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Natalie Maines does not normally talk a great deal in concert. This may sound counterintuitive to say, since objectively there is no person in music history more famous for talking in concert than Natalie Maines. But
she has always been more of a quality than quantity gal when it comes to that, so her legendary 2003 comment about being ashamed to share a home state with then-president George W. Bush was more of an anomaly than an indicator that she or her bandmates are going to be prone to lengthy speeches at any given concert by the Chicks.
Fortunately, the short current tour the group is wrapping up was custom-built to feature a steady stream of personal asides, which are welcome, if you happen to be a fan of the trio as personalities and not solely as musical talents. The main reason for that is that the outing is officially a celebration of the 20th anniversary of “Taking the Long Way,” the 2006 record that won five Grammys in total, including a rare Grammys sweep of the top three categories, album, record and song of the year. Not much was revealed in advance about the exact format of the tour. As it turned out, the Chicks (nee: Dixie Chicks) were not only down for spending the first two-thirds of the concert performing “Taking the Long Way” in its 14-song entirety, but for providing between-song commentary on most of the tracks, along with background on the preceding events that ultimately led to this left turn of an album — including “the incident,” as the Bush flap has been euphemistically known in band circles for 23 years.
This made for a rare treat, as Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer sat on stools on a riser for an hour and a half and went deep into “Storytellers” mode, engaging in a mixture of somewhat pre-scripted and fairly spontaneous dialogue before nearly all of the songs, also sometimes putting up documentary film clips on the big screen to further illustrate what was going down in the studio in the mid-2000s. (Some of the clips were from their “Shut Up and Sing” documentary, but many were unreleased.) The show fell into that rare sub-genre many of us love from a veteran performer: the docu-concert.
But the other reason for some added chatter during the tour was the timing, which was coincidental (seemingly?), leading up to — and, in Los Angeles, overlapping — the 2026 midterm elections. Their three-night stand at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood began Sunday, two nights before the nation went to the polls, followed by a show on election night Tuesday, with a wrap-up of the stint and the tour scheduled for Wednesday. (Wednesday’s show will be a make-up for the one that was supposed to happen Monday, but got canceled in the hours beforehand due to an unspecified band illness.)
Naturally, the topical events of this week were bound to inspire a few thoughts comparing the current climate with the heated temperature that resulted in a lot of attempted Chick-broiling in 2003-4.
“It was 20 years ago, and a lot has changed since then,” Maines told the Dolby crowd near the start of Sunday’s show. “Now I would give George Bush a big kiss. Now we’re ashamed the President of the United States from the United States.” (Maines had made similar remarks earlier in the tour, and noted that these had been publicized enough that the White House issued an official statement “calling me a peanut head… or peanut brain, I can’t remember.” For the record, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said on Oct. 15, “Natalie Maines is a despicable nobody who clearly suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has completely rotted her peanut-sized brain.”)
The crowd of 3,400, skewed disproportionately toward progressive cowgirls, went nuts. As they did later in the first act, when, before singing “I Hope,” Maines shared that they had recently visited the Obama museum, which gave them hope of again seeing a country that is not “run by a deranged nutjob.”
The only other overt reference to current events came during the second act — the greatest-hits set — when Maines sang “White Trash Wedding” and followed the time-honored opening line “You can’t afford no ring” with the contemporary addendum: “Because gas prices are too high! And electricity. And medical!” They expounded upon this a little more during Tuesday night’s show, when all three members fanned themselves with large “Fuck Trump” fans.
There’s one word to describe the trio’s nearly quarter-century history of not backing down: Nice.
Not every artist who does a full-album throwback show plays the original record in order; some rearrange the sequence to put a big single at the end. But the Chicks adhered to original running order, which meant that “Not Ready to Make Nice” provided a natural climax to the show only three songs in. And anyway, sometimes gratification that isn’t delayed is the best kind. So when Maines broke from the visage of chagrin and anger that characterizes most of “Not Ready…” to bust into a defiant smile after admitting “I kinda like it,” we’d gotten the most cathartic moment of the show out of the way less than 15 minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour gig. And we kinda liked it, because after all, act-2 favorites like “Sin Wagon” and “Goodbye Earl” don’t exactly count as anticlimactic.
