Indigo Girls / Indigo Girls (Expanded Edition) / 1989
Secure Yourself
solemn, incantatory, consoling but shadowed by violence
A hymn-like meditation on death and spiritual release, built around a chant-like refrain that treats dying as a kind of fastening-in for a journey rather than an ending. The verses describe a suffering body being let go while the chorus insists on surrender to something larger, and the song closes by widening that surrender from a single addressee to a collective 'we'.
mortality and letting go faith versus doubt suffering and release transcendence of the body collective salvation
Who's speaking
A narrator addresses someone who is dying or has died, watching their suffering and translating it into reassurance; by the end the address shifts from 'you' to an inclusive 'we', suggesting the narrator is speaking as much to themselves as to the dying figure.
What happens
The song opens with an instruction to the dying person to brace for a journey, then describes that person's bodily agony in vivid, almost violent imagery. A second verse shows the speaker kneeling in prayer, admitting guilt or grief as they metaphorically bury the person, before describing a release from gravity and bodily limits. The recurring chorus repeats the same instruction throughout, so the song doesn't progress through plot so much as through intensifying imagery around a fixed ritual phrase, ending in a vocal arrangement that splits the two singers' parts, isolating the chorus and verse lines separately before merging on the final affirmation of universal chosenness.
How it's built
The song is organized around a short, fixed two-line chorus that functions like a chant or incantation, repeated almost unchanged throughout. Two verses carry the narrative and imagery, each followed by the chorus, and the song ends with a restructured final section where Amy and Emily's parts are presented separately rather than interwoven, isolating the chorus's command from the verses' imagery before letting them converge on the idea of being chosen.
Section by section
Opening chorus
“secure yourself to heaven”
The command that opens the song frames dying as preparation for travel, as if death were a vehicle to be buckled into. The word choice treats the afterlife not as destination alone but as infrastructure to be trusted.
First verse
“warrior raging have no fear”
The verse juxtaposes brutal sensory detail -- blood, screaming, a body worn down -- with a strange stillness, as the dying figure is described as both asleep and solid, suggesting a consciousness caught between realms. Calling them a warrior reframes suffering as a kind of valor rather than defeat.
Second verse
“i dig a grave to bury you”
The speaker's own agency becomes uncomfortably literal here: prayer and grief slide into an act of burial performed by the speaker themselves, blurring compassion with complicity. This is the song's most morally ambiguous moment, raising the question of who is really being released -- the dying person or the one left behind.
Final section
Splitting the vocal parts into separate blocks rather than interweaving them formally enacts the song's theme: two voices moving apart and then converging on the same affirmation, as if demonstrating the very release from separateness the lyric describes. The resolution into a plural, universal claim of being chosen pulls the song out of its private address and into something closer to communal doctrine.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Death is figured throughout as a kind of travel or ascent -- fastening burdens, gliding, needing no ground -- turning physical dying into an image of weightless departure.
- anaphora
- The repeated instructive phrasing of the chorus functions like liturgy, reinforcing the song's hymn-like, ritual quality through near-verbatim repetition.
- synesthesia
- Images blend senses -- night described in terms of ink, screaming heard through thunder -- compressing fear and darkness into a single sensory field.
- juxtaposition
- Violent, bodily imagery (bleeding, screaming, a body worn to the skin) sits directly against serene, weightless imagery (falling softly, gliding through the sun), dramatizing the tension between suffering and release.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a death song written from the position of a witness-mourner, using religious language not necessarily as literal doctrine but as a vocabulary adequate to the scale of loss -- heaven, grace, being chosen function as metaphors for whatever release accompanies death, spiritual or otherwise. An alternative reading takes the religious imagery more literally, as an actual statement of faith in an afterlife, with the grave-digging image read as ritual rather than guilt. The ambiguity between comforting the dying and mourning them, and between literal and metaphorical heaven, seems intentional rather than a flaw.
Context
This track comes from the Indigo Girls' 1989 self-titled major-label debut, early in their career when their sound was more stripped-down folk harmony before later full-band arrangements. I don't have reliable biographical detail connecting this specific song to a real event or death; the song should be read primarily on its own textual terms.
Listen for
- the shift from unison vocals to separated solo parts near the end
- how the chorus never varies in wording even as the verses escalate in imagery
- the contrast between violent verb choices and soft, floating verbs within the same verse
- the pivot from singular address to plural inclusion in the closing lines
About Indigo Girls
Indigo Girls are an American folk rock music duo, consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. The two met in elementary school and began performing together as high school students in Decatur, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.
1985 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue