Indigo Girls are coming back to central Ohio, this time for an outdoor evening at Columbus Commons. The folk-rock duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers will perform at the Bicentennial Pavilion on September 16, sharing what's billed as a night of songs, stories and sing-alongs, with singer-guitarist Linda Perry opening the show.
The concert, first reported by The Columbus Dispatch, is being presented in partnership with the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts and Columbus Arena Sports & Entertainment. Tickets range from $54.24 to $73.39 and are available at capa.com, with a limit of eight tickets per person or household, according to the same report.
It's the second time in less than a year that Indigo Girls have played for a central Ohio crowd. The duo joined Melissa Etheridge for a sold-out co-headlining show at Mershon Auditorium in 2025, a stop on a North American tour that spanned more than 30 dates, according to the Schottenstein Center.
A Career Built Across Four Decades
Indigo Girls have sold more than 15 million records and released 16 studio albums since forming in Georgia in the 1980s and signing to Epic Records in 1988, per the Indigo Girls' official website. Their self-titled 1989 debut, which included early staples like “Closer to Fine” and “Kid Fears,” won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Recording, and the duo has racked up seven Grammy nominations overall, according to Grammy.com.
The band's profile has climbed again recently. “Closer to Fine” was prominently featured in the 2023 Barbie movie, and the duo's story got a deeper telling in the documentary Indigo Girls: It's Only Life After All, which is now streaming on Netflix. The film, directed by Alexandria Bombach, drew on 40 years of personal home video footage and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023 before a wider theatrical release in April 2024, per Wikipedia.
Linda Perry Brings Her Own Pop Pedigree
Opening the September 16 show is Linda Perry, the singer-guitarist best known as the former frontwoman of 4 Non Blondes, whose top 20 hit “What's Up?” became a 1990s radio staple. But Perry's songwriting résumé extends well beyond her old band: she wrote Pink's “Get the Party Started” and Christina Aguilera's ballad “Beautiful,” both international chart-toppers, according to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted her in 2015. Perry has also founded two record labels over the course of her career.
From Shuttered Mall to Downtown Music Hub
The Bicentennial Pavilion sits inside the six-acre John F. Wolfe Columbus Commons, a park built on the footprint of the old City Center Mall after its demolition in late 2009. The park opened in 2011, and the pavilion itself followed in May 2012 as a permanent outdoor performance space, according to Wikipedia. Since then, Columbus Commons has grown into one of downtown's busiest event sites, hosting somewhere between 200 and 250 events a year, including the Columbus Symphony Orchestra's Picnic with the Pops series, per Columbus Commons' own accounting.
Co-presenter CAPA brings its own long civic history to the partnership. The Columbus Association for the Performing Arts was founded in 1969 to save the historic Ohio Theatre from demolition, and it now operates the Ohio, Palace, Southern and Lincoln theatres downtown, according to Wikipedia.
Indigo Girls have kept a busy touring and advocacy schedule this year. Hoodline has reported on a sold-out benefit the duo played in Atlanta to help WABE recover from a federal funding cut, and on their booking as an opener for Brandi Carlile's summer run at The Gorge Amphitheatre. They also closed out a festival lineup in their hometown of Decatur, Georgia, earlier this year.
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