Guiding Lights

The Indigo Girls inspired "music nerd girl'' Becky Warren. Now the singer-songwriter is opening for them.

Becky Warren is living the dream.

Growing up in Atlanta, she got her first guitar in 1991— and the first tunes she taught herself to play on it were the songs of the Indigo Girls.

Warren, now an Americana singer-songwriter in her own right, will open for the duo when they appear at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on May 5.

“I spent a lot of time in school feeling awkward and lonely and weird—the kid who was absolutely obsessed with music that most of the other kids weren’t listening to,” she says on The Bluegrass Situation website. “The Indigo Girls showed me there was a place in the future where a music nerd girl from Atlanta could fit in great. And they taught me a hell of a lot about songwriting.”

Did they ever. Warren’s first album, War Surplus, is a lauded, inventive, semi-autobiographical examination of post-traumatic stress disorder (she was married to an Iraq war vet). Her most recent album, Undesirable, was inspired by her conversations with street corner vendors about their struggles in a marginal existence.

You can see how she’d fit in with Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, whose activism on behalf of women’s equality and native Americans, among other social causes, has fueled their creativity. Friends since childhood and musical partners since adolescence, they met in grade school while growing up in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur, sang in the school choir together as high school students – and supplemented their musical education by getting fake ID’s so they could perform together in bars.

Always on the lookout for new projects, they have begun performing with symphony orchestras of late, and last year released an album, Indigo Girls Live with the University of Colorado Symphony Orchestra. They’ve performed with symphonies elsewhere on this tour but wanted to team up with Warren for the Orlando date.

They have released nine albums with major record labels over the past three decades, featuring fan favorites such as Closer To Fine, Galileo, Least Complicated and The Wood Song. Saliers and Ray continue to record, separately and as a duo, on their own IG recording company.

For ticket information to Sunday’s concert, click here.