In Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, the place each day is the absolute best day ever, pop stars like Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX supply a bouncy soundtrack as the live-action dolls pass about their cheery, joyful lives. That is, till Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical” Barbie cues a file scratch with an extraordinary and stunning existential question: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”
To get to the bottom of this disruption to her differently highest lifestyles, she hops in her purple Corvette and belts alongside to a monitor full of strummed acoustic guitars and shut harmonies. “There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line,” she sings with a grin, earlier than thrusting a manicured pointer in the air.
Barbie’s tune of selection on her method to the Real World is the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.”
The Indigo Girls, a people duo from Georgia who’ve launched 15 studio albums since 1987, featured “Closer to Fine” as the opening monitor on their self-titled 1989 LP. Emily Saliers wrote the tune after she and her fellow singer and guitarist, Amy Ray, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta and had been often enjoying an area bar referred to as the Little Five Points Pub. It changed into a staple of the Girls’ dwell display that unfold thank you to school radio play and a gap slot on excursion with any other Georgia band, R.E.M.
It’s a tune about looking for, Saliers mentioned by means of telephone this month: “I searched here and I searched there, and if I just try to take it easy and get a little bit of knowledge and wisdom from different sources, then I’m going to be closer to fine.”
“Closer to Fine,” with its four-chord verses, octave-jumping refrain and quite inscrutable lyrics, has been a staple of dorm room singalongs, karaoke tours and automobile rides for years, and it’s the Indigo Girls’ maximum identifiable song. “Indigo Girls,” their first album for a significant label, went double platinum and gained a Grammy.
“It’s got a very easy melody and really easy chorus, and the chorus repeats,” Saliers mentioned. “When you get to a chorus of a song that you’re into and you can just sing it at the top of your lungs, I think just structurally, melodically, it’s really a road trip song and I think that’s why you see it in those kinds of scenes.”
Ray mentioned “Closer to Fine” represents 80 % of the band’s licensing, however the duo are in most cases advised little or no about how their song will probably be used. They don’t permit advertisements, however have had a success soundtrack and onscreen placements in movies like “Philadelphia” and TV presentations together with “The Office” and “Transparent.” In 1995, the duo starred as Whoopi Goldberg’s space band in the film “Boys on the Side.”
“I think it was really important at that time for us to reach more people,” Ray mentioned in a telephone interview. “Those kinds of things are just invaluable for an artist.”
The Indigo Girls have a an identical hope for “Barbie,” already a world phenomenon with powerhouse advertising and intergenerational emblem reputation. A “Closer to Fine” duvet by means of Brandi and Catherine Carlile seems on the expanded version of the film’s soundtrack.
“I always felt that song was really defining of who they were in that era,” Brandi Carlile mentioned in an interview. “That, even more than lesbians, what they were was intellectuals. They were offering up a life beyond the life that young people knew. And it’s a very young person’s song,” she added. “It’s about seeking out more than you thought you believed.”
Still, given little context in an preliminary name from their supervisor, Saliers mentioned she used to be apprehensive. “I didn’t know who was directing it or anything, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is about Barbie? We better check to make sure this is kosher,’” she recalled. “But as it turned out, it’s in the hands of Greta and it’s just this amazing thing that happened. It was a complete surprise to me and Amy.”
Ray referred to as it a present: “It’s just absolutely wonderful that they’re using it.”
“Closer to Fine” recurs in the movie thrice and looks in its legit trailer, however it’s been recirculating in popular culture organically, too. In March, a video of the comic Tig Notaro making a song it on a birthday party bus along a team that integrated Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Sarah Paulson blew up online. The band’s newest album, “Look Long,” arrived in 2020, and they have got been on a excursion (in most cases last with the song) that touches down in Ireland and Britain subsequent month.
“You don’t imagine a folk lesbian duo to be in this hot-pink Barbie movie,” mentioned Notaro, who has been a fan since seeing the “Closer to Fine” video on MTV’s choice rock display “120 Minutes.” “Kind of just selfishly and personally, I feel like, ‘Yeah, we were onto something all these years,’ you know? It’s validating. Obviously it’s been a huge hit forever, but this is so next level.”
“When I hear a song like that,” she added, “it feels like just my chest bursts open with joy and hope.”
The Indigo Girls also are the matter of a documentary, “It’s Only Life After All,” directed by means of Alexandria Bombach, which premiered at Sundance in January. The movie serves as a reminder of ways Saliers and Ray, each overtly queer and from non secular Southern backgrounds, persisted scrutiny and prejudice as “Closer to Fine” put them in an early highlight.
“For the longest time I always felt we were the brunt of lesbian jokes in kind of a lowest common denominator,” Saliers says in the documentary. Ray echoed the ones sentiments in the movie, announcing, “It seemed like the most derogatory thing you could be is a female gay singer-songwriter.”
Critics would refer to them as too earnest or overly pretentious, in the event that they coated them in any respect. The duo had been used to comedian impact on “Saturday Night Live” and “South Park”; even Ellen DeGeneres hired them as a punchline after her personality got here out on nationwide tv on her sitcom “Ellen.”
“That time period that really was just so critical of women — of queer women, of women that didn’t present the way that a patriarchal system wanted them to,” Bombach mentioned. “I think it’s a really critical time for us to be looking back at, you know, just things that we scoffed or laughed off or said were OK.”
Brandi Carlile mentioned after gazing the duo take such a lot of photographs over the years, the “Barbie” second is additional candy. “The real injustice of how the Indigo Girls have been treated throughout these last few decades is that they’ve been used as kind of this dog whistling acceptable way to sort of parody lesbians, and I always felt destabilized by it,” she mentioned. “And so seeing something like this happen for them on this scale and watching them and that iconic kind of life-affirming song make its way to new ears is probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in years.”
The singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt, 29, discovered the Indigo Girls in highschool however additional embraced them in school, when she mentioned their song gave her the self assurance to write private and descriptive lyrics from her stories as a homosexual lady.
“Representation in culture is the biggest, the single most important thing I think for people to fully embrace themselves,” she mentioned. “You need all these different examples of who you’re allowed to be, and the answer is anybody — you’re allowed to be anybody.”
Pruitt referred to as “Closer to Fine” the “northern star” of songwriting. “It’s incredible that it’s having a resurgence in 2023” in “a franchise that I grew up associating with extreme heteronormativity,” she mentioned. “I love how now they’re rebranding it as something incredibly inclusive.”
Bombach, who came upon the Indigo Girls right through singalongs led by means of counselors at formative years summer season camp, noticed “Barbie” on opening weekend in Atlanta and mentioned there have been screams of pleasure and popularity when “Closer to Fine” performed onscreen.
“It’s very gratifying to think that there’s something that this very fine director saw in the song that had cultural relevance in this day and time,” Saliers mentioned. But above all, she appreciates that point has allowed listeners to step again and respect the band’s song as merely song.
“We’re finally allowed to just be us,” Saliers mentioned. “I guess we’ve stuck around long enough and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just Amy and Emily.’ We no longer are the brunt of a joke and we’re flourishing in certain ways in terms of this relevancy, which is gratifying. It’s strange, you know, to watch culture change and move — and it really has changed for us.”