Listening to Gaslighter, the Chicks’ first album in 14 years, would have been poignant regardless of what was happening in the world when it came out. But the album, out today, arrives a few weeks after the pop-country veterans dropped the “Dixie” from their name in the wake of national protests for racial justice. It feels like a new statement of purpose, and an answer to the question of what the Chicks can be without “Dixie.” The answer is familiar, but very different.
Coproduced with Jack Antonoff, Gaslighter is definitely a pop album, and on the surface it’s unlike anything they’ve done in the past. It’s full of flourishes that recall Antonoff’s best work with Taylor Swift and Lorde. Yet it’s less of a departure than you might expect, because the specific humor and musical grace of Natalie Maines and her collaborators Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire always wins out. Despite the drum machines, their earthy fiddle and banjo are still very prominent.
Physical copies of the album were manufactured before the name change, but it’s fitting that this is the first release to appear digitally under the new name. It’s essentially their declaration of independence from the genre and industry that tossed them aside unceremoniously back in 2003, when Maines publicly opposed the Iraq war. The Chicks are sometimes cited as the earliest victims of an internet-driven backlash cycle, but the real consequences, like their de facto ban from country radio, were led by the industry machine based in Nashville.
Even after that, their 2006 album, Taking the Long Way, stuck pretty faithfully to the country sound that they had ridden to pop-crossover success. Instead of rebelling against the culture that shunned them, they made a masterwork of it. It swept the Grammys the next year, but was all but ignored by country radio and the Nashville establishment. They had achieved pop success while sticking to country’s narrative forms and traditional instrumentation, making it accessible to a broader group of pop fans. But in the years that followed their ejection, country music retreated into Toby Keith–style appeals to a largely white, exurban audience. With the notable exception of Swift and the biggest bro-country hits, that crossover has become increasingly rare. Over the last 17 years, we’ve spent so much time thinking about what country music did to the Chicks that we haven’t had as clear a memory of the great things they did for it.
Gaslighter was recorded a while ago—its release was delayed by issues related to Maines’s divorce proceedings and the pandemic—so it’s merely a coincidence that it’s emerging at such a complicated moment for their former genre. As Jon Caramanica pointed out in the New York Times this week, mainstream country “is still a pool party.” And some of the moves in response to the moment have fallen flat, like Lady A’s decision to use a name already taken by a Black blues singer. But it’s impossible to deny that the genre is in flux. Over the last decade, a new generation of country stars built audiences with political outspokenness as a central attraction. When Instagram was flooded with posts supporting Black Lives Matter, plenty of mainstream country stars joined in, ranging from relative newcomers like Thomas Rhett, Jimmie Allen, and Maren Morris to some of its biggest stars, including Faith Hill and Darius Rucker. When country music publicist and writer Lorie Liebig made a list collecting the names of musicians who had spoken up, she said artists reached out to her to make sure they were being included.