Twenty years ago, things didn’t go “viral”. People didn’t get “cancelled”. But the Dixie Chicks were.
“These days, everybody’s saying anything and everything that crosses their mind and people are getting cancelled left and right,” says lead singer Natalie Maines. A look of mischief crosses her face. “I’m kind of proud to have been the first.”
If you’re a fan of The Chicks – who dropped the “Dixie” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, after feeling uncomfortable about its slavery associations for years – you will know what Maines is referring to.
The Texan trio, comprising sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer alongside Maines, were one of the most successful female – and country – acts of all time. They sang songs about what it was to be a young woman, independent, brazen, in love.
Ever since their 1998 breakthrough album Wide Open Spaces, their music had swerved the sort of country music churned out for the right-wing Bible belt and brought pop and rock fans around to bluegrass.
They had no interest in compromising their musicianship (it was in their contracts that they play their own instruments – Maguire on fiddles, mandolin, guitar; Strayer on guitar, banjo and dobro), nor their liberal opinions to fit into what male-dominated Nashville thought they should be.
In the beginning – the band formed in 1989 and Maines joined in 1995 – they had fluffy blonde hairdos and fluffy bright outfits, the slogans on their merchandise were “Chicks Rock!” and “Chicks Rule!”, they led their crowds in chants of “Chicks kick ass”.
But in 2003, fresh from singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl and on a tour titled – grimly ironically – “Top of the World”, Maines declared at a gig at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, “We’re ashamed that the
president of the United States is from Texas.”
The crowd cheered, she cackled – the way she does now, several times a sentence – and they launched into their next song. It is hard to imagine they would be the same band today if that comment had not been reported in a Guardian review.
When news of their heresy made its way across the Atlantic, they fell spectacularly from grace. They were boycotted, banned on country radio, their CDs piled high in the streets and burned. They received death threats investigated by the FBI, were told to “shut up and sing”, and became pariahs in the conservative country music world. They never went back.
“The incident”, as it is referred to by The Chicks, became a grave cautionary tale. The band who inspired artists from Taylor Swift to Kacey Musgraves set a path not to be followed: speaking your mind could cost you your career and your safety.
Male rock and punk stars had been radical and political for decades. “But being women and being in country music – that’s what made it not OK,” explains Strayer, 50, from her home in San Antonio, on a loud and careening video call with Maines, 48, in Los Angeles and Maguire, 53, in Austin.
Even now, when wielding public influence for good feels like a moral duty, that controversy still casts a long shadow. Swift’s 2020 documentary Miss Americana saw her wrestling with her management and her father about whether to criticise Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn for her voting record on women’s and LGBTQ issues. The message was: “Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks.”
To Maines, looking back, the furore feels “comical”. Has she ever regretted it? Never. “It’s a part of our history. And it kind of cleaned house.”
Three years later, the band released a comeback album, Taking the Long Way, and a defiant single, “Not Ready to Make Nice”. They were vindicated. They won acclaim, won all five Grammys they were nominated for. Then they took a long break.
They focused on parenting (they have nine children between them) and worked on separate projects – Strayer and Maguire released two albums as duo Court Yard Hounds, Maines a solo covers album, Mother.
They interrupted their hiatus with sporadic live shows, but their fans were impatient – and drastically changed, from women their own age and little girls to “adults whose mothers forced us on them”, grandparents, straight men, gay women, “a lot more gay men”. “The controversy drew out a whole other demographic – people who felt like they’ve gone through hardship,” says Maines.
In 2016, they headed out on a world tour and began to perform a cover of Beyoncé’s country-zydeco “Daddy Lessons”. It was so electrifying, she asked them to join her on stage at the Country Music Awards – a ceremony to which they swore they’d never return.
The country establishment still didn’t like it – things were frosty backstage, “but we were protected by the Beyoncé cloak” – and it was a triumph.
It took 14 years after Taking the Long Way for them to release new music. But in 2020 with little warning, they announced Gaslighter. Made with super-producer Jack Antonoff (a favourite of Swift, St Vincent, Lorde and Lana Del Rey) it was stunning: slick, emotionally wrought and more personal than they have ever been.
Maines, Maguire and Strayer are about to pause their lives as parents of teenagers and become that force of nature together once more. Their European tour – which includes a show on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on Sunday, and supporting Bruce Springsteen’s concerts at Hyde Park in London in July – is the first time they will perform songs from Gaslighter here. For Maines, the three-year delay has been no bad thing. “If we’d had to perform it back in 2020 I might have been a ball of tears. It might have been a little too soon to be that raw.”
The Chicks say that when they write, they “meld all three of our different relationships together and mask it”. It means people can project their own experiences on to their music. But Gaslighter has the clearest narrative of any of their records and its story is of Maines’s divorce.
It explores adultery, emotional manipulation (the title proved apposite, but does not refer to Trump), the children caught in the middle, the devastating loneliness and quiet, the letting go. It is so blistering that Maines’s ex-husband, the actor Adrian Pasdar, reportedly tried to block its release.
“The things that you wouldn’t say out loud, you can sing them out loud,” says Strayer (though I imagine if they were not legally bound, there’s even more they would say out loud).
