CHX
With surprise guest Sheryl Crow, the country music trio performed their 2006 album Taking the Long Way in its entirety
For years, it was hard not to wonder if the Chicks could ever move past it. The incident, that is — when Natalie Maines told an audience in London, England, during a show in 2003 that she was “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Would it always overshadow the music, and define the band?
The Chicks’ Oct. 15 show at Nashville’s new venue the Truth proved that wondering so is maybe asking the wrong questions. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of their Rick Rubin-produced, Grammy-sweeping LP Taking the Long Way (and accompanying reissue), there was no shying away from the event that shaped that album’s storytelling. But, then again, shying away from their convictions has never been what the Chicks — Maines, Martie Maguire, and Emily Strayer — are about anyway.
You could see it on the stage curtains, upon which archival footage was projected you could hear it in the music, with the band playing the album front to back (joined, at one point, by Sheryl Crow, who was part of the original recording). You could see it on the merch, with “still not ready to make nice” sweatshirts and “we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from the United States” tees for sale. This is part of the Chicks’ story. It’s just not the only story.
It’d be a crime to overlook the band’s sheer musicianship. Performing songs like album opener “The Long Way Around,” “Bitter End,” and “Favorite Year,” alongside the equally outspoken Sheryl Crow, there were more country instruments onstage than probably anywhere else in Nashville that night — and most of them were played by the Chicks themselves. Throughout the evening, Strayer tackled the banjo, guitar, and dobro, with Maguire on fiddle and mandolin, while Maines’ explosively powerful vocals (hopping on guitar, tambourine, and autoharp as well) anchored the gorgeously written songs, particularly the aching emotion she captured on Taking the Long Way’s centerpiece, “Not Ready to Make Nice.” Scorching solos, intricate finger picking, and inventive interplay have always defined their approach to making music, honoring the country and bluegrass roots that shaped them, but on their own terms — terms that always made purists uncomfortable, even before the London incident.
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Taking the Long Way is an album built on songs of defiance, fight, and struggle, but it too is not only about that. It’s one heavily about motherhood — which, for powerful women in an industry that rarely makes room for such a thing, is its own act of defiance. Maines’ son, Slade, joined the band on the tender “Lullaby,” and the band introduced “So Hard” with a story about Maguire’s struggles to conceive her children while on tour, talking openly about “egg drops” and ovaries in a room full of women who could likely relate. Taboo subjects, after all, aren’t limited to just political beliefs, and the Chicks tackle them all fearlessly. “Martie showed her vagina to many doctors,” Maines told the audience. “And she got the baby.”
The set ended on “I Hope,” before a second set of Chicks classics. “We had the pleasure of going to the Obama Center a few days ago,” Maines said, urging the audience to vote in the upcoming November midterms. “It’s a great reminder of what it was like to not have a nutjob for president of the United States. — a deranged nutjob. In these times, it’s hard to find hope. Going to the center gave me hope.”
After a short break, the Chicks returned, opening with “Goodbye Earl,” one of the most beloved songs from their catalog that, at its time, wasn’t received well by country radio. Despite murder ballads being a country music tradition, programmers didn’t seem to embrace women doing it so gleefully. The Chicks did have numerous country radio hits though, and played several of them — “Wide Open Spaces,” “Cowboy Take Me Away,” “Landslide,” and “Travelin’ Soldier,” which was topping the charts right before the London show.
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The performance of “Daddy Lessons/Long Time Gone,” their collaboration with Beyoncé, was one of the night’s most fierce moments: so much conversation surrounded both artists about whether or not they were country enough, when all you had to do was open your eyes and ears. These are country songs, but none of these women have benefitted from the label — Beyoncé called Cowboy Carter a “Beyoncé album,” not a country album, because, as with the Chicks, why would you define your music by genre terms built to exclude you? The songs, and that fiddle and banjo, speak for themselves.
At the end of the evening, Maines told the audience that they’d be back. In whatever capacity that is, no one knows yet, though a new Chicks album would be more than welcome. Their Thursday night show in Nashville, however, felt less like closing a chapter and more like solidifying who they have always been, and owning their story. Wondering when they might make nice will never be the right question. But wondering why we ask women to do so will always be.