Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Beauty Queen Sister - Indigo Girls

Beauty Queen Sister - Indigo Girls
3:11
Beauty Queen Sister, 2011
Written by Amy Ray

This fast-paced title track, one of Amy Ray's best, reflects on a rough but free-spirited Southern childhood rendered in vivid, affectionate detail. Ray sketches a world of bikers, tattoos, and back-road survival with quick, evocative strokes ("Mama's got a friend named Monkeyman / With a two-seater bike / And a tattoo stand"), grounding the song in lived experience rather than nostalgia. A passing reference to The Outsiders ("Pony watched Johnny die / Nothing gold can stay") reinforces the sense of youthful reckoning and hard-earned awareness.  The overall theme of this song is one of loss ("But every day I gained, another fell apart.") but leavened by hope.  Cut live in the studio, the track shimmies with soulful momentum, buoyed by the Shadowboxers' warm, insistent backing refrain: "Hang on tight."   

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