The Indigo Girls (Emily Saliers and Amy Ray) release their sixteenth studio album, One Lost Day, on June 2nd. Vast in its reach, but unified by the traveler’s sense of wonder, gratitude, and empathy, One Lost Day moves like a centrifuge, pulling the listener close to linger in the small moment, then casting out onto sonic currents. This is music of the past, present, and future — a boundlessness earned and not bestowed. One Lost Day has a feeling of music composed across time, not just in time. These songs are rooted in tradition and inventive, too: nourished in dark soils, leafing and luminous.
Memories here are more than specters; they are evolutions. The album maps the dim corridors of the heart and mind, lifting and landing the listener across state lines and continents. Place is a character rich in the universal specific: “Boots on a board in a barn” in “Texas Was Clean,” boys “under the bridge on the river shoals off GA 9″ in “Fishtails,” the New Orleans’ 1788 fire and the fence around the St. Louis cemetery in “Elizabeth,” the “sunny twist of Venice Chez Jay” in “Southern California is Your Girlfriend,” and the devil-spawned Angola prison in Louisiana where three black men sat wrongly convicted for decades, confined in solitary.

The Indigo Girls have spent thirty-five years performing together, produced fifteen albums (seven gold, four platinum, and one double platinum), earned a Grammy and seven Grammy nominations, and have toured arenas, festivals, and clubs the world over.