Opinion | Why the Indigo Girls Are So Popular Right Now

Music is, pace Proust, the most reliable engine of nostalgia. But I’ve never had much use for nostalgia, especially for my chaotic childhood. Nostalgia, it always seemed to me, required a sort of amnesia, a belief that things were somehow better in the gauzy past. But as I get older, I’ve come to see that nostalgia is not just about looking back at good times. It can also be a remembering of the exquisite pleasure of longing, of anticipation of the life you want so badly, of the self you will make of the materials you collect along the way.

The Indigo Girls first spoke to me in 1989, when their breakout self-titled album was released. Like a lot of Gen Xers, I had my musical tastes formed, for better or worse, by the preferences of my boomer parents, a limited but rich aural diet of the LPs my parents happened to own — the astonishing cycle of Stevie Wonder albums from the early 1970s, “Blood on the Tracks,” Steely Dan, the Sugarhill Gang. And “Rumours,” obviously. Lots and lots of “Rumours.”

Then in the mid-1980s, I violently rejected their music in the early stirrings of adolescence, first for teeny-bopper crushes like George Michael and Terence Trent D’Arby, then graduated to the new stars of hip-hop (Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul) and finally to modern rock — R.E.M., the Sugarcubes and, above all, Jane’s Addiction, a Los Angeles postpunk band whose frontman, Perry Farrell, was angling to be my generation’s Jim Morrison.

In 1990 my life was abruptly turned upside down. We moved half a world away, to Ghana, where I knew not one single soul. I could bring only one suitcase, and somehow “Indigo Girls” was one of a handful of CDs that made the cut. I had a few of my other favorites, but for some reason, I kept reaching for that album. It became my companion in a lonely, strange and confusing time. As I’ve listened again, more than 30 years later, I realize that what these women were telling me was this: It was going to be OK. All the pain, the confusion, the loneliness — I’d figure it out. As the song says, “It’s only life, after all.”