Any serious fan of the group might have heard those latter barnburners in concert enough for one lifetime… not that retributive murder and taunting fornication ever get too old. But the main draw of this show for a more hardcore Chick-aholic was as it usually is for veteran acts’ full-album gigs: the promise of long-ignored deep tracks as inherently part of the concept. And “Taking the Long Way” certainly has its recently unplumbed depths. Four of the songs from the 2006 album have remained staples of the group’s sets: the quasi-title track “The Long Way Around,” the balladic “Easy Silence,” the rocking “Lubbock or Leave it” and, of course, “Not Ready.” That left 10 the group has not gone back to in a show for at least 10 years and, in several cases, 20.
Or never. “Baby Hold On” is apparently the one track the group never performed live before this tour (at least according to setlists.fm). Four had not been played since the arena tour of 2016: “Everybody Knows,” “Silent House,” “Favorite Year” and “I Like It.” Another, “Lullaby,” had not mollified an audience since 2014. And four hadn’t been performed since the year the album came out, two decades ago: “So Hard,” “I Hope,” “Bitter End” and “Voice Inside My Head.” In fact, the last two of those had apparently only ever been performed live once. All to say: the Chicks were taking the long way back around to a huge part of this setlist.
How’s it holding up, anyway? Probably everyone can think of Grammy album of the year winners that seemed like a good idea at the time, to somebody, but haven’t dated well. And it would be wrong to imagine that “Taking the Long Way” made it into the winners’ circle solely on musical merits, when there was clearly an appetite to give the Chicks a medal of valor for all that they’d put up with on top of a slew of Grammys. Even I, not having listened to the full album in quite a while, approached this concert playback with a touch of trepidation: What if it didn’t live up to memories and it felt like the Recording Academy had given out all that gold as a consolation prize for their crucifixion?
So there was good news Sunday — not quite as good as Tuesday night’s national news, but still pretty good — in just how solidly “Taking the Long Way” stands up as not just some sort of political milestone but a superior collection of music. (I’d still give the nod to “Home” as their best, but this remains a strong second.) The dance the trio did in collaboration with producer Rick Rubin and their songwriting collaborators was a slightly tricky one, with enough themes of personal iconoclasm running through several key songs that it almost came to feel like a concept album, even if they were only being allusive to the controversy that continued to follow them… with the exception of “Not Ready,” which was pretty darned specific, given how only a minority of us can relate to receiving death threats.
That anthem was preceded by a film reel of right-wing commentators having their way with the Chicks in the immediate wake of the Bush controversy, including Fox host Bill O’Reilly famously opining that “these are callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around.” Maines recounted their first writing session with Dan Wilson, who co-wrote six of the album’s songs, where “he said, ‘So you probably wanna write about the incident… You wanna write like an apology song?’ We said, ‘Fuck that.’ And he was like, ‘OK, fine. How about “Not Ready to Make Nice”?'” The result gave songwriting blind dates a good name. “Even though we went through all the stages of grief, we landed on anger for most of it,” said Strayer, the trio’s banjo player, “and we thought it was so specific to our story that it wouldn’t necessarily relate to everybody else, but little did we know or anticipate that it would become such an anthem for everybody else’s story as well.” Now, maybe even more than then, there’s something about their righteous Troll Derangement Syndrome that rings a bell.
The members were able to point out instances in other songs that referred in some way to the controversy. While each verse in “The Bitter End” was about a different kind of parting, and in some cases a sweeter one, they confirmed that the final verse did indeed describe their immediate estrangement in 2003 from the country music establishment they’d spent years kissing up to, be it label execs or radio programmers or fellow country stars. The last verse rang afresh with a mixture of resignation and the triumphalism that is inherent in any of their three-part harmonies: “You had a good time / Drinking all of our wine / After the show / We all rode the wave / Of that crazy parade / Oh, where’d you go / What happened to / The ones we knew / As long as I’m the shiniest star / Oh, there you are… / We’ll still be here when you come round again.” That’s a family reunion that never quite came true, as the group came to be more accepted in rock and Americana circles than in mainstream country… though the number of hats and boots in attendance at the Dolby made it clear there was a huge part of the former audience that never got lost back when sides were taken.
