Stream It Or Skip It: ‘It’s Only Life After All’ on Netflix, A Documentary The Influential Folk Rock Duo The Indigo Girls

For the 2023 documentary It’s Only Life After All, now streaming on Netflix, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach and Indigo Girls members Amy Ray and Emily Saliers focus on the duo’s lives as performers and people over the Grammy-winning folk-rock duo’s 40 years together. That’s a long time, and It’s Only Life doesn’t approach it in linear music doc fashion, instead drawing on thoughtful new interviews with Ray and Saliers where they touch on the themes that have defined Indigo Girls’ music and career: individual acceptance, shared experience, the visibility of women and the LGBTQ community, and an always lit spark of activism. Footage of Indigo Girls in performance appears throughout It’s Only Life After All, both of the classics you know – “Closer to Fine,” “Galileo” – and selections drawn from a rich cross-section of material straight out of Amy Ray’s personal archives.      

IT’S ONLY LIFE AFTER ALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “One thing that was different about me and Amy, we had acoustic guitars, but we had pickups in our guitars and we liked to plug them in and turn them up.” The better to accompany Indigo Girls shows, which It’s Only Life After All often captures in full singalong mode. But Emily Saliers is also making a larger point about how they were never easy to classify. “A folkish new female duo,” Kurt Loder says in a vintage MTV News broadcast. “Not folk music for wimps” goes another news clip. “We didn’t suggest it,” Amy Ray offers in Only Life. “But people thought of us as kind of – is there a category that’s lesbian Christian rock?”

Indigo Girls themselves were as surprised as anyone when their 1989 hit “Closer to Fine” popped up in Barbie in 2023. But to be mildly subversive has always been a part of their music, just as much as an earnest intensity that’s well-documented. (It’s Only Life After All reserves an entire segment for Ray and Saliers to clap back at a 1989 critical pan in the New York Times. “Women who are outspoken and sort of earnest, for rock critics, that’s a hard one, you know?”) Though they are interviewed separately, Ray and Saliers have the familial ability to finish each other’s thoughts, memories, and anecdotes. And as It’s Only LIfe continues in unframed fashion, letting its subjects riffle through their four-decade history together as musicians and friends, the doc takes on a friendly, approachable air. It’s the personalities they’ve established – Ray is forthright, funny, and admits she’s never suffered a fool, while Saliers is sincere and more cerebral – but expanded upon, and tempered by age and experience.

For as pushy as the media has been over the years regarding Ray and Saliers’ respective sexual identities, It’s Only Life After All is the opposite, offering each woman the space to talk about it in their own words. Growing up, Ray says, “I definitely had gender dysphoria, but I had no language for that.” And Saliers reflects on how her decision to come out in the early 90s is reflective of a personal life she remains protective of. The doc also delves into Ray and Saliers’ dedication to activism, and mixes gentle reenactments with real-life fan testimonials to portray the emotional reach of Indigo Girls’ music. “The person sending their friend a mixtape and them sharing that song – the sharing of that made it more powerful, and that happened a lot with our music.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Last time a documentary had this much access to Indigo Girls was director Kathlyn Horan’s One Lost Day, which appeared in 2015 alongside the album of the same name. (Horan is a producer for It’s Only Life After All.) And Joan Baez, who’s performed with Indigo Girls and gets props here as one of their mentors, was the subject of a deeply-told doc of her own, 2023’s  I Am A Noise.   

Performance Worth Watching: Preserve physical media! Shout-out to Amy Ray for unearthing stacks of Indigo Girls-related videotapes in many antiquated/archaic formats – “I used to basically carry a camera around everywhere we went” – and a double shout-out to Past Woody Harrelson, who surfaces twice in all of this Indigo Girls B-roll.   

Memorable Dialogue: All the time, people say Indigo Girls’ music changed their life. More than one person says that even in this documentary. And while Amy Ray respects those feelings and doesn’t wish to diminish them, she also characterizes her own opinion as a little more mystical. “I’m talking about synchronicity and like critical mass. People feeling the same response to that song at the same time, and you just having this sense that you’re being held by something.”

Sex and Skin: The sex lives of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers are a topic throughout It’s Only Life After All, just as the subject has followed them throughout their careers, whether or not they even wished for it to be a focus. “We’ve just been so hemmed in,” Saliers says of society and heteronormative expectations. “Binary systems hemmed in by gender, sexuality. They’re constructs. Like all these things, they’re human constructs. Some people might want us to identify a certain way, and others may not care, and others may want us to say queer, but – we all are who we are.”

“What it really is about is just loving and accepting each other for who we are completely.” 

Our Take: It’s Only Life After All often has the feel of opening a creaky old closet door and letting the mementos and memories pile out. Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met as teenagers (“She was the other girl who played guitar”), were performing as Indigo Girls by college, and got signed to Epic out of Little Five Points, their home club in Atlanta, all the way back in 1988. There’s a lot to reflect on; that metaphorical cabinet’s holding a lot of stuff. Which is why it’s great how It’s Only Life lives up to the lyrical reference of its title. As much as they’re just telling us how it all went down, Ray and Saliers are offered real space to reconsider their past selves. So we get Saliers analyzing who she was as a young songwriter – “I see this, like, little english major nerd; who fucking writes about the Lady of Shallot?” – and Ray allowing that her various onstage tantrums were self-centered and musician brain-y. 

Just as often, those reflective moments tie into one of the larger themes of Indigo Girls’ music and career. “I was also a young woman in an environment that was incredibly patriarchal and incredibly patronizing,” Ray says of those early days. It’s Only Life After All returns to all the moments that mattered throughout the years. But it also finds ways to illustrate how issues of visibility and empowerment are still with us today, it’s still able to locate the power center of Indigo Girls as they’ve put out records and played shows across four decades. “I just get washed over with the energy of togetherness.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The duo’s superfans will want to see and hear every bit of the stacks of recordings, old videotapes, and pages of handwritten notes for songs in Amy Ray’s physical archive of Indigo Girls stuff. For them, the benefit of It’s Only Life After All is in its dedication to including as much of that ephemera as possible. But there’s a bigger, more rewarding story here, too. One of acceptance. For 40 years, Indigo Girls have explored what it means to have more than one answer to these questions pointing us all in a crooked line.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.