Seventeen years ago, Emily Strayer, Martie Maguire, and Natalie Maines would sit backstage at their sold-out Top of the World Tour and laugh. They’d laugh about what men were saying about them on major cable networks, men like Bill O’Reilly (“These are callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around”) and Pat Buchanan (“The dumbest, dumbest bimbos I have seen”). They’d laugh when their tour manager, who they’d send out nightly to scope out the signs protesters held as they picketed their shows, would return with photos of misspelled insults (“You’re traders to our country!”). They’re laughing now, video-chatting from various pockets of the country, simply remembering how much they laughed during one of the darkest times in The Chicks’ career.
It’s the middle of the afternoon, days after the release of the band’s eighth studio album, Gaslighter, and the women are recounting the worst things they heard during the blowback to Maines’s now-vindicated, then-vilified 2003 comments about George W. Bush. “To me, comments like that don’t hurt at all,” Maines says of the vitriol over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, flanked by Strayer (San Antonio) and Maguire (Austin). “But it’s disappointing and a little shocking”—here she mimes retching—“when it’s from women! You almost expect it from men.”
“Who was it that said you should be spanked, Nat?” Strayer asks, cocking her head.
“Your mom,” Maines responds without batting an eye, as the three erupt into peals of laughter. “We’re self-deprecating, can you tell?” Maguire asks. “We’ve never taken ourselves too seriously,” Maines adds.
Columbia Records
Today, the Chicks have plenty to be happy about. For starters, there’s Gaslighter, one of the most warmly received records of the trio’s 25-year-long career, their first original album since 2006’s Grammy-winning Taking the Long Way (“our ‘drop the mic’ moment,” Maguire says, miming the motion as she smiles). Originally set to be released in May, Gaslighter was briefly shelved as the Chicks reassessed releasing music in the wake of an ongoing global pandemic. Then, in June, as protests filled America’s streets, the band dropped the “Dixie” from their name with a concise statement: “We want to meet this moment.”
But there were doubts they’d ever make it to this moment, a quarter-century into their groundbreaking career, in the first place. Gaslighter, let alone the fate of the Chicks themselves, was never written in stone. “For me, at this point, I feel like we succeeded when we finished the record and turned it in,” Maines says. “Everything else is a bonus.”
Five years ago, making a new record wasn’t even a glint in the Chicks’ eyes. It was 2015, and the group hadn’t toured the United States in a decade. The best-selling all-female group in the U.S., the Chicks had taken nearly a decade off to regroup, parent, and fall back in love with the idea of making music again.
The women always had faith their fans would be there when they decided to return, but the turbulent events of the early aughts made the band’s once-bright future feel foggy. That era, captured in real time in their 2006 documentary Shut Up and Sing, began in 2003, as the band kicked off a world tour in support of their sixth album, Home, at London’s Shepherd Bush Empire—just two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” Maines said, tuning her guitar onstage between songs. “We do not want this war—this violence—and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
Maines’ remarks were swiftly branded unpatriotic, triggering the world’s most unintentional, unstoppable Rube Goldberg machine. The band’s hit single, “Travelin’ Soldier,” disappeared from country radio as stations around the U.S. banned the Chicks from airwaves. Detractors slammed the women, calling them “traitors,” “Saddam’s angels,” and “Dixie Sluts” (as documented in their nude 2003 Entertainment Weekly cover shoot). Former fans gathered, as captured on news reports from the time, to burn the group’s albums in metal barrels outside radio station headquarters. The group appeared on a prime time interview with Diane Sawyer to do damage control, though not to apologize for the remarks. At one Texas stop on their tour, Maines received a credible, terrifying, hyper-specific death threat. Madonna, Merle Haggard, Vince Gill, Bruce Springsteen, and Roseanne Cash all stood in public support of the band, but as far as much of the country music community saw it, the death knell had sounded for the Chicks.
“In the States, if you like country music, then you’re [automatically assumed to be] a certain kind of person,” Maines says of why so many people revolted in the wake of her remarks. “Because we played country, a lot of people thought we were a certain kind of people. We were definitely told, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ But I don’t know how to do that.”
