Amy Ray’s second solo album, Prom, explores the dance between gender and sexuality, man and woman, youth and adulthood, authority and rebellion.

The setting is the South, both suburban and rural, where an undercurrent of whitewashed innocence and destructive value systems often hold the hierarchy together. These ten songs are full of characters from Amy’s past and present, including the disenfranchised kids from her high school days, loves lost to addiction and abuse, and the teenagers that now inhabit her southern rural neighborhood. She challenges many institutions including the Christian Right, but does not shrink from taking to task the alternative institutions of rebellion. Her almost edible, growling voice and innate storytelling renders an album that is pastoral but filled with firecrackers; life giving, but never resting.

Ray, one half of the Indigo Girls, will release this album, like her last, on her independent label, Daemon Records.