The Chicks

Busking in Dallas, 1989

The band began in Dallas in 1989, when sisters Martie and Emily Erwin — fiddle and banjo respectively — formed a bluegrass group with Robin Lynn Macy and Laura Lynch. Three independent albums followed: Thank Heavens for Dale Evans in 1990, Little Ol' Cowgirl in 1992 and Shouldn't a Told You That in 1993. Macy left in 1992 and Lynch, who had sung lead and played upright bass, departed in 1995.

Natalie Maines took the lead vocal, and the trio's commercial run began immediately. Wide Open Spaces, released in 1998, was eventually certified 13 times platinum; Fly, from 1999, reached diamond certification. Home, in 2002, pulled the arrangements back towards acoustic string-band playing. By 2020 the group had sold 33 million certified albums worldwide, making them the best-selling all-woman band and the best-selling country group since Nielsen SoundScan began counting in 1991.

10 March 2003

On 10 March 2003, on stage in London in the days before the invasion of Iraq, Maines told the audience the band was ashamed that President George W. Bush was from Texas. Country radio dropped them, organised boycotts followed, and airplay and ticket sales fell. Maines apologised at the time and withdrew the apology three years later.

That sequence is the subject of the record the band is now touring, and the two decades since have turned the episode into something the trio handle themselves rather than something done to them.

The album that answered back

Taking the Long Way arrived in 2006, built with players from outside the Nashville session system — Mike Campbell and Keb' Mo' among them — and topped the Billboard 200. Its lead single, Not Ready to Make Nice, refused the retraction the industry had wanted. At the Grammy ceremony in February 2007 the record won all five categories it was nominated in, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. The band's career total stands at 13 Grammy Awards.

Then came a 14-year gap in studio work. Gaslighter, produced by Jack Antonoff, was released by Columbia in July 2020, weeks after the group announced on 25 June 2020 that it was dropping "Dixie" from the name over the word's associations with slavery. Laura Lynch, the founding bass player, was killed in a road collision in December 2023.

The reissue

Legacy Recordings issued Taking the Long Way (20th Anniversary Edition) on 2 October 2026, as a triple LP with an etching of handwritten lyrics and revised artwork, and to streaming services. It carries five additional tracks: demo versions of Not Ready to Make Nice, So Hard and Flowers, plus two previously unreleased recordings, Thin Line and Live Wire, available to stream for the first time.

In the announcement the three members said it was hard to believe 20 years had passed, that the songs took them back to one of the most defining periods of their lives, and that the material still resonated. It is their most recent release; there is no announced successor to Gaslighter.

Where they stand in October 2026

The Taking the Long Way 20th Anniversary Tour was announced in May 2026, with an artist presale on 3 June and general sale on 4 June through the band's own site. It covered 16 cities, opening at the Fox Theatre in Detroit on 30 September and finishing with two nights at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on 1 and 2 November. On 12 August the band added Philadelphia, Boston and a third Dolby night on 3 November. The run is described by the band as sold out.

During the Beacon Theatre nights in New York in mid-October, Maines returned to the 2003 line. She told the room they had thought that was the worst it could get, then said she would now give George Bush "a big wet kiss", and that the band is now ashamed the president of the United States is from the United States. A White House spokesperson replied in a statement to Fox News reported on 14 October, calling her "a despicable nobody" with a "peanut-sized brain". Both the remark and the response restated the terms of the original row without changing either side's position.

Eleven dates remain on the schedule: Nashville on 15 October, the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio on 17 and 18 October, Bass Concert Hall in Austin on 20 October, Benaroya Hall in Seattle on 25 and 26 October, the Masonic in San Francisco on 29 and 30 October, and the three Hollywood nights.

On stage as a document

The staging is deliberately small for a band that last toured stadium-scale sheds. The trio sit on chairs at centre stage with six backing musicians, and the screens behind them run archival news footage of the 2003 backlash, studio material from the album sessions, and home video from that period. In Detroit, Maines opened by saying the band was nervous and excited to be playing the first show of the tour; in Chicago, over the 2003 footage, she noted that little did they know it could get so much worse.

Reviewers have treated the first half as narrative rather than concert. Selena Fragassi, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times after the Auditorium Theatre show on 3 October, described a storytelling-heavy evening of more than two hours in a largely sold-out house, with the audience raising fists and beer cans when Maines updated the Bush remark. Chris Stevens, reviewing the Boston date of 9 October for Boston.com, called it an evening of politics and music about resilience, friendship and love, and wrote that the band could have sat on stage making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for two hours and drawn the same cheer. Asked on stage about the old instruction to shut up and sing, Maines answered: "No, thank you."