#The Dixie Chicks #country #bluegrass #country pop #contemporary country #country rock #Patty Griffin cover
As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, Natalie Maines invited her bandmates—the sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer—to play some bluegrass in her living room in Austin, Texas. They’d been off the road for a few years, and their plan was to hang out, catch up, and remember how good it feels to hear their voices blend in harmony, for no audience but each other. Earlier that year, they’d sued their label for withholding royalties from their first two blockbuster albums. In the years after, they’d find themselves in a righteous battle against the industry, leaving their future as a band uncertain. But for now, they were enjoying the most relaxed, unburdened creative experience of their lives.
It was Maguire on fiddle, Strayer on banjo and dobro, and Maines with a voice like a gut-punch. No amplifiers. No drums. One song Maines suggested they try was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a classic rock staple that Stevie Nicks wrote at the age of 27. Maines, who had just turned 27 herself, found new resonance in its words after the birth of her first child and she thought she could hear her bandmates’ voices in its bittersweet sunshower of a melody. Also on the setlist were two songs written by the folk artist Patty Griffin. One was about speaking your mind in the face of public dissent; the other was about winding up on your deathbed with a long list of regrets.
They weren’t planning on making an album. And even if they were, because of the lawsuit, they figured they couldn’t release it anyway. As the music started coming together and Maines enlisted her father, behind-the-scenes steel guitar legend Lloyd Maines, to produce the sessions, they brainstormed a couple of strategies. After the surprise success of the bluegrass soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they thought maybe these songs would be served best in a film. They contemplated going indie. They considered breaking the mold and sharing the music directly on their website for free, a way to thank the loyal audience they’d amassed as a major breakthrough act in the late ’90s.
The two songs written by Patty Griffin, one of the band’s formative influences, serve as the heart of the album. In “Truth No. 2,” Maines belts in her powerful soprano how “you don’t like the sound of the truth coming from my mouth.” Without the direct narrative of their previous anthems, they meditate instead on the moral of these stories. Maines would become well-known for making enemies by speaking her mind; “Truth No. 2” would become the centerpiece of their songbook. The other Griffin composition, “Top of the World,” finds Maines narrating from a haze between life and death, lamenting “a whole lot of singing that’s never gonna be heard.” The arrangement is the album’s most elaborate. Its orchestral swell is punctuated with dramatic pauses that stretch it out past the six-minute mark, as if the song itself is fading in and out of consciousness. It threatens a long, eerie quiet, an afterlife to be avoided at all costs. From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dixie-chicks-home/
