Indigo Girls: Love's Recovery (live version)
[purchase]
How appropriate I'm posting this on Valentine's Day - for our 30th wedding anniversary (we've now been married 33 1/2 years), I made my husband a mix CD of love songs that portrayed the "it ain't easy, baby... but it's ours" side of long-term relationships (with this tune included). Marriage is a series of One Day At a Times - one can't experience the joie de vivre without the sturm und drang... and I try never to take my good love for granted...
This is yet another song with just-back-from-Puerto-Rico memories - I remember seeing the Closer to Fine video and falling in love with the Indigo Girls: one fair, the other dark; one soft-voiced, the other urgent; one romantic, the other realistic. Their combined yin-yang, flip-sides-of-the-same-coin captivated me in a way I had not been the previous 4 1/2 years - I was smitten and of course had to buy their eponymous recording (on cassette at the time, I confess). What a treat to discover the rest of the album as fine (pun semi-intended) as the song that introduced me - I don't think it left my car's player for weeks (and as a then-suburban mom, I spent a *lot* of time in my car!).
From Everything2.com:
"Indigo Girls", their first major-label album, was released in February 1989. Guest artists on the album included REM, Hothouse Flowers and Luka Bloom. "Closer to Fine", the first single, peaked at #52 on the Billboard chart. The album reached as high as #22, remained in the chart for 35 weeks, and was certified gold in September 1989. Also that year, "Indigo Girls" won a Grammy Award in the category "Best Contemporary Folk Recording". The duo was also nominated for a Grammy Award in the category "Best New Artist".
It took me years to hear Love's Recovery references to same-sex relationships ("not content to bow and bent to the whims of culture that swoop like vultures eating us away... to our extinction"), although it certainly fit all the criteria I had for my 'til-death-do-us-part mix as well - we've watched so many of our friends allow themselves to succumb to the hardships, rather than choose to continue the work necessary to maintain and further growth and connection...
"Nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal, as specks of dust we're universal, to let this love survive would be the greatest gift we could give" - Happy V-Day!