Gaslighter swings from so fragile it is almost uncomfortable to completely savage; from the poetic, “I see a wildfire comin’/ Burnin’ the world that I’ve known/ Watch me, watch me outrun it/ Take what I need and go”, to the specific, “You can tell the girl who left your tights on my boat that she can have you now”. “It wasn’t tights,” Maguire says. “It was something else.” Maines is screeching with laughter (again). It is still, she says, “all very real. But it’s not raw.”
The Chicks sometimes seem like three sisters rather than two. They share a sensibility, even if Maines is the most unfiltered and vocal. Strayer is equally firm but considered and Maguire as thoughtful and direct (they say their dynamics have not changed much in nearly 30 years, but there are fewer fights backstage about skull earrings).
Melding their lives works – you don’t have to have “hoed a row” on a Tennessee farm to relate to their songs, which have grown in introspection, from growing up and leaving home on “Wide Open Spaces” to the wild heartbreak of 1999’s “Cold Day in July” to 2006’s “So Hard”, which takes in Maguire and Strayer’s struggles with infertility.
Divorce is one thing all three have experienced – five in total – and it still feels starkly rare to hear women writing about it, and the children involved, with such frankness. Adele’s 30 does, and so does Gaslighter. “Young Man” is addressed to Maines’s eldest son, who is now in their band; she was “holding back tears” the first time she had to rehearse it.
I wonder how exposing that kind of vulnerability to their children affects how honestly they write. “That’s the hardest part,” Maines says slowly, with a sigh. “That’s the part that sucks. When it’s so personal, when it affects people other than just yourself. I talk to my therapist a lot.”
Her children have processed the divorce well, she says. “Luckily. So far. I tell people, ‘Ask me how it’s going in 20 years and I’ll tell you all the mistakes I made.’ I never talked about my divorce or my relationship with my kids. But they definitely hear enough in the music.”
“They’ve gotten to see the arc of our songwriting,” points out Strayer. “As hard as it is for them to hear the realness of lyrics about the bad stuff, they’ve also gotten to see us from young women, starting with ‘Cowboy Take Me Away’ and the dreamy ‘we’re all falling in love’ stuff, all the way to where we are now. They get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. At least for my girls, I feel like it’s a healthy thing to start a conversation.”
For their boys, too. The Chicks are feminist icons – “Goodbye Earl” (1999) is the most funny, subversive song you’ll ever hear about a wife-beater (who two best friends poison with black-eyed peas) – and those values are just as important when raising sons.
“People talk a lot about raising their girls to not accept this, not accept that, but it is equally as important to raise boys and men that don’t do ‘that’,” says Maines, whose sons Slade and Beckett are 22 and 18. “Domestic violence still blows my mind,” she says, incensed. “Like, who hits women? I’m sure they watched it and they learned it.
“When we wrote [Gaslighter song] ‘Julianna Calm Down’ I was envisioning young girls who might be insecure and finding their way. But we also think of men too, because you’ve got to teach men how to treat women.”
“I have to say,” says Strayer, “raising boy-girl twins, I’m now realising some of the double standards that even I am not seeing.” Her 18-year-olds Julianna and Henry have just finished school and her daughter has complained that she has given them different rules. “I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, I did… But am I just being realistic? Or am I building this [message that] you need you need more care and more parameters’? I constantly have to test and check myself. It’s different for girls, and it shouldn’t be. That’s the shame of it.”
I ask if the popularity of social-media misogynists like Andrew Tate makes them worry for their children’s generation. They think his views are nothing new. “It’s just not hidden,” says Maguire. “Now it’s out in the open, maybe that’s part of the solution. What people used to do behind closed doors, or think, now they’re falling on their sword, exposing what they truly are.
“I like to believe that’s a positive thing that has to happen in order to call these people out and make them change, or make perceptions change.”
“People are being held accountable more than they used to,” agrees Maines. “Maybe in future men will think, ‘Oh, shit, I could spend the rest of my life in prison. Is this moment of power over this woman worth it?’”
“Hopefully there’s a pendulum swing,” Maguire continues. “That goes for racism and what’s happening with a lot of legislation against trans people. Get it out there, quit hiding it. Let the masses judge what’s right and what’s wrong. I think we’ll win.”
The Chicks usually end up on the right side of history. The Iraq war, prison reform, women’s rights, Black Lives Matter – campaigning for social justice has been a commitment for decades.
Yet their “Chicks Rule” mantra didn’t block the sexism they faced early on, when they were underpaid, overworked and dismissed. “We didn’t know any better,” says Maguire. “The label and our management were like, ‘go go go, make hay while the sun shines’. Now we call the shots.”
And in the media, they were infantalised and sexualised. A 1998 Rolling Stone review of the “three blonde lookers” expressed shock that “these girls can play”, praising the sisters’ “good old-fashioned virtuosity as well as heart-stopping visuals (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)”.
The Chicks in 2023 could not be further from “good old-fashioned virtuosity”. They are noisy, politicised, provocative. I ask whether they feel like trailblazers – like they have changed things. In the time since “the incident” at least, “has country changed that much?” asks Strayer. “I don’t know that it has. I still think people are biting their tongues.”
“We’ve always liked to write songs that empower young people and women,” says Maines. “But getting older, it does seem like heavier stakes than” – she puts on a high-pitched voice – “Chicks Rock! Chicks Rule!”
The Chicks perform at Glastonbury Festival on Sunday. Their UK tour opens in Cardiff on Monday, thechicks.com
