Dixie Chicks – Taking The Long Way

This recording has been the subject of the most speculation, anticipation and even dread of any major release of this decade, for reasons that are obvious enough.

It has been three years now since the political brouhaha that sidelined the Dixie Chicks as chart-topping, innovative country record-makers, but public recall of the whole sorry, pick-your-side episode hasn’t faded much — even as sentiments about the still-ongoing war and its president have shifted more than a little among some of the very people the Chicks pissed off in the first place.

As Natalie Maines, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire have concentrated on increasingly busy and children-filled private lives — and, it turns out, on more songwriting than ever — it’s become an open question whether this album would be some sort of political statement. Not to mention, given their public comments on leaving country music for pop or adult rock or something, what it would sound like. Some Fleetwood Mac record? Or maybe, once Rick Rubin was announced as producer, The Chicks Come Around?

Now we’ve got answers. Those who’d never paid much attention to the Dixie Chicks’ often startlingly fine, instrumentally adept and conceptually daring music until they became maltreated victims of posturing retribution may be disappointed that there are, in fact, no big political statements here as such. But there’s a lot more comment on “what we’ve been though” than might be expected. The single that listeners may have heard for a few weeks now, the explicitly defiant “Not Ready To Make Nice”, isn’t the only song here on that theme.

As for the sound, not more than two or three of the disc’s fourteen tracks could be called even “sort of country” — though Emily’s banjo and Martie’s violin (I hesitate to call it a “fiddle”) are prominent enough at strategic moments throughout the record. For the first time, all of the songs here are credited to some combination of the Chicks themselves, mainly to all three, plus such rock and pop luminaries as Gary Louris, Neil Finn, Mike Campbell, Sheryl Crow, Pete Yorn, Dan Wilson (of Semisonic) and Keb Mo. Campbell and fellow Heartbreaker Benmont Tench are among the guest musicians. Get the picture? The sounds vary — from quite lean to choral dramatic, and along a roots-rock, folk-rock, even Celt-rock sort of continuum that may sometimes strike readers here as “Tres Dixie Chicas” in effect.

So, yes, Taking The Long Way sounds different enough from their last studio set, 2002’s largely acoustic Home, to mark a definite, deliberate new turn. It would be possible to overdramatize that; after all, there were certainly pop elements in their country mega-hit albums Fly and Wide Open Spaces. But the lyrical themes and references, and the occasional clear honky-tonk or bluegrass-inspired turns that kept those outings modern country, are now, in a phrase, a long time gone. If the original pre-Natalie version of the band that sounded folk on record, played like bluegrassers, and dressed like Dale Evans was the Dixie Chicks’ Act One, and the influential modern-country star turn was their Act Two, then this adult alternative style — obvious enough even in their new “long cool women in black dresses” publicity stills — is truly a third act.

The album itself has something much like three acts in its structure. The opening tracks — “The Long Way Around”, “Easy Silence”, “Not Ready To Make Nice” and “Everybody Knows” — are all songs of isolated anger and dislocation, and, not to make too fine a point of it, refer pretty constantly to The Trouble They’ve Seen. “I moved with the shakers, wouldn’t kiss all the asses they told me to,” they declare at one point; elsewhere, they address the “monkeys on the barricades” who are “warning us to back away” and who “form commissions trying to find the next one they can crucify.”

The sequence is quiet then loud, angry then hurt, and, in its self-pitying martyrdom, easily the weak part of the album — but perhaps not a dispensable part. Because the rest of the songs will evolve away from that place, resulting in some of the strongest, most involving music this group has yet produced.

The middle section, tracks 5-10 more or less, is about reconnecting after the burned isolation described in that first segment. The doleful, dramatic “Bitter End” that starts this act still talks of showbiz types who’d be there “as long as I’m the shiniest star,” but instead of giving this betrayer what-for, Natalie sings “Farewell to old friends, we’ll still be here when you come ’round again” — not an angry boast, but a tentative invitation. There’s the quietly strummed, utterly committed “Lullaby” to some or all of those new babies in the Chicks’ households — in tones that speak more to adults than the young girls previously a key part of their audience — and then “Lubbock Or Leave It”, the regionally-audacious questioning of the complete perfection of Texas, in which the reasons Buddy Holly took off for Greenwich Village and may have still gotten to heaven are detailed.

In “A Silent Home”, there’s the absence of a mother or perhaps sister who has left the place silent, as the singer tries “to connect all the pieces you left,” to carry on recalling the years “when your mind was clear.” The specifics are a little vague, deliberately so, but the urge to reconnect with this other person is utterly convincing — as is the connecting nostalgia in “Favorite Year”, the following track. And then there’s the stunning “Voice Inside My Head”, which posits the credible but rarely-heard-in-song situation of a woman who “has a place, a husband,” is settled, happily mostly — but still wonders on down days how life might have been with the guy she left a decade before, needing to believe the choice made was the right one. Adult stuff.

That brings us to the disc’s Act Three, which is all about reconstruction, and acceptance — from the “well, it’s all good so let’s dance” song “I Like It”, to ending literally on a note of hope and expectation with the black-churchy “I Hope” (previously released last fall as a digital download to benefit Katrina victims).

For lovers of country music, it would be easy to regret the Chicks’ departure, however temporary or permanent. Their daring and success have made it possible for any number of acts to have a fiddle or banjo back on the radio — but that’s happening now whether the Dixie Chicks are on the same radio station or not. They can go where they want to go, short or long way around, and these often smashing results suggest it’s a worthwhile excursion.

There’s no rule, by the way, that says a third act has to be the final one. In tragic-comical-historical-pastoral productions, as that performing writer Willie Shakespeare knew, there might just as well be five.