A new name and sound
Despite plenty of changes, Chicks still sound like the truth
It’s unseemly to pity our pop stars when we already bathe them in so much fame and money, but let’s remember that these are atypical human beings with a precarious task: squaring their uncommon lives with millions of common ones.
“You can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat that she can have you now,” Natalie Maines snaps on Gaslighter, a new album from The Chicks, the resurgent country trio that recently dropped the “Dixie” from its name. Tights on My Boat is a song about the discovery of real-life infidelity and its gnarly aftermath, and while the salacious lyrical details might slack your jaw, it’s Maines’s ability to align her multitudes that’ll knock you in the guts. She didn’t edit the song’s setting to make her story more relatable. She’s a Texas-born Californian divorcee with a big yacht and a big heart, and whenever she sings, she sounds like a superstar who knows how to tell the truth.
Seventeen years ago, her honesty transformed The Chicks into pariahs — and, later, into heroes. Remember back in March 2003, when then-president George W. Bush was beating his war drums for the invasion of Iraq? Maines made a declaration at a London concert that would change the shape of her career and country music writ large: “We’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Those 12 words have hung over The Chicks ever since, usually with the righteous pacifism that preceded them conveniently nipped off: “We do not want this war, this violence.”
You can feel the album’s polarities at the beginning and the end. The curtain-raising title track takes flight with Queen-ish blasts of a cappella harmony, then follows acoustic guitars and banjos as they run from a tidal wave of artificial bass. “Acting all above it when our friends divorced,” Maines seethes directly to her ex. “What a lie.” But by the time the trio reaches its finale ballad, Set Me Free, Maines is seeking resolution. “The weight of this hate was exhausting,” she confesses. A minimal string arrangement quietly generates max-melodrama.
Strange, then, how the most casual moment on Gaslighter feels like the most important. It happens during Texas Man, a rebound ditty about how Maines wants a new guy — a Texan “who can feel at home, yeah, here in the California sand.” Again, she’s a heartbroken multimillionaire, mentioning her beachfront property without drawing too much attention to it. And while her vocal melodies follow friendly pop contours, the guitars sound detuned and percussive, rickety and bedraggled. “I’m a little bit unravelled,” Maines sings, underscoring that sound-as-metaphor, “but I’m ready.”
This isn’t grand, sweeping, comeback-album stuff. It’s fresh, and inventive, and optimistic, and it might speak to The Chicks’ creative position better than any other cut on the record. It’s a song about what’s been overcome, but it’s also a song about what might be coming next.