“I value Nat’s outspokenness, and her inability to edit,” Strayer adds. Maines throws her head back and laughs. “If only you knew how much internal editing I’m actually doing,” she says. “You’d be so grateful.”
Three years later, the Chicks returned with their righteously scorched-earth album Taking the Long Way, a pointedly angry record produced by rock and hip-hop icon Rick Rubin. It sold nearly 3 million copies in the United States and later collected major Grammy gold, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. “It was such a hard time that I’m just proud we persevered,” Strayer says. “All this turmoil and controversy, and then we make this record, we put it out, and we can just walk away for fourteen years,” Maguire adds. “We had the last word. Then we got to go and have great lives with our families.”
But time away from their fans—a short Canadian tour in 2013 excepted—brought with it a renewed passion for the band, and in 2016, the Chicks headlined stateside arenas on the DCX MMXVII World Tour. Later that fall, they joined Beyoncé onstage at the Country Music Awards—their first time there in nearly a decade—to perform a remix of the Lemonade standout “Daddy Issues.” Now, fans started to hope the Chicks might soon make their return to music.
It helped, the three of them say, that the band contractually owed their label two more albums. “Our manager negotiated that Sony would take a live version of the 2016 tour as one of our commitments,” Strayer says. “So it was eye-opening to realize we [really only] had one more studio album commitment.” They briefly considered recording an all-covers project to complete their deal as easily as possible, but in re-reading the fine print, they realized it wouldn’t count. So they went back to the drawing board.
“We realized the musical part of the Chicks was still clicking when we toured together in 2016,” Strayer remembers. “But we hadn’t written in a while, so that was the new question: ‘Will this click?’”
On Zoom today, the women are clicking like no screens or miles of distance separate them. Maines, 46, does much of the talking (and laughing—an infectious, often sudden noise that always feels like it’s escaped her before she realizes it), but throws to her bandmates early and often. Maguire, 50, is the most introspective of the three, pausing to collect her thoughts before delivering eloquent, elaborately detailed replies. Strayer, 47, often serves as a mediator to the answers and jokes flying around, lassoing careening trains of thoughts before they can threaten to veer off track. Listening to them discuss Gaslighter, it often feels like eavesdropping on three sisters’ (Maguire and Strayer actually are siblings) private conversation—complete with inside jokes, knowing looks, and the occasional revelation.
Gaslighter shares its creators’ unflinching honesty; it’s somehow both emotionally fraught and sonically light. Modern and nimble, it’s the most pop-leaning record the Chicks have ever released. The songs are laden with sticky hooks and anthemic chants, sleek but authentic all at once. The album speaks to how adaptive the band has been without losing an ounce of what makes the Chicks one of the most revered and popular groups of all time. Country purists might complain Gaslighter is missing some of the crunch of the band’s earlier work, but that half-baked critique doesn’t take into account that the Chicks haven’t considered themselves part of the “country” community for years.
Pairing with pop writer/producer Jack Antonoff early in the process, the Chicks realized that after fourteen years away, they had a lot they wanted to talk about—including divorces (that’s “divorces” plural), motherhood, protesting, and their children. They surrounded themselves with contemporary pop hitmakers like Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, Teddy Geiger, St. Vincent, and Sarah Aarons to help spin their stories into their most open and self-reflective lyrics yet. “One song would give us the confidence to get in there and do another one,” Strayer says.
Gaslighter is rife with thumping confessional songs like “Tights On My Boat” and “My Best Friend’s Weddings,” which fans have already picked apart like meat on the bone, searching the gristle for substance. Legally, Maines can’t talk about her recent divorce, the subject of many of Gaslighter’s most exhilarating moments. Her reticence to discuss it ad nauseam with new producers and songwriters helped the Chicks winnow down their list of collaborators, but Maines and her bandmates have, they say, enjoyed the rabid fervor with which their fans have attempted to sleuth their way through “clues” they’ve dropped throughout the album’s 12 tracks.
“We’re always willing to push ourselves and not repeat the same things over and over,” Maines says. “I like how direct a lot of these lyrics are. They’re not necessarily poetry or metaphors or beating around the bush.” She pauses and looks directly into her camera, smiling. She repeats herself, freshly punctuating the thought: “I like their directness.”
