‘Galileo’: When Indigo Girls tackled the thorny issue of reincarnation
Where do we go when we die? While this is the sort of question you might expect to encounter while reading Plato, it’s not the sort of subject you can expect to gain answers to from a 1990s adult contemporary or indie folk hit.
I’m not saying that music of this ilk can’t be introspective or philosophical, but it’s hardly the place I’d go to for an insight into whether my soul will live on after I croak or if it will be eviscerated the moment I draw my last breath. If you wouldn’t quiz Bonnie Raitt on the meaning of life, then why should anyone think to turn to the Indigo Girls as a first port of call for musings on reincarnation?
Well, perhaps writing them off as an improbable source of wisdom is ironically unwise, because their 1992 hit ‘Galileo’ is perhaps one of the finest examples of a popular song attempting to scrape meaning from human existence.
While the song doesn’t necessarily take itself too seriously, the duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers manage to tap into some weighty lines of questioning on whether death is just an inevitable full stop that punctuates our lives, or if it provides a pathway into future existence in another form.
Those of us who aren’t considered great existentialist thinkers in the same league as the likes of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Adrian Chiles might ask questions about the afterlife in simple terms, such as whether we’re likely to be reincarnated as a cat or a flower, and according to Saliers, the catalyst for her wanting to explore these themes in a song was born from a similar discussion among friends.
In an interview with Songfacts, she revealed that being asked these very questions prompted her to come up with the idea for ‘Galileo’. “I wanted to write a song that was upbeat, that sort of took the whole subject sort of in a lighthearted way, even though I was thinking about it very seriously,” she claimed, before going on to reference moments in the song where she discusses the idea of souls being regenerated in order to improve existence over time. “It was kind of like taking a heavy subject and sort of having fun with it.”
However, this doesn’t necessarily lead us to any clearer reasons as to why the name of Galileo Galilei was attached to the song, since the majority of his ideas were rooted in scientific discovery rather than related to hypothesising about something that we can never truly discover the reality of. Despite this, Saliers would go on to reveal why she associated his name with these thoughts, giving more context to what was passing through her mind when writing such a philosophical song.
“I was thinking about him because he came up with such great truths,” the songwriter argued. “He was like this pinnacle of light and truth, and the church made him recant. So I was thinking, he’s a great role model for a truth seeker, and with reincarnation being a spiritual pursuit and its relationships to the church, I was just sort of lumping those things together.”
Of course, ‘Galileo’ hasn’t brought us any closer to truly understanding the meaning of our existence and purpose, but if we’re willing to accept it on a surface level, then Indigo Girls perhaps found the perfect way to distil all of the anxieties and insecurities we have about our mortality into a pop song, and may have prompted us to earnestly ask questions that we wouldn’t normally ponder outside of a drunken 2am chat.
