ast month, with almost no fanfare, the US formally completed its withdrawal of troops from Iraq, after 23 years of violent quagmire. But it was the beginning of that conflict that loomed over New York's Beacon Theatre on Monday night, where the Chicks played the second of three sold-out shows. In March 2003, eight days before the US invaded Iraq, the country supergroup's lead singer, Natalie Maines, said on stage in London she was "ashamed" that then president George W Bush was from the trio's home state of Texas, triggering a swift, self-righteous and scarily prescient backlash.
More than one person at the Beacon wondered aloud where fellow fans were back then, when a single comment, circulated on AM radio and cable news, led to CD-burning protests and death threats. (High school, was a common answer.) I myself was nine, with a child's stark view of morality and consequence. Our country was at war, I knew, in an impossibly faraway place, and my favorite band bore the cost of criticizing it. One day, I could catch blue-sky hits including Travelin' Soldier, Landslide and Cowboy Take Me Away on the radio on the way to school; the next, they were gone.
The incident, AKA "the blessing", as Maines put it on Monday, was pointedly addressed on Monday night, at one of a handful of shows commemorating the 20th anniversary of Taking the Long Way, the Chicks' scorched-earth, chart-smashing retort to what many now recall as early "cancellation" (though it is perhaps more accurately, and ominously, seen as a form of proto-social media, post-truth coordinated harassment). Though it looms large for a particular demographic – largely white and female, many queer – I almost didn't recognize the moment when the band played that 2003 clip on stage as a prelude to their bitter barn-burner Not Ready to Make Nice, because in it Maines is laughing, speaking off-handedly. People forget, it was never supposed to be that serious.
If only. The band revisited several clips from Shut Up and Sing, Barbara Kopple's essential 2006 documentary on their fall and rise, throughout this statement of show; in one, a montage of cable news hosts and vox pop randos decry "Saddam's angels" as "traitors" who disrespected the troops, spoke too loudly, broke country music's rah-rah rules.
"Well, imagine that … we thought that was the worst it could get," Maines told the rapturous crowd on Monday, still laughing. "Now I would give George W Bush a big kiss. Because now we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from the United States." Time has not been kind to the country, unfortunately foreseen on the group's seminal fourth studio album as hypocritical, vindictive and perhaps irrevocably divided. But it has been kind to the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks (they dropped the "Dixie" in 2020), whose exquisite, industry-standard harmonies and liberatory bluegrass-pop has aged like fine wine.
The trio appeared enriched and polished by the two decades since Taking the Long Way's release – which included a 14-year hiatus, a couple tours, one more album (2020's Gaslighter) and one bitterly fractured nation. The album, played in full during the show's first act, now appears unnervingly prescient, at turns an elegy and a kiss-off to home towns perhaps permanently estranged. Maines – along with sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer on fiddle and banjo, respectively (and, fitting for their Rick Rubin-aided pivot toward pop and rock, a full backing band) – kept the 14-track run-through as potent and trained as her never-better vocals, lucid as ever. It was just the songs, interspersed with documentary clips illustrating both the public and the private storms – the backlash but also young mothering, touring around IVF (So Hard), finding words for, say, a grandmother's struggle with Alzheimer's (Silent House).
The group used brief interludes to shout out collaborators including the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith (who, I learned, played drums on Not Ready to Make Nice); Maines's father, the renowned pedal steel guitar player Lloyd Maines; Semisonic's Dan Wilson, who wanted to call the album Undivided and initially proposed an apology ballad ("We said, 'fuck that,'" Maines recalled on stage). They also made nods to Mike Campbell, who lent his experience with Tom Petty to Lubbock or Leave It, the Chicks's most straightforward rock tune, and the gospel steel guitarist Robert Randolph, whose closing track I Hope, with its outdated faith in disagreeing "lovingly", is afforded some bite via background footage of civil rights protests then and now.
But perhaps nothing proves a point like a blistering second act that tears through the hits, reminding that even scratching the surface of the group's electric discography will get a full-throated and complete singalong. From karaoke staple Goodbye Earl into emancipation anthem Wide Open Spaces, a welcome bluegrass down moment in White Trash Wedding into a sublimely record-faithful version of Cowboy Take Me Away, the nine-song finale is more of a mutual catharsis than a concert. By the time the band reaches its torrid finale in Sin Wagon – the Chicks being perhaps one of few mainstream shows where a fiddle solo is met with raucous applause – the case is long past made. The incident may have made the Chicks a cautionary tale, but there's vindication in the long run.