Amy Ray’s first solo disc, Stag, expanded the harder rocking side that she exhibited on occasion as one of the Indigo Girls. Her stunning new album Prom (Daemon) expands on that concept, with punk rock flair and some of the hardest hitting lyrics she’s ever written. The blistering “Put It Out For Good,” “Driver Education,” “Blender” and “Sober Girl,” put the current passel of punk rock poseur-boys to shame, while “Rural Faggot” is devastating in its bare bones honesty. Rent a tux, buy a corsage and attend Amy Ray’s Prom.

Gay & Lesbian Times: What criteria do you use, when you are writing songs, to determine whether a song is better suited to an Amy Ray solo disc or an Indigo Girls album?

Amy Ray: It’s hard to know anymore (laughs). I used to think it was partly subject matter, in that my solo stuff seems to be a little more intimate. More graphic, I guess. Intimate in an edgy way, and really singular in that it’s hard for two people to sing the songs that are on my solo records. It doesn’t make as much sense. Musically, I found that I enjoy writing very specifically acoustic music for Indigo Girls and sometimes some electric stuff spills over into there. If I’m writing an electric song that’s more bombastic or fast and loud, I automatically put it over in my solo pile these days. Some of them made it onto the last Indigo record because we were going in that direction. I still felt like I missed having a split, really doing a folk, acoustic, rootsy thing with the Indigo Girls, rather than trying to put us into the electric context all the time. I think we can do it; there are a couple of records where I think we’ve done it really well. There’s something about the opportunity to do the rootsy music that I don’t want to miss out on. I try to take advantage of the strong points of what I think the Indigo Girls are.

GLT: As with Stag, on which you were joined by The Butchies, Joan Jett, Kelly Hogan and Josephine Wiggs, to name a few, Prom has a stellar line-up of guest musicians, including return appearances by Kate Schellenbach (of Luscious Jackson fame) and Danielle Howle, as well as Jody Bleyle and Donna Dresch (of Team Dresch fame) and the band Nineteen Forty Five. What is involved in your process of choosing musicians with whom to record?

AR: It’s usually people that are really inspiring to me musically. People that I’ve wanted to play with, that I have some sort of shared musical context in common. I played with Nineteen Forty Five on the last (solo) record and I didn’t feel like I used them enough. I love them as a band; they’re definitely one of my favorites. I knew right after I finished Stag, that I wanted to bring them back and have them do a big chunk of the next record. I even thought about them doing the whole thing. I didn’t feel like I used Kate enough on the last record either. They were these two entities that I felt like I didn’t take advantage of the way I should have the last time around and I promised myself I would this time. Kate was playing with Jody out in L.A. and asked me if I wanted to get together with them and jam, way before I started this record. It felt really good. In my mind, I thought half the record would be them and the other half would be Nineteen Forty Five, which was different from Stag because it was a little more spread out among different bands. I just settled on those two. And then Donna and Danielle came into the picture later. I used Michelle Malone to do some guitar stuff. I filled in the pieces that I was missing after I had started tracking with both of those bands.

GLT: You make reference to gender in “Put It Out For Good” and “Blender” – which is a term that has been coming into popular use in recent years. What does it mean to you?

AR: I separate gender from sexuality usually. Your gender is different from who you want to sleep with, in other words. When I use the word gender, I mean it as each person has their own gender and it falls somewhere in the spectrum between male and female. I think some people are really far to one end or the other and some people feel that they are in the middle. I look at it as a self-identification issue and as something, in the context of queer rights and the queer movement and queer vernacular as being something that we should have been talking about for the last hundred years (laughs). It’s a really important part of who we are as a queer community and it’s one of the things that bridge us with the straight community. I think there are many straight people, sexuality wise, who probably feel ambiguous about their gender. It’s one place where we can connect and understand that everything is much more fluid than we think it is.

GLT: Prom also contains a recurring high school theme, as heard on “Put It Out For Good” and “Driver Education.” Are these songs based on your own experiences in combination with what you are seeing now in high school kids?

