As the dark-haired half of the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray also authors much of the folk-rock duo’s darker, edgier material—Chrissie Hynde to Emily Salier’s Judy Collins—and it’s that voluble, volatile personality mix that’s helped keep the Indigos fresh even after two decades in the business. On both her 2001 solo release Stag and the new Prom, Ray’s punk roots are further revealed. It’s no accident that among the players on Prom are Donna Dresch and Jody Bleyle (from Team Dresch) and garage terrorists Nineteen Forty-Five. The title is no accident, either: Prom is an autobiographical journey as seen through the eyes of a girl who came of age in the South during the ’70s (specifically, in Decatur, Ga.) and had to grapple with her gayness under the cruelly withering glare of high school. As images of pep rallies and driver education classes flit by the ghosts of friends and acquaintances—old crushes, teenage runaways, victims of abuse, sexually confused gay bashers—also appear, Ray weaving their experiences into hers with nuance and empathy.

The narrative tone of Prom is established with opening cut “Put It Out For Good,” a Tom Petty-meets-Clash anthem in which an “overachiever of the wrong persuasion” hangs out with fellow misfits (“punks, queers, freaks, smokers”) yet senses there has to be a life beyond the limits imposed by parents, teachers and locale. “I got this spark, I got to feed it something,” howls Ray, “or put it out for good.” Impossible to resist, it deserves to be the defiant anthem of the summer. As a matter of fact, while a certain segment of the American electorate might take umbrage at some of the album’s direct language and in-your-face sentiments and try to slap a “QC: Queer Content” advisory sticker on the front of the CD, I’d say a more appropriate label would be “PD: Proudly Defiant.”

Ray spoke from her home in Dahlonega, Ga., a rural spot near the North Georgia Mountains that was once a gold-mining town (roughly an hour north of Atlanta) about Prom, politics and her indie label Daemon—the latter, incidentally, currently celebrating its 15th year.

As a straight white male who grew up in a tiny textile town in the South during the early ’70s, I have to say that much of Prom brings back memories of being a teenage misfit. Change a few lyrics and “Put It Out For Good” could almost be my story.
I really started the record when I wrote “Put It Out For Good.” After that song, I went, “All right—I’m gonna start a solo record!” [laughs] Because for me, yeah, it set the tone that I wanted to set. I didn’t know I was gonna write that song; it just came out. And then I was like, “I’m gonna follow that direction, this feeling.”

It captures that weight, I think, that comes with being a teenager. The fact that it’s also contemporary with references to punks as well as the freaks gives it a real universal quality. Is it hard to write a song from a personal context and find a way to push it into that larger realm?
I thought those images were universal. At least to me, like when I think about my friends, or my sister and the way she’s talked about high school. When I really started that song I was making some notes in my journal after [the Indigo Girls] had played this show. A cousin of mine died, she was 15, and we played at this high school as a benefit to raise money to build a garden in her memory. All these high school bands, these punk and metal bands, came and played, and it was great. Afterwards, we were all hanging around outside and all the kids were smoking and being cool and doing what you do, and I just looked and thought, “Oh my god. Nothing changes.” [laughs] Practically the same haircuts!

That’s where your opening lines come from: “I hear the rock show winding down at the high school/Kids out on the sidewalk waiting for a ride/All the punks and the queers and the freaks and the smokers.”
Yeah. It started with that. And then I just thought about float parties and homecoming parades and that thing about where people are talking about you behind your back—and I just wanted to empower anybody now who’s going through that. “You don’t have to be friends with those people. You can always turn a bad situation into a good situation and take all that energy, all that stuff you have that’s untapped, and just be, you know, a superpower. Because that’s how I felt. You know those scenes in West Side Story where the gangs are all itchy and everything? I felt like that the whole time I was there.

Do your solo records allow you to express yourself more fully than doing Indigo Girls records?
It’s a different voice. It’s something that’s a little more singular, I think. Whereas it’s harder to have a duo singing something like “Put It Out For Good.” It’s like the difference between when Tom Petty does something and when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young do something. Certain songs are just singular, and while it’s great to have harmony and everything, sometimes you want to hear one voice expressing itself.

Tom Petty comes to mind when I was listening to this record.
He’s very influential to me. I don’t know how much I sound like him, but I love him. I wish I could write like him!

Well, in your narratives, for example: I was thinking about Petty’s Wildflowers, and how on that album he became even more narrative than he usually is, whether writing in characters or autobiographically. I know that on Prom you are telling stories about yourself as a teenager, about some of the people you grew up with. It seems like much more personal album than Stag.
Stag was autobiographical, but this one’s dealing with a lot more story lines—of people that I know and relating an experience I saw them go through or had with them or in some way was touched by. Definitely “Pennies On The Track” is sort of a tribute to a couple of girls, and one girl in particular that I knew who was being abused. I was very young when I found out about it. She told me and it was my first exposure to sexual abuse, what it meant. So [the song] was kind of like a tribute to her and her ability to survive.

In the South, so much of that stuff was never talked about. I don’t remember ever hearing about something like sexual abuse when I was growing up.
I didn’t hear anything, either! I just remember getting a phone call in the middle of the night from this kid who was 13 years old. I was 13 myself. She was telling me what’s been happening, and I didn’t know what to do.

What is it about the South that makes the teenage experience this alien type of terrifying endurance test? I know being a teen anywhere is tough, but still ...
I know that when I talk to, say, kids from the Northwest, they go through something, too. It’s different from place to place. But I think what we went through in the South in the public schools, in the era of suburbia, and that sort of denial and violence about so many things, is that we were going through all of this, these things, and we didn’t know what to call any of it, you know? We had no articulation. And that’s sort of the difference. When I talk to kids now, they have references to sexuality and gender, and they talk about it. Even kids in rural areas—and in rural areas, it’s tougher. The kids where I live have a language, but they’re still really oppressed, and they’re almost oppressed by their own language, in a way, because it makes it more complicated.

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