With new name and album, The Chicks’ voices ring loud again
The Dixie Chicks are no more. Breaking their ties to the South, The Chicks are stepping into a new chapter in their storied career with their first new music in 14 years.
The Texas trio of Emily Strayer, Martie Maguire and Natalie Maines have been teasing new music for a year, and “Gaslighter” finally drops on July 17 when the nation is embroiled in divisive politics, cancel culture and reckoning with inequality. The timing is right for their voices to be heard again.
“It just seemed like a good reflection on our times,” said Maines. “In 20 years, we’ll look back at that album cover and title and remember exactly what was going on in the country right then.”
“Gaslighter” is a slang term, inspired by a 1944 Ingrid Bergman film, to describe a psychological abuser who manipulates the truth to make a person feel crazy. In recent years, it’s been used to describe powerful men like Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump.
“I think most everybody has a gaslighter in their lives somewhere,” said Strayer. “But, yeah, it was so weird how it echoes our current administration.”
As the best-selling female group in RIAA history, The Chicks appealed to generation of country fans that saw themselves in the band’s stories, whether it was “Wide Open Spaces” or “Cowboy Take Me Away.” After three independent albums, their first major label record in 1998 sold 13 million copies in the U.S. alone.
With Maguire on fiddle and Strayer on banjo, they were all steeped in bluegrass and classic country, but relished in fun country-pop on crossover songs like “Goodbye Earl.”
While the break between albums was longer than any of them anticipated, they realized they still had important things to say.
“We have to say things when the time is right to say them, and we’ve been quiet for 10 years, so get ready,” Strayer said with a laugh.