AR: Yes, it’s definitely both. Although I wouldn’t say that I’m in touch with what every high school thinks in every part of the country (laughs). It’s so different from one region to the next. It’s my little neck of the woods. For some reason this record became thematic around that time period. A lot of it references things that I went through and images that I remember from high school and I put it in the context of some high school experiences of kids I know now or things that I see on the news or that I read or kids that I talk to at shows. I probably fell into the trap a couple of times, but I didn’t want it to be too sentimental about back in the good old days when I was in high school (laughs). I think high school was a coming of age for me, more than college was. I’m more attached to the things I went through in high school and the teachers that I had. That was when I started singing and playing in clubs. That’s when Emily and I started the Indigo Girls and that’s when I started finding my political self. College was a really great time for me academically, but I was already playing music and I was already an activist and I was already gay (laughs). All of those things happened to me in high school. When I have a touchstone to talk about activism or politics or rebellion or identity, high school usually becomes that.

GLT: The song on Prom that I keep coming back to is “Rural Faggot.” You shine an unyielding light on homophobia, and by the time the song reaches its dramatic and ironic conclusion, you have rewarded the listener tenfold.

AR: I’m glad that you found that ending to be like that. The song was pretty dark and I didn’t intend it to be a hopeless song. It was meant to be like, “This is what you’re going to go through and it’s going to be all right.” But this is the process that is happening right now that you may not see. I wrote it from the rural area that I live in, and a couple of my neighbors and their kids and these boys that I’ve seen grow up over the last 12 years and become teenagers and then leave the house. Some of them are gay and some of them aren’t. Many of them went through a period of gay bashing and would tell me about it (laugh of disbelief), as if I would think it was funny. They knew I was gay and I don’t know why they thought I would think it was funny. They wanted to get approval from me for something that was obviously not something that I would agree with. They saw me as different, because I’m a gay woman, and these were all guys. They saw a real difference between gay women and gay men. That is a real hallmark of living in a rural area. In a rural area, you almost expect the flannel and the almost mannish style of dress. But if guys walk around with a purse, there’s just no place for that in a rural area (laughs). There’s no place for a man who is effeminate or for a man who isn’t effeminate, but is gay. It’s a really hard road, and that’s why I made it (the song) specifically about guys. It’s something I wanted to talk about because it’s something I see a lot where I live.

GLT: Every one of these songs – “Blender” and “Driver Education” to name a couple – rocks as energetically as say, the new Green Day, yet because of the Clear Channel stranglehold on the airwaves, they may never be heard by the mass audience they deserve.

AR: (laughs) They probably won’t.

GLT: As an artist who operates and records her own independent record label, how do you get beyond that?

AR: We just say we’re going to do college radio. We’re going to try to get it on a couple of rock stations. It probably won’t because I’m gay and I’m female and I’m 40, which is a big three strikes against me for rock and roll stations. Radio play is icing on the cake for me when I finish a record. The great part of it is feeling really proud of the experience of playing with Kate and Jody and Donna and Nineteen Forty Five, people that I really admire and I’m even nervous to play with at first. Just having gone through that process is a big deal to me. And then I get to go out and play the songs live; that’s the fun part, playing in clubs and having a band. The radio and the fact that it will never be a big record like Green Day, that’s life and that’s my choice. I choose to go down a certain path. I choose not to try to appear straight, when I’m gay, and to make a certain kind of music that is not as acceptable from women. I just hope that in the spirit of The Distillers or some of these great female-fronted bands, that radio would recognize some of it. It’s not just – there are a lot of women making great rock and punk music. Somebody’s got to break some ground and you hope you can help do it.

GLT: And finally, because of the album’s title, did you, in fact, attend your high school prom?

AR: Oh, yeah. I was very involved in high school (laughs). That’s what’s so weird. I was a real black sheep, but I was president of my class and I went to the prom, whether I had a date or not. I had a boyfriend for a few proms, and then, my senior year I had a girlfriend, but I didn’t take my girlfriend to the prom. It wasn’t that far along yet. I think we went “alone” and met up there. Yeah, I went, I was involved. I went to the football and basketball and baseball games. I played sports and was really active. It was still that high school time, where everything’s hard (laughs).