Daemon Records
2005
Prom
About This Album
Listeners who rallied around Stag, Amy Ray's 2001 collection of punk-kissed roots rock, will find Prom to be an equal if not better slice of "blue state" Americana swathed in a "red state" wrapper. The darker half of the Indigo Girls has tapped into her Southern past and created a record that manages to paint youth as a struggle against both colors of the political spectrum. It's hard to balance sweetness and anger, but Ray -- who always manages to find a kind of winsome humor somewhere in the middle -- makes it look easy, and her not-so-subtle mix of attitude, nostalgia, and compassion makes for a perfectly enlightening road trip of an album. Prom starts out strong with the one-two punch of "Put It Out for Good" ("The stadium lights were breaking through the bleachers/I spent all day pushing tissue roses into chicken wire") and "Driver Education" ("Films and drills and safety illustrations/The crushed cars of driver education"). Both cuts paint the kind of country high-school experience that fueled John Cougar Mellencamp to sing about "Jack and Diane" and Tom Petty to salute his "American Girl," but Ray's youth was more than just "Drinking with the older guys/Tripping by the lakeside.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,7 and 8)

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