'Taking the Long Way' is long way from 'Home'

New Dixie Chicks album leans toward singer-songwriter territory.

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 22, 2006

The last time we heard from the Dixie Chicks, it seemed the entire country was either mad at them or proud of them.

On March 10, 2003, days from the invasion of Iraq, Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience that she was ashamed President Bush was from Texas.

All heck broke loose. Literally overnight, the Chicks were dropped from radio playlists, condemned in public and received death threats.

Maines apologized, but took it back this year.

"I don't feel that way anymore," she recently told Time magazine. "I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."

With "Taking the Long Way," their new album about the controversy, hitting shelves today, it is easy to forget that from 1998 to March 9, 2003, just about everybody could agree on the Dixie Chicks.

Country music lifers dug them. After a few years of Shania Twain's frictionless pop and the seemingly endless reign of Garth Brooks, it was clear these gals could actually play, not to mention sing like Hill Country angels. College kids certainly liked them; you could find the Chicks' smash hit albums "Wide Open Spaces" and "Fly" filed with Bob Marley's "Legend," "The Eagles' Greatest Hits" and at least one Dave Matthews album, all turn-of-the-century must-haves for the mainstream American culture consumer.

As the years wore on and fans multiplied, the Chicks, whose tour will stop at the Erwin Center on Oct. 1, put up staggering numbers. To date, "Spaces" has sold more than 12 million copies; "Fly" moved over 10 million. Between 1999 and 2001, "Fly" deposited a jaw-dropping nine of its 13 songs on the U.S. country chart, six in the top 10.

Their signature tune — "Goodbye, Earl" — is a smart corker about a beaten wife who takes poisonous revenge on her abusive husband. Chief Chick Natalie Maines' delivery turned what could have been an over-earnest mess into one of the great life-affirming jolts of the era. Earl puts his wife "in intensive care" without melodrama — they were smart enough to know spousal abuse is too widespread to be anything other than a sad, horrible fact of life, and that it need not be overdramatized.

They did everything right — sharp songs, everyday feminist vision, great voices, copious wit and an ease with the complexities of everyday life that's the hallmark of great country.

Middle-class soccer moms and dads liked them. Nashville liked them. Even country critics liked them. In David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren's excellent 2003 book "Heartaches by the Numbers: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles," the song "Wide Open Spaces" comes in at a healthy 214. As writer Kurt Wolff put it in his excellent guidebook "The Rough Guide to Country Music" (2000), "Who doesn't like the Dixie Chicks?"

Then came "Home" in 2002, one of the most brilliantly triangulated albums in recent pop memory. Plenty of fans heard the rootsy, low-key instrumentation on "Home" as an authenticity move, and it probably was, in part.

But this was also the year the soundtrack to "O Brother Where Art Thou," with its old timey bluegrass and blues tunes, sold 4 million copies to an audience most record companies had forgotten existed — actual adults (or as we call them in Austin, the folks who listen to KGSR). The Chicks moved with the market's occupation with banjos and old-school twang with ease. "Home" clocked over six million sold. Who, again, doesn't love the Dixie Chicks?

Then came Maines' comment about the President. Scrapped by the audience they thought they served, the Chicks' singular run came to an end.

Which brings us to "Taking the Long Way." Helmed by rock producer Rick Rubin and written not by Nashville songsmiths but by the Chicks and adult-rock names such as Semisonic's Dan Wilson, Jayhawk Gary Louris and sometime Austinite Sheryl Crow, this is the move away from country many feel is their only option.

While the music is roots pop (also a KGSR sound), it's the lyrics that represent the more interesting departure from mainstream country crowd and toward adult contemporary.

Instead of country's universality, "Taking the Long Way" is shot through with singer-songwriter introspection. The stories are gone, "I" doesn't sound like the in-this-together "we" that country thrives on — Earl and his vengeful wife feel like characters from an earlier idyll, which they are. The focus is now on the Chicks themselves, their trials, their victories and their straightforward songcraft.

Take the "The Long Way Around," the album's lovely, propulsive leadoff. It starts like many C&W tearjerkers about home and its limitations: "My friends from high school/Married their high school boyfriends/Moved into houses in the same ZIP codes/Where their parents live."

Then come references to the band itself ("Lived like a gypsy/Six strong hands on the steering wheel") compete with references to previous highs ("I've been a long time gone now" and "It's been two long years now/since the top of the world came crashing down").

This is fresh territory for the Chicks. These aren't the sleight-of-hand lyrics that you'd hear from, say, a Joni Mitchell (or Carly Simon's "You're So Vain," for that matter). But they aren't the class-conscious honky-tonk blues that Nashville turned into an American art form.

Crow aids the bittersweet "Favorite Year" and indeed, it sounds like Sheryl Crow. Linda Perry (Four Non Blondes, Pink) contributes "Voice Inside My Head" and "So Hard," both about reproductive issues.

The capstone is "Not Ready to Make Nice," a fuming response to the stress, the death threats, the naked hostility the Chicks faced after the 2003 flap. Overswelling strings, Maines' voice builds "I made my bed and I sleep like a baby/ With no regrets and I don't mind sayin'/It's a sad, sad story when a mother will teach her/Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger." It's a striking, personal performance, but it's hit no higher than 36 on the Billboard country chart.

"Easy Silence" is a love song dedicated to a partner who shelters the singer from the storm ("I come to find a refuge in the/easy silence that you make for me") with a riff so simple it's almost indie rock. Or maybe it's an ode to their publicist. ("The peaceful quiet you create for me/And the way you keep the world at bay for me.") It could go either way.

"Everybody Knows" is a dead ringer for the Fleetwood Mac vibe they tasted when they had a hit with their cover of "Landslide." "Lullaby" is an ode to their kids, while "Lubbock or Leave It" is a roots rocker on leaving small-minded small towns.

But will those small towns come with the Chicks if the music doesn't directly address their hopes and fears? Time to hear from the soccer moms, the college kids and Earl's wife.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926