While they were recording, the women were also continuing their years-long internal conversation about legally changing their name. They’d already begun the process publicly on their DCX MMXVI World Tour in 2015, abbreviating their name on tickets and official merch; the cover of that tour’s live album similarly referred to the band as DCX. And 2006’s Shut Up And Sing finds band members, management, and PR all calling the band simply “The Chicks” in conversation.
But silent change wasn’t enough. In June, a month before Gaslighter’s release, the murder of George Floyd captured the attention of millions worldwide. Many white Americans began publicly reckoning with their privilege for the first time. The cultural conversation again turned to scrutiny of outdated, racist terminology. Without fanfare, the Chicks ripped Dixie—a tired reference to the antebellum South—from the branding that defined them for decades. The move immediately stood in stark, sufficiently intentional contrast to the ongoing, legally entangled dispute between the country group Lady Antebellum and Lady A, the 61-year-old Black blues singer whose name they wanted to take for their own as they “met this moment.”
“[Well before this year,] a lot of people already referred to us as The Chicks,” Maines says. “I think an earlier changeover would’ve happened a lot easier than we knew.”
By then, roughly 400,000 Gaslighter CDs and vinyl records had shipped with “Dixie Chicks” printed on them—”collectors items,” Maines jokes. “Get ‘em while they’re hot!” Fans who want to “be part of the change with their own little personal protest,” she notes, can plaster over the cover with a sticker the band added to physical copies of the records.
Releasing a long, long, long-awaited album during a pandemic isn’t exactly what the Chicks had in mind for themselves. Though Gaslighter debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at No. 3 in its first week with 84,000 equivalent copies (15 million streams and 71,000 physical sales)—second only to posthumous releases from Juice WRLD and Pop Smoke—the women don’t care about numbers or chart positions. They don’t care about being the biggest band on earth anymore. They’ve been there before. This time, for the Chicks, success means something entirely different.
“We all think the same way as far as success goes, especially after the dips and dives in our career we went through together,” Maguire says. “We’re more interested in being happy and good moms and musically fulfilled. We have the same core values about why we do this. It’s not about the money, and it’s not about the chart position.”
“For me, there’s a comfort and a trust,” Maines adds. “It’s never hard to be around each other. You can really feel free to say, ‘No, that’s not good, but what about this?’ ‘You’re a little out of time.’ ‘Can you re-sing that, you’re a little pitchy?’ Nobody’s getting their egos bruised. You’re never walking on eggshells. That’s what makes working together an easy place to always go back to, and a great place to always go back to.”
Robin Harper
As the Chicks themselves know, the future is never guaranteed. This year was meant to see them embark on a world tour (arenas again, with Maines’s sons’ bands opening and Strayer and Maguire’s children tagging along with backstage summer jobs). It certainly wasn’t meant to be so filled with teleconferenced morning and late show performances (“We’ve seen each other more in these squares than anybody else in our lives,” Maines jokes). But the Chicks have always been adept at rolling with the punches—and with their Sony contract now fulfilled, the next chapter really is theirs to write as they please. “When we signed with Sony, it was the standard deal,” Maines says. “We didn’t have any options. And when we sued Sony and renegotiated, there still wasn’t streaming. It would all look different now, obviously. Seven albums is ridiculous.”
The whole band laughs. Maguire nods her head emphatically. “I think we would do an album or two at a time—if we signed with somebody,” Maines adds. “And I think we’d wanna own our masters.”
Right now, they’re taking whatever comes next as it comes. They’re not “overthinking,” which Maguire says has been their calling card in the past. Gaslighter is a hit by anyone’s standards. Their fourteen-year absence from recording new music is over. Their best days, if you can believe it, are likely still ahead of them. “I think about, realistically, if things took off and were to go to an even bigger level, I don’t know that we’d have the time to say yes to much more,” Strayer says. “With nine kids between the three of us, there’s only so many hours in the day, and we can only do so many dates in a tour. So the reality of whatever success may come? We have plenty to do in the hours that we have.”
“And at this point,” Maines says between laughs, “success is just washing your hair.”
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