How the Indigo Girls Brought Barbie ‘Closer to Fine’
In Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, where every day is the best day ever, pop stars like Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX provide a bouncy soundtrack as the live-action dolls go about their cheery, blissful lives.
That is, until Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical” Barbie cues a record scratch with a rare and shocking existential query: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” To resolve this disruption to her otherwise perfect life, she hops in her pink Corvette and belts along to a track filled with strummed acoustic guitars and close harmonies. “There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line,” she sings with a smile, before thrusting a manicured pointer in the air.
Barbie’s song of choice on her way to the Real World is the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” The Indigo Girls, a folk duo from Georgia who have released 15 studio albums since 1987, featured “Closer to Fine” as the opening track on their self-titled 1989 LP.
Emily Saliers wrote the song after she and her fellow singer and guitarist, Amy Ray, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta and were regularly playing a local bar called Little Five Points.
