The Indigo Girls - Heartache Central Time - Various Cover Versions (1982-1987)

A couple of days ago, I posted an album containing the best Indigo Girls original songs from 1982 to 1987, the years before they hit it big. This album spans those exact same years, except all the song are cover versions. And, like that other album, all the songs are performed acoustically.

The two Indigo Girls Emily Saliers and Amy Ray are excellent singers and harmonizers, and I love Emily's tasteful lead guitar work. So it's no surprise that their cover versions are always excellent. The problem I had with making this album is audio quality. Neither this nor the other album I've posted would have been remotely possible had it not been for the website www.lifeblood.net, which is an incredible repository of Indigo Girls music, all free for download. But even with that site, there are only a limited number of bootlegs from before the duo hit it big in 1989, and nearly all of them are middling audience concert recordings.

The first five songs here come from a homemade cassette called "Tuesday's Children" the Indigo Girls made back in 1982, when they were still in high school. It's basically an entire album of cover songs, with only two originals. However, the sound quality is merely good, not excellent, and the duo was still growing into their musical talent, so I only picked what I considered the best performances. I also tried to pick lesser known songs. The covers I left behind are: "Carolina on My Mind," "Her Town Too," "Rock Me on the Water," "Father and Son," "Come Down in Time," "It's Too Late," "You've Got a Friend," and "A Heart in New York." IF you like the music on this album and want more along similar lines, then consider getting the rest of that album from the Lifeblood website.

The rest of the songs here are from concert bootlegs. Luckily, there were a couple of early concerts recorded in soundboard quality, incredibly enough, and i used those as much as I could. I would have been able to make this a double album of covers, except there were many songs I had to let go because the only recordings of them were dodgy sounding audience bootlegs.

However, from time to time, I got lucky. A few of the songs here, such as "Girls Talk," "Love the One You're With," and "Drift Away" do come from dodgy sounding bootlegs, but for whatever reason, on those particular songs the sound quality was better. For instance with "Girls Talk," that particular bootleg was marred by a constant murmur of people talking over the music, but that talking pretty much disappeared for the duration of that one song. Perhaps it was a case that the more lively strummed songs quieted the crowd some, and also ended up being recorded better than the more quiet, fingerpicking-styled songs.

Ultimately, the sound quality here is variable, but in my opinion, what I included is all very listenable. And all of it is unreleased, or very nearly so ("Finlandia" is from a 1985 EP that quickly went out of print). Covers of "Finlandia" and "All Along the Watchtower" have been released by the Indigo Girls, but those are different versions, performed years later.

01 The House at Pooh Corner (Indigo Girls)
02 Danny's Song (Indigo Girls)
03 Junkie's Lament (Indigo Girls)
04 Dancing Shoes (Indigo Girls)
05 Long Ago and Far Away (Indigo Girls)
06 Finlandia (Indigo Girls)
07 Drift Away (Indigo Girls)
08 The Weakness in Me (Indigo Girls)
09 Malachy's (Indigo Girls)
10 Girls Talk (Indigo Girls)
11 Heartache Central Time (Indigo Girls)
12 Love the One You're With (Indigo Girls)
13 Killing Time (Indigo Girls)
14 All Along the Watchtower (Indigo Girls)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15130026/TIngidoGs_1982-1987_HeartacheCentralTimeVariousCoverVersions_atse.zip.html

I've had a heck of a time finding good Indigo Girls photos for cover art. But I finally found a keeper. This one dates all the way back to 1982, back when they were briefly known as the "B" Band. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it.