There were some more amusing memories during this first section, as “Lubbock or Leave It” led to a discussion of whose parents were most supportive at the time. Maines’ father, famed steel player Lloyd Maines, “a father figure to us musically,” was seen in a film clip describing how he’d tossed off an angry letter to the hometown Lubbock country station that banned the Chicks — whereas Strayer and Maguire, who are sisters, had “our mom was saying things like, ‘I’m gonna put her (Maines) over my lap and spank her’ — stuff like that. So we had a little different dynamic going on at home.”
Some other family fighting came up. “I bet that’s the only time you’ve ever heard sisters fight about in vitro,” said Maines, following a film clip in which Maguire and Strayer got into it about the difficulties of scheduling dates on their European tour around her IVF procedures. “I had to go see a different gynecologist in a different country every other day,” explained Maguire, while her sister had already had success using the procedure. The resulting song, being performed on this tour for the first time in two decades, was “So Hard,” surely one of the first songs on a bestselling album devoted to in vitro fertilization. (Ironically, Sara Bareilles just performed a contemporary one on the same subject at the Dolby just a couple of weeks ago.)
And speaking of songs that very much capture a moment in time, Strayer pointed out that “Baby Hold On” referred to the three children under the age of 3 1/2 she and then-husband Charlie Robison had at the time, and the need to find marital intimacy amid that, when they sang, “Let’s kick the babies out of bed / How ’bout you and me instead.” Strayer and Robison would be divorced within a couple of years, which may account for why the song was never played live until this year. “I think I thought it was about hope, but it was probably more about desperation at that point,” Strayer admitted to the Dolby audience. “We’ve all been there,” responded Maines.
The album also had its share of less overtly autobiographical but still deeply personal-sounding songs. “Favorite Year,” co-written with Sheryl Crow, was one of these, a spirited but still haunting recollection of a past love affair that left a lot of “what if” questions behind, even though the singer has a husband and child. If this one had a personal meaning for one or more of the members, we didn’t learn, because there were a few numbers from “Taking the Long Way” when they did just shut up and sing. But “when we were together, I was at my best” is both a warm thought and a chilling one. And the song provided yet another example of how, on this album, the trio sometimes sounded a lot closer to the Bangles than anything out of Nashville or even Texas.
Come the end of the album playback, Maines said they would be “taking a brief intermission, and come back and play this whole album backwards.” Instead, the second act brought nine songs that are a part of any of their contemporary sets — including the mashup of “Long Time Gone” and “Daddy Issues” they’ve been including ever since they premiered it in collaboration with Beyonce on the 2016 CMA Awards. (Is it really the 10th anniversary of that controversy?) The only original song performed from the last 20 years came from their only album released in the last 20 years, the title track of 2020’s “Gaslighter” … a divorce song, not a Trump song, though it being played during the week that America effectively voted to divorce the president gave it a little extra resonance.
There was more rock and less talk in this final greatest-hits segment. Of course fans would hope that another album might be in the hopper from the music world’s least studio-prolific superstar act shy of Lauryn Hill. Perhaps collecting memories and overseeing the documentary footage for the “Long Way” retrospective has reminded them they like the recording studio? Or perhaps they will continue to lean on repertoire. They’ve got one of the greatest catalogs in contemporary music, so it’s hard to complain if they find a way to milk it every few years. They took the short way around to becoming instantaneous pariahs 23 years ago, but when it came to going from that panic-button moment to being transformed into heroines for the ages, it’s been a hell of a long tail.
Setlist for the Chicks at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Nov. 1, 2026:
The Long Way Around
Easy Silence
Not Ready to Make Nice
Everybody Knows
Bitter End
Lullaby
Lubbock or Leave It
Silent House
Favorite Year
Voice Inside My Head
I Like It
Baby Hold On
So Hard
I Hope
(intermission)
Goodbye Earl
Wide Open Spaces
White Trash Wedding
Daddy Lessons/Long Time Gone
Cowboy Take Me Away
Landslide
Gaslighter
Travelin’ Soldier
Sin Wagon
