The Chicks

Essential Albums

  • Home
    Home
    Home

    After two albums that leaned heavily on a more pop-friendly sound, Home brought the Dixie Chicks back to their bluegrass roots. That meant no drums, but plenty of Dobro, banjo, and mandolin. "Truth No. 2," for instance, opens with a ferocious fiddle lick that complements Natalie Maines’ tough, tender voice, while "Long Time Gone" finds the group directing their ferocity at the country-music industry, longing for the days of Merle and Hank over an instrumental that toes the line between barn dance and barn burner.

  • Fly
    Fly
    Fly

    In 1999, the same year the Chicks released one of the best-selling country albums of all time, the group joined a tour that, at the time, seemed as far removed from mainstream Nashville as possible: the Lilith Fair. Equipped with banjos, mandolins, twangy harmonies, and some (then-controversial) crop tops, the trio of Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer, and Martie Maguire—then known as the Dixie Chicks—played nearly 20 dates on the all-female tour. It was proof that the Chicks’ music—and the women who made it—had transcended the limits of country music culture. And the higher the Chicks rose, the clearer it became that Maines, Strayer, and Maguire weren’t following anyone’s rules but their own. The beauty of Fly—the band’s chart-topping, Grammy-winning 1999 smash—is that, despite the album’s mischievous spirit, it’s a country record to its core: Polished and produced, to be sure, but also overflowing with ace instrumentation and strings that were more traditional (at least compared to the genre-wandering music of late-1990s pop-crossover acts like Shania Twain). Fly also demonstrated that the members of the Chicks were more than exemplary players and singers; they could write, too. The trio had a hand in five of the album’s songs, including the classic, sweeping love song “Cowboy Take Me Away.” Written for Maguire’s husband at the time, it’s not so much a pledge of everlasting commitment as it is an ode to the freedom that comes with his nomadic, unfettered lifestyle. “Fly this girl as high as you can,” Maines sings, “into the wild blue.” And fly they do, on an album that includes tributes to rebellious women, including “Sin Wagon” and the now-infamous murder ballad “Goodbye Earl”—both of which caused shocked country music programmers and DJs to pull out their hair. The response to some of Fly’s more boundary-pushing material forced listeners to confront their biases: After all, country music’s men had always sung about sexual appetites—Conway Twitty’s “Slow Hand,” anyone?—yet Nashville let out a collective shudder when such desires were seen through a female perspective. Murder ballads, meanwhile, were a downright country tradition—so why such outrage about a song in which the woman is the guilty party? Maybe, as Maines sang, it’s because Earl deserved it. But the Nashville lifers who found these songs so troublesome were far outnumbered by the Chicks’ ever-expanding fanbase—and even now, decades after its release, the appeal and influence of Fly endures. The album created a road map for future artists like Taylor Swift and Maren Morris, proving female country musicians could dress how they desired, sing the stories they wanted to tell, and defy the genre’s expectations—and, most importantly, that they could truly fly.

  • Wide Open Spaces
    Wide Open Spaces
    Wide Open Spaces

    The wild success of Wide Open Spaces turned The Dixie Chicks into superstars. They deliver knockout honky-tonk tunes (“Tonight the Heartache’s on Me”), sweet ballads (“Loving Arms”), and some choice covers, including a sizzling take on Bonnie Raitt’s “Give It Up or Let Me Go.” There’s not a drop of filler—the trio tears it up from start to finish. 

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About The Chicks

For as conservative as it can seem at times, country music has always been a place for rebels. One of the most successful bands of the ’90s and 2000s, The Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks) emerged as valuable counter-programming to Nashville’s more outdated narratives, mixing radio-friendly bluegrass with a progressive edge that made them outcasts to country purists but unlikely heroes in mainstream pop. Not that they ever courted the mainstream, per se. If anything, the band served as an early swell in a broader wave of country artists—including Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, and Lady A—that mixed the rootsy sound of early country with an image and feel suited to the modern day. Formed in Dallas by sisters Emily and Martie Erwin (later Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire), the band started out as bluegrass revivalists, wading into more modernized arrangements with the arrival of vocalist Natalie Maines in the mid-'90s. Even before they were blacklisted from corporate radio for their denunciation of President George W. Bush and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they carried an air of controversy, turning out songs that had a dark sense of humor (“Goodbye Earl”) and raw—albeit funny—sexuality (“Sin Wagon”) that came on a little too strong for some audiences. Still, the band always came off as earnest and upright, torch-carriers for an old-fashioned sense of truth that has always made country shine (“More Love,” “Truth No. 2”). After a 14-year hiatus from the studio, The Chicks released Gaslighter in 2020. Amidst a broader reckoning of the legacy of racism and slavery in America, they also removed the word “Dixie” from their name—a reminder that their true strength wasn’t in keeping things the same, but in understanding what it means to change.

ORIGIN
Dallas, TX, United States
FORMED
1989
GENRE
Country

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