In Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, the place each day is the very best day ever, pop stars like Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX present a bouncy soundtrack because the live-action dolls go about their cheery, blissful lives. That’s, till Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical” Barbie cues a document scratch with a uncommon and stunning existential question: “Do you guys ever take into consideration dying?”

To resolve this disruption to her in any other case good life, she hops in her pink Corvette and belts alongside to a observe stuffed with strummed acoustic guitars and shut harmonies. “There’s a couple of reply to those questions, pointing me in a crooked line,” she sings with a smile, earlier than thrusting a manicured pointer within the air.

Barbie’s music of selection on her option to the Actual World is the Indigo Women’ “Nearer to Fantastic.”

The Indigo Women, a folks duo from Georgia who’ve launched 15 studio albums since 1987, featured “Nearer to Fantastic” because the opening observe on their self-titled 1989 LP. Emily Saliers wrote the music after she and her fellow singer and guitarist, Amy Ray, graduated from Emory College in Atlanta and had been often taking part in a neighborhood bar referred to as Little 5 Factors. It turned a staple of the Women’ stay present that unfold thanks to school radio play and a gap slot on tour with one other Georgia band, R.E.M.

It’s a music about looking for, Saliers mentioned by telephone this month: “I searched right here and I searched there, and if I simply attempt to take it simple and get a bit bit of data and knowledge from completely different sources, then I’m going to be nearer to advantageous.”

“Nearer to Fantastic,” with its four-chord verses, octave-jumping refrain and barely inscrutable lyrics, has been a staple of dorm room singalongs, karaoke excursions and automotive rides for years, and it’s the Indigo Women’ most identifiable tune. “Indigo Women,” their first album for a serious label, went double platinum and received a Grammy.

“It’s acquired an easy melody and very easy refrain, and the refrain repeats,” Saliers mentioned. “Once you get to a refrain of a music that you just’re into and you may simply sing it on the prime of your lungs, I believe simply structurally, melodically, it’s actually a street journey music and I believe that’s why you see it in these sorts of scenes.”

Ray mentioned “Nearer to Fantastic” represents 80 p.c of the band’s licensing, however the duo are usually informed little or no about how their music might be used. They don’t permit commercials, however have had profitable soundtrack and onscreen placements in movies like “Philadelphia” and TV reveals together with “The Workplace” and “Clear.” In 1995, the duo starred as Whoopi Goldberg’s home band within the film “Boys on the Aspect.”

“I believe it was actually vital at the moment for us to achieve extra folks,” Ray mentioned in a telephone interview. “These sorts of issues are simply invaluable for an artist.”

The Indigo Women have an identical hope for “Barbie,” already a worldwide phenomenon with powerhouse advertising and marketing and intergenerational model recognition. A “Nearer to Fantastic” cowl by Brandi and Catherine Carlile seems on the expanded version of the film’s soundtrack.

“I all the time felt that music was actually defining of who they had been in that period,” Brandi Carlile mentioned in an interview. “That, much more than lesbians, what they had been was intellectuals. They had been providing up a life past the life that younger folks knew. And it’s a really younger particular person’s music,” she added. “It’s about looking for out greater than you thought you believed.”

Nonetheless, given little context in an preliminary name from their supervisor, Saliers mentioned she was nervous. “I didn’t know who was directing it or something, and I used to be like, ‘Oh, that is about Barbie? We higher test to ensure that is kosher,’” she recalled. “However because it turned out, it’s within the palms of Greta and it’s simply this superb factor that occurred. It was a whole shock to me and Amy.”

Ray referred to as it a present: “It’s simply completely great that they’re utilizing it.”

“Nearer to Fantastic” recurs within the movie 3 times and seems in its official trailer, however it’s been recirculating in popular culture organically, too. In March, a video of the comic Tig Notaro singing it on a celebration bus alongside a crew that included Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Sarah Paulson blew up on-line. The band’s newest album, “Lengthy Look,” arrived in 2020, they usually have been on a tour (sometimes closing with the tune) that touches down in Eire and Britain subsequent month.

