Indigo Girls To Close 2008 PrideFest
March 19 Town Hall Meeting To Offer More Details About 21st Annual LGBT Festival
Milwaukee - For the second year in a row, PrideFest will close its three-day festival with an act that has strong appeal with the women's community. The festival will present the popular folk rock act Indigo Girls on the Miller Lite Main Stage on Sunday, June 8. Organizers believe that  as icons of the LGBT rights movement, the Indigo Girls will bring a rousing close to PrideFest's celebration of LGBT culture and community. Veteran rocker Joan Jett's appearance set an all-time Sunday attendance record at last year's PrideFest.
  The announcement, made initially on festival media partner "88Nine" WYMS-FM March 17, also served to promote the festival's planned town hall meeting set for Wednesday, March 19, beginning at 6 PM at the Hillside Family Resource Center, 1452 N. 7th Street here.
  With hits like "Closer To Fine," "Hammer and a Nail," "Galileo" and "Shame On You," the Indigo Girls are known for legendary live shows that inevitably turn into massive group sing-alongs. They also carry the respect of the peers in the music industry, having won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording and receiving a nomination for Best New Artist.
  Twenty years after they began releasing records as Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have politely declined the opportunity to mellow with age. You could say it's just not in their constitution: devoted environmental and social justice activists, the Girls have spent their entire career pushing boundaries on a variety of fronts. Why stop now?
  Both Saliers and Ray agree that Despite Our Differences, the tenth Indigo Girls studio album, is a record defined by change and newness. On the business side of things, it's the first CD they've released since signing a new record deal with Hollywood Records earlier this year. And on the creative side, it's one they made far outside the confines of their established Georgia comfort zone; Differences was recorded over a speedy month-and-a-half this spring at veteran producer Mitchell Froom's home studio in Santa Monica, California.
  The result is perhaps the freshest-sounding album in the Indigos' ample discography. Differences pulses with warm acoustic guitars; crisp, tasty keyboards (played by Froom and longtime band member Carol Isaacs); and, of course, the singers' trademark intertwined vocals. Guest appearances from two Indigo Girls fans, Brandi Carlile and Pink (returning the favor the Girls did her when they performed and sang on "Dear Mr. President" from Pink's album I'm Not Dead), "inject the record with this inspiring energy," Saliers says. There's an understated immediacy to the music that evokes the deep-rooted chemistry of the artists' live show, which Saliers admits was part of what she and Ray were after. "Amy and I had learned the songs," she explains, "and we just wanted to go in there and cut them with the rhythm section. Mitchell's not an overproducer - he wants the song to come alive."
  For more information about this year's PrideFest, visit the festival website at: www.pridefest.com