Indigo Girls' Amy Ray cuts country album

• %27Goodnight Tender%27 will be release Jan. 28 on Ray%27s Daemon Records
• The album contains 11 originals plus a cover of a Heather McEntire song
• Bon Iver%27s Justin Vernon%2C Susan Tedeschi%2C Kelly Hogan and members of Megafaun appear on the album

The Indigo Girls' Amy Ray has toyed with the notion of a country album for years. Now, she has finally made one.

Goodnight Tender, out Jan. 28 on Daemon Records, is the result of 10 years of writing songs separate from her work with her folk duo with Emily Saliers, or her other solo recordings, which lean toward a highly politicized style of rock and punk. With its 11 originals and one cover, Goodnight Tender draws on roots ranging from Hank Williams and George Jones to the Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers, with a little Southern rock and Americana mixed in for good measure.

Ray says the material differs from her other work at a fundamental level of storytelling and subject matter.

"I've lived in a rural area for about 20 years now, and it has definitely affected my writing a lot, because I'm around a lot of bluegrass musicians all the time," she says. "On this record, I really tried to make it storytelling, and not gender-specific or sexuality-specific. When I do my rock and punk solo stuff, it's very driven by a politicized, rebellious idea about gender fluidity, sexuality and human rights. It's an arena, for me, that's very strident.

"Country music is such a populist music. Sometimes you just want it to be the story you're going to tell the guy sitting next to you at the diner who is a member of the NRA and voted a straight-ticket Republican, and you're this left-wing, queer, aging dyke, and you have this thing in common. I love that! That's where I live."

Take, for example, Hunter's Prayer, a meditation sung from the perspective of a hunter preparing for the kill.

"That song is about a way of life, what I imagine about the good people I know who hunt and have a reverence for wildlife and the land," says Ray, an avowed vegetarian. "If you're going to eat meat, you should know how to hunt — that's my feeling about it.

"I've never been the kind of vegetarian that says no one in the world should eat meat. I do it because it's comfortable for me, and I don't like the idea of meat, and I don't like the idea of animals being used for food for me. But if you're going to do it, that's the way to do it."

Ray recorded Goodnight Tender at Echo Mountain Studio in Asheville, N.C. "I really wanted to use players from Georgia and the Carolinas, because there's a specific Southern Appalachian sound," she says. Though the Indigo Girls often have recorded in Nashville, "I wanted to do something that's slightly different." The album includes guest spots from Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, Susan Tedeschi, Kelly Hogan and members of Megafaun.

"I was trying to put together this group of people that are country, but are playing also what I consider to be Appalachian music, not playing straight-up bluegrass but something that's more like field recordings."

USA TODAY is premiering a behind-the-scenes video on the making of Goodnight Tender.