These songs were prompted by my finding out about It’s Only Life After All, a new documentary about Indigo Girls, musicians from Atlanta who seem to have found exactly the amount of success that they wanted. (And they deserve it; they’re awesome, and I’m glad to see they’re still finding new listeners with stuff like the Barbie movie).
But that reminded me of Follow For Now, a band from Atlanta who should’ve been so much bigger. I listened to their one album constantly and still have most of it committed to memory. I spent so much of the early 90s driving around Athens and Atlanta blasting it at full volume. In a just universe, they would’ve been as popular as Fishbone.
Their album isn’t available on Apple Music, but I was happy to find a video that I didn’t know existed, for their song “Evil Wheel.”
I’m glad that the video has some live footage, because they were phenomenal in person. I only got to see them live once, and it was as wild as raucous as you’d expect, but also overwhelmingly inclusive. I might be revealing myself to be a white liberal stereotype, but any time I went inside the perimeter in Atlanta, I tried to be hyper-aware of whether I was invading spaces that weren’t meant for me. The crowd at the Follow For Now show (which if I remember correctly was in Little Five Points) basically treated the whole idea as irrelevant.
Which makes sense in retrospect, since there was nothing exclusionary about the band’s content. At the start of this post, I was going to say that they had nothing in common with Indigo Girls apart from Atlanta, but that’s not quite true: they both put an emphasis on socially conscious lyrics and activism.
The highlight of the album is their phenomenal cover of Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero.” If over the next couple of weeks, you happen to see a white-bearded old man driving slowly around Burbank in a mid-sized electric SUV, head-banging as if he were in the mosh pit of an early 90s music video, you know which song is to blame.