Returning to Pangea during NYC Pride week!
In The Lesbian Songbook, singer-songwriter Matthew Brookshire interprets the songs of the Indigo Girls and more, and shares stories about his search for a queer identity in North Carolina in the early 90s. Heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, The Lesbian Songbook is a meditation on music, memory, Melissa Etheridge, and the Methodist Church.
Excerpts from The Lesbian Songbook:
A reporter once asked Amy Ray to name the one song she wished she’d written, and she said “Romeo & Juliet,” a song she’d performed for years in bars and clubs before finally recording it for an Indigo Girls record. The song was written and originally recorded by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. In it, he sings from the perspective of both Romeo and Juliet, and also sort of Tony and Maria from “West Side Story.” His performance is conversational, subdued. Amy Ray’s version is a desperate plea. A full-throated confession. She’s singing the same words as Knopfler, playing the same characters, but I heard it differently. It wasn’t the genderless you of her other songs. It was an open declaration of love to her Juliet.
Emily Saliers and her father Don wrote a book together called “A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice,” where they draw connections between secular and church music, or what they call the music of Saturday night and the music of Sunday morning. “Music can reach the part of human experience that is impossible to speak,” they write. “Anyone who struggles with love and suffering and searches for the mystery ends up singing…”