For Ebert, I reviewed Glitter & Doom, a coming-of-age queer-romance, powered by the music of the Indigo Girls. It’s a mixed bag as a film, and runs into the normal jukebox musical challenges, but it’s super fun to hear the re-arrangements of these familiar songs. I’ve written a lot about the Indigo Girls here before – in my music roundups which I haven’t done in forever! I’ve had a relationship with these women since I first bought their second album on cassette tape, and listened to it until the tape disintegrated. And, kind of amazingly, they weren’t a flash in the pan, or one-hit wonders. There were lots of great female singer-songwriters rising up at the time. Suzanne Vega. Tracy Chapman. Ebba Forsberg (almost completely forgotten: but I loved that album). Des’ree (adore her). But time moved on and these women kept making albums, of course, and some – like Chapman – maintained their position as innovators – but … there were many who just didn’t “make it’. The Indigo Girls are still here. It’s been 35 years now. And their albums keep getting better and better. There hasn’t been a diminishment. At all. I feel like I’ve “grown up” with them. Their music mean a lot to me. Two songs are basically radioactive for me because I so associate them with losing what I then thought was the love of my life – these songs seemed to speak to what I was going through and struggling with. A loss that seemed bigger than just the individual loss of him. And it WAS bigger. So here we are so many years later, with the loss transformed into scar tissue, and I STILL can’t listen to those two songs. I still don’t have the proper distance and at this point I never will.
So yes, Glitter & Doom has problems and I acknowledge them. But the music is great!