“You don’t think about a folks lesbian duo to be on this hot-pink Barbie film,” mentioned Notaro, who has been a fan since seeing the “Nearer to Fantastic” video on MTV’s different rock present “120 Minutes.” “Form of simply selfishly and personally, I really feel like, ‘Yeah, we had been onto one thing all these years,’ you realize? It’s validating. Clearly it’s been an enormous hit ceaselessly, however that is so subsequent degree.”

“Once I hear a music like that,” she added, “it looks like simply my chest bursts open with pleasure and hope.”

The Indigo Women are additionally the topic of a documentary, “It’s Solely Life After All,” directed by Alexandria Bambach, which premiered at Sundance in January. The movie serves as a reminder of how Saliers and Ray, each brazenly queer and from non secular Southern backgrounds, endured scrutiny and prejudice as “Nearer to Fantastic” put them in an early highlight.

“For the longest time I all the time felt we had been the brunt of lesbian jokes in type of a lowest widespread denominator,” Saliers says within the documentary. Ray echoed these sentiments within the movie, saying, “It appeared like essentially the most derogatory factor you can be is a feminine homosexual singer-songwriter.”

Critics would confer with them as too earnest or overly pretentious, in the event that they lined them in any respect. The duo had been used to comedian impact on “Saturday Night time Dwell” and “South Park”; even Ellen DeGeneres employed them as a punchline after her character got here out on nationwide tv on her sitcom “Ellen.”

“That point interval that actually was simply so essential of girls — of queer ladies, of girls that didn’t current the way in which {that a} patriarchal system wished them to,” Bambach mentioned. “I believe it’s a extremely essential time for us to be wanting again at, you realize, simply issues that we scoffed or laughed off or mentioned had been OK.”

Brandi Carlile mentioned after watching the duo take so many photographs through the years, the “Barbie” second is further candy. “The true injustice of how the Indigo Women have been handled all through these previous couple of many years is that they’ve been used as type of this canine whistling acceptable option to form of parody lesbians, and I all the time felt destabilized by it,” she mentioned. “And so seeing one thing like this occur for them on this scale and watching them and that iconic type of life-affirming music make its option to new ears might be one of many coolest issues I’ve seen in years.”

The singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt, 29, discovered the Indigo Women in highschool however additional embraced them in faculty, when she mentioned their music gave her the boldness to write down private and descriptive lyrics from her experiences as a homosexual lady.

“Illustration in tradition is the largest, the one most vital factor I believe for folks to completely embrace themselves,” she mentioned. “You want all these completely different examples of who you’re allowed to be, and the reply is anyone — you’re allowed to be anyone.”

Pruitt referred to as “Nearer to Fantastic” the “northern star” of songwriting. “It’s unimaginable that it’s having a resurgence in 2023” in “a franchise that I grew up associating with excessive heteronormativity,” she mentioned. “I like how now they’re rebranding it as one thing extremely inclusive.”

Bambach, who found the Indigo Women throughout singalongs led by counselors at youth summer time camp, noticed “Barbie” on opening weekend in Atlanta and mentioned there have been screams of pleasure and recognition when “Nearer to Fantastic” performed onscreen.

“It’s very gratifying to assume that there’s one thing that this very advantageous director noticed within the music that had cultural relevance on this day and time,” Saliers mentioned. However above all, she appreciates that point has allowed listeners to step again and recognize the band’s music as merely music.

“We’re lastly allowed to simply be us,” Saliers mentioned. “I suppose we’ve caught round lengthy sufficient and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s simply Amy and Emily.’ We not are the brunt of a joke and we’re flourishing in sure methods by way of this relevancy, which is gratifying. It’s unusual, you realize, to observe tradition change and transfer — and it actually has modified for us.”