Saturday night will see a lot of tired protesters. Some will be in New York City, some will be in Cleveland, some will be half-way around the world and some will be in Finney Chapel listening to Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, The Indigo Girls, sing out for peace and social justice.
“It’s a good way to unite those who couldn’t make it to New York or another city for an organized protest that day,” said senior Rebecca Bodonyi, who has been instrumental in bringing the acoustic duo to campus.
“I’ve wanted to do a benefit concert for a long time, but that didn’t work out,” she added, “My goal was more to do awareness raising.” Thus, the Concert for Peace idea was born.
The Indigo Girls, who released their first album in 1989, have been activists as long as they have been musicians. They have been vocal about gun control, nuclear waste dumping, the death penalty and LGBT issues. Most recently, they have spoken out for peace.
“I wanted to frame the event positively as opposed to an ‘anti’ or ‘no war’ message,” Bodonyi said. “While I agree that we should be against war in Iraq, I felt that it was time to celebrate peace and the kind of world that we envision rather than focusing on this event that we want to avoid.”
Bodonyi, who is co-chair of the Oberlin Folk Music Club, appealed to the student union programming board to bring the Indigo Girls to campus.
Many students had requested the act in the past, but the Girls had never been available before now.
Senior Lily Matini, the board’s talent coordinator, said she was pleased to be able to bring the Girls to campus because “they can really cross boundaries to hit the crowd on a personal level and remind us why we’re at a school like Oberlin.”
Matini predicts that the student union will sell all 1200 tickets for the show.
“This is why we need to bring big names to campus,” she said, “I mean the people that you have [on] CD, you know who they are, you’ve been listening to them since junior high. I think everyone should see at least one show like that before they graduate.”
The Indigo Girls went from lesser-known folk musicians in 1989 to in-demand artists in 1992, when their platinum album Rites of Passage was released.
Their 2003 tour kicks off after the release of their ninth full-length album, Become You, which combines Ray and Saliers’s song-writing with an eclectic range of instruments. Between them they bring four guitars, a mandolin, a harmonica and a bouzouki to the stage.
Puerto-Rican born Ani Cordero of Atlanta and her Latin-influenced indie band, Cordero, will open for the Indigo Girls. Cordero released their album Lamb Lost in the City on Ray’s record label, Daemon, last fall. Saturday will be their 5th performance with the Indigo Girls.
When asked what could be expected from this concert experience, Matini said, “People are going to be crying and screaming and it’s going to be a typical, kick-ass, Oberlin experience.”
Finney. Saturday, Feb. 13 at 8 p.m. $13 OCID, $22 general admission. Tickets available at Wilder Front Desk and at the door.