The Chicks to bring 20 years of defiance, 'Taking the Long Way' to D.C.

Photo Credit: Kim Maguire

The Anthem gets its own stop on The Chicks' 20th anniversary tour this fall, when the band brings its beloved Taking the Long Way to Washington on October 6. The sixteen-date theater run kicks off September 30 in Detroit and works through Chicago, New York, Nashville, Texas, and the West Coast before it wraps. Notably, the tour lands in D.C., a city built around the exact kind of fight that made the band who they are.

Most artists who survive a career-threatening controversy come out the other side more careful. The Chicks came out louder. That pattern was set in March 2003, when Natalie Maines told a London audience the band was ashamed to share a home state with President George W. Bush, days before the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Country radio pulled their songs overnight. Fans destroyed CDs in parking lots for local news cameras. The band received death threats specific enough to require security. A band that had outsold every other female group in country music history spent the next three years watching an entire genre decide it would rather pretend they didn't exist than sit with what they'd said.

Three years later, the band answered with an album instead of an apology. "Not Ready to Make Nice," the lead single from Taking the Long Way, refused every bit of contrition the industry expected and won three Grammys for the trouble, including Song of the Year. The album took five total, among them Album of the Year. The band had a choice after 2003: get quieter and try to win back what they'd lost, or get louder and build something new. They chose louder, and it worked.

Plenty of artists in the current political climate have learned to keep their opinions vague enough to survive both audiences. The Chicks never learned that lesson, or never wanted to. Concert visuals in 2016 paired a photo of Donald Trump with a pair of devil horns, a call that cost them fans who had stuck around through everything else and drew a fresh round of "stick to music" think pieces from people who had made the same argument in 2003. Five years later, the video for "March March" spliced together footage from gun violence protests, climate marches, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Today, the band marked the sixth anniversary of Gaslighter with a satirical statement on Instagram:

Six years ago today, The Chicks released their Gaslighter album. Since that historic date, no gaslighting has ever taken place. The Chicks were honored to receive the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize for Album of the Year. The group later disbanded when Emily left the trio to form a bluegrass Bon Jovi cover band called Banjovi.

Gaslighter itself, released in 2020, took that same directness somewhere more personal. Maines wrote much of it during her divorce from actor Adrian Pasdar, naming the album after him without ever using his name, trading political bluntness for something just as unguarded. Producer Jack Antonoff helped shape a record that sounded like nothing the band had made before, proof that the willingness to openly say the uncomfortable things did not depend on the target being a president.

Twenty years after Taking the Long Way and six years after Gaslighter, The Chicks are still taking the long way, still refusing to be gaslit into thinking it wasn't worth it.