On the Indigo Girls forthcoming album 'Poseidon and the Bitter Bug,' the opening track 'Digging on a Dream' tells the story of an old, working class guy trying to make his way -- the Emily Saliers chorus portrays the somber thoughts of a guy heading to the dredges every morning: "You take your prospects and your pick axe and you trudge down to the stream, and you bloody your hands digging for your dreams."

"That's kind of a sad song," Saliers tells Spinner. "But the thing I like about that is the R&B character -- I just want to be Mary J. Blige, so bad. Or like Rhianna, or sing like Beyonce. Black American music moved me like no other music. What I really like about that song is we focused on the groove."

'Poseidon and the Bitter Bug' is the duo's first independent release since 1987's debut, 'Strange Fire.' "I thought, 'Let's give a smaller label one more chance to take us to the next level, or introduce us to a new audience,'" Saliers says of 2006's 'Despite Our Differences,' which was released via Hollywood Records. "They made a lot of empty promises. And we were like 'You know what, we're done. We're fine to do it on our own.'"

Fans will get a double dose of the Indigos this time around, too; 'Poseidon' will contain two versions, one with a band and the other with just the two. But it's not a song-by-song replica; the track orders on each CD are different, and the Amy Ray song 'Salty South' was added. "In the acoustic version, we needed a different order for it to make sense to us," Ray says.

After a stop at SXSW later this month, the Indigo Girls will be setting sail on the singer-songwriter oriented Cayamo Cruise, before launching a theater tour.