimed album is the distinct flavors of the two songwriters, yet the album is cohesive because both women put their imprint on the other’s songs. The melding of the two is always in the harmonies, Ray said.
“Our voices have a blend,” Ray said. “It’s just as simple as that.”
Allen attributes what she considers to be the magic of the Indigo Girls’ sound to much more. It’s in the poetry of their lyrics, the brilliance of their instrumentation and the passion of their vocals, she says.
That’s what reeled her into fandom after the first listen of their debut in the late 1980s when Allen was just 15. She’d never heard of the duo and selected the cassette from a list of options on her BMG Music Club enrollment form based on the fact that it featured Michael Stipe and she loved the color indigo.
“I popped it in, and I was completely hooked,” Allen said.
All these years later, she has the Indigo Girls entire catalog (many on cassette tapes) and numerous bootlegs from concerts. She’s seen them in concert five times, and she even briefly met them once following a concert at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis.
“I went out back, and they came out,” Allen said. “They both signed my CD, and I have a picture of Emily signing my CD and one of me with Amy.
“I really wanted to tell them what their music has meant to me. But all I could get out was ‘thank you.’”
Instead of telling them, Allen will get to show Ray and Saliers how much she loves their music. Sunday night, from the sixth row during their concert at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, and Monday night, front-row center at the Civic Center, the Girls will look down and see Allen proudly leading her section in the “Pendulum Swinger” dance.
