Amazement at the sheer number should be matched by astonishment at their consistency. If I Fall … is just great. Organ-driven rock lent a Nashville twang by the fiddle, it barrels along, rich with the confidence of a band who know they can’t put a foot wrong.
You don’t want for dirt dished about Natalie Maines’ divorce on Gaslighter, the band’s eighth album, but this accusation of nautical infidelity stands out. It’s ferociously angry and very funny – plus its understated, live-in the-studio sound only compounds the sense that you’re eavesdropping on tea being spilled among friends. A great country weeper in its own right, You Were Mine is also part of the Chicks’ origin story.
It was written by the sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire about their parents’ divorce; they then invited Maines, the daughter of the producer Lloyd Maines, to sing on the demo, rather than the then Chicks vocalist Laura Lynch. A lineup change and vast success ensued. The chief theme of the Taking the Long Way album – being celebrated soon with a 20th anniversary reissue and tour – was the Chicks’ war of words with President George W Bush and Nashville conservatives.
The musically sweet-toned opening track suggests that attitude was par for the course – of a piece with a longstanding disinclination to “kiss all the asses” and “do it like everybody else”. Over a soft organ backing and something approaching a dancefloor pulse, the Chicks offer hard-won advice to the recently dumped: “Put on your best shoes and strut the fuck around like you’ve got nothing to lose.” Its slow build to a euphoric climax – elevated by Maguire’s fiddle – is great. You could suggest the Celtic motifs on Ready to Run are an acknowledgment of Irish folk’s seminal influence on country; equally, they may have something to do with the Corrs’ late-90s success.
Either way, Ready to Run’s breezy mood carries a witty lyric that offers a middle finger to marriage and commitment. Marooned in California post-divorce, Maines pines for the more rough-hewn gents of her home county. But the beauty of Texas Man is really about the music’s experimental bent: a tight, close-miked, new-wave-leaning sound replete with fuzzed-out guitar that’s completely unlike anything the Chicks had released before, but still somehow sounds like them.
Five minutes of inconsolable misery. The guitar-driven arrangement is simple, but spot-on: it doesn’t need anything more to work its sob-inducing magic. In the early 80s, there was talk of a subgenre called cowpunk.
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