Dixie Chicks Review

As promised, I bought the new Dixie Chicks album, Taking the Long Way, on iTunes the day it came out.

The verdict: A quite good album. Now, I really became a Dixie Chicks fan with their last album, Home. More specifically, their cover of Fleetwood Mac's Landslide. Before that, I was pretty dismisive of them. But I decided to buy Home and found myself absolutely loving it, especially the songs Long Time Gone and Travelin' Soldier.

With the new album, they've moved on a bit. This isn't quite what Home was, but it's still pretty damn good.

But who can blame the Chicks for moving on? I mean, they've had kids and been through a witch hunt unlike that of almost else who has dared to criticize the Bush administration.

The best songs on this album cover these issues: kids, witch hunts and war. And they often combine them. Most notably, Not Ready to Make Nice directly tackles the controversy they were involved in with the lyrics:

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
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Sayin' that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

Not all the songs are about these topics, but nevertheless, they do show up quite a bit.

My favorite song on the album is the last, I Hope which is a soul song that Al Green wouldn't have sounded out of place singing, with a more or less "Make Love, Not War" type of message. I was amazed to hear Natalie Maines sing a song like this so well. Another song, I Like It has similarly impressive sultry vocals by Natalie.

The Chicks have definitely begun to leave some of the country sound behind. While Home had a lot of fantastic bluegrass sounds, Taking the Long Way is mostly folk music. Most of these songs would fit right in on an Indigo Girls album.

But the rebel attitude is still there. Despite what many would have you believe, unblinking support of the president does not have its roots in country music. Waylon Jennings made his name as an outlaw, and Willie Nelson endorsed Dennis Kucinich, for God's sake. Dolly Parton just had an Oscar-nominated song in a movie about a transsexual. And, with apologies to Chris, I'm stealing this Johnny Cash quote from his blog:

I didn’t vote for Mr. Bush. Let’s just leave it at that.

The Dixie Chicks have more in common with the giants of country music than just about any of their contemporaries, and they are making perhaps the best music of anyone in country music today.