Goin' Out Walkin'

Goin' Out Walkin'
Dixie Chicks' Home

by Don Allred
September 25 - October 1, 2002 Issue 39

Climb a mountain, turn around.
photo: James Minchin
Dixie Chicks
Home
Open Wide/Monument/Columbia

Soon as I saw the video of "Long Time Gone," debut single from the new Dixie
Chicks album, Home, I knew there was gonna be trouble, and not necessarily as
cute as the usual D.C. trubble (re: fried green tomatoes, served with Thelma &
Louise's picnic-ready peas, so "Goo'bye, Earrrrrrrll." Ha! Ha! Mah name's not
Earl).
I (swallowing the reviewer bait) mean, sure, now they're singing the "I" of a
country-boy narrator who always knew he was different, and "went to
Nashville, tryin' to be the big deal." He gets pumped up, vows he'll be a star. But
then abruptly (star or not?), he's back at home, sitting with the woman he'd left
behind, and everybody and everything's still here, but not quite. Including
the music on the radio: "They sound tired, but they don't sound Haggard/They
got money but they don't have Cash/They"—OK, OK! But, in this vid, we don't see
Mr. Sourgrapes, or any of the people he talks about. We see the Chicks (that
is, destiny's choice Natalie Maines, with founding/hiring/firing foresisters
Emily Robison and Martie Maguire). Holding court in a cantina, looking the best
they've ever looked, as well they might, in ethnista (-sewed?) finery, and the
blondest, regalest realness a freshly re-re-renegotiated contract can buy.

Exhilarated by the smell of Sony Suit blood, mega-mega-Diamond (ho-hum for
your mega-mega-Platinumb) Conquistadorables descend once again from their
2000/2001 A.D.-long Family Values-Trekking Mamaship, currently hovering over the
trembling Nashvile skyline ("Long Time Gone?" Gulp!). Even worse, they're
laughing, tossing away these "righteous" lines aimed at dim Radio, from whose now
finally Chicks-replenished loins Las Chickitas once sprung!

And spring again. For behold, Radio quickly sits on its squawk box, the
better to gobble up said nutritious enrichious po-mouth razzberries, and, in the
name of the songbirds' boutique label, Open(s) Wide, adding four more "cuts"
from Home to its "singles" (virtually mythical morsels) playlist. Thus
buffet-table-buffering "Gone" 's possible impact (as if anyone's really going to say,
"Hey, Chicks're ratt," and click off the radio and go do something more than
whistle along to a cheery car-tune, 'bout a good ol' scapegoat, like we all
need).

So far, so fine, but I hope that the Chicks are laughing because they know
their dear Sony/Columbia stubbornly carried Cash past peaks through some creative and.or commercial dry spells.  Sure, Johnny stirred later,
as did Merle, after they finally got dumped, and went to smaller labels (will
Radio take its Chicks-cue, when Johnny's new album comes marching down home
this fall? Stay chuned!).

Also (re: Radio "soul" versus "junk" food), surely Natalie, Emily, and Martie
recognize that primo Cash stash could wax almost as bubblicious as their supersize, as
he bounced through that "Ring of Fire," with kazoo-like trumpets too. And "I
shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die"  gives great novelty-shock value and more,

 sure as "Heroin."  Pop and Art still need each other, and sugar's best when it's got the
juice.

Juice pumped by heart not rote, and jumping, via Home's questing overview
(stern Chicks, now all in black, watch and wait on the cover),
to where "Long Time Gone" quickly sketches it into  a paper airplane, and which the
no-BS, star-as-fan version of Stevie Nicks's (steady-as-she-goes) "Landslide" further
clears, to bless even a "Travelin' Soldier" with a speck of luck.

Conversationally direct and engaging as "Gone" and "Landslide" and the
recruit himself, all of "Travelin' Soldier" adjusts the album's first
third-person, early-experience lens, to a bareness the girlish-not-girly vocals make
plainer than they let on. Can't even this high school chick tell that the
older kid, whom she briefly meets,  is just passing through, looking for a
sweeter, greener past, and a chance to write,
"I close my eyes and
I think of you"?

I  want to yell, "Don'r go! Come back!" at both of them, as the music slips away again.
It's plain as days, between the lines of his letters,

way before she hears his name called from a list, across
a football field. "Never gonna hold the hand of another guy" is all she can cry,
 so far, but of course it's already too late. His leaving, his isolation, has become hers,
 added to it.

So: "Plainer than they let on," yeah. There's something really up front, yet
always shading back, about Home. Room for spacious (mostly night) skies. And a
beat or two, with or without drums. But notst ju a tastefully shaded, homefront
retro "purity," or anything else too simple. (Nat-debut Wide Open Spaces fell
into a happy/sad/happy/sad running order of tracks, but its closing triple
rippled into Fly, which scored every which way, incl. lobbing its own lonely-planet
title song across Home's simmering [contem] plate).

When another (?) lady reads "Truth No. 2" from what sure sounds like) her own list,
"This time when he swung the bat, and I found myself laying flat, I wondered,
What a way to spend a dime," then chases it with "Swing me way down South," is
she still talking to the same person? Or is she now asking the guy who swung at
her to swing her? Is she alone? I think so, but when she continues, in her odd
stop-start mountain (?) chord-cycles (angular, also "circular," is how they
sound to me, carrying the ear like an eye's got horizons: When a cycle stops
stop-starting and makes a circle, that's progress, or at least a chord's notion
of "progression," isn't it?), offering to "bring you pearls of water on my
hips," does she mean what I think she does? If so, it's not something you (or at
least I) would say to a mirror, although there's one on her list. Her
idiosyncracy seems like a defense, not a freeze-out. To whom it may concern.

Despite the Irish hillbilly twang, "White Trash Wedding"

 is not a bad girl,
or even weird. She's taken (by) the normal course, only really compressed:
"JustsayIdoand-kissmequickthebaby'sonitsway." Mama's got a squeezebox, and Daddy
better not sleep tonight. "Wedding" is fast enough to be mistaken for her
older, rowdier kissin' cousin,"Tortured Tangled Hearts."

 See, there's this subset
of increasingly (are-they-gonna-mush-out-now? There! Oops, not quite yet)
maturing ballads, culminating in the (star-as-fan, no BS) Everlys/Orbisonic,
bolero-istic, D.C. original, "I Believe in Love," WHAP! Cold wet washcloth, care of
those drive-by wisenChicks,  past even cooing, "Bless their tortured, tangled hearts."
What a relief, to look back once again, through that third-person lens. You may
come away with a black eye, but this 'un'll scrub off. And put a cackle in
your twang.

Someone's getting wished "Godspeed," by Chicks and Aunt Emmylou, till they
all disappear, behind a big warm bass. While an old man's awake, with wishes
piling up, drying like leaves. Strings trickle in, useless as tears. 'Til the
bass leads the way to "The Top of the World," and because he's still on this aluminum-backsided  label, he/s spinning toward associations with Jimmy Cagney's "Top of the world, Ma!" before blowing himself up in White Heat: not that kind of perversity, but maybe his own, and certainly some of the same sense of fixation, and momentum. ("Dramatic Stasis, " it's called by Nashville songwriter Alice Randall, also author of The Wind Done Gone.)  I want to hear him again, but not too soon.

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Recent/latest releases from this album's writers include: Patty Griffin
("Truth No. 2," "Top of the World") (also wrote Fly's "Fly"): 1,000 Kisses; Radney
Foster ("Godspeed"): Another Way to Go; Bruce Robison ("Travelin' Soldier"):
Country Sunshine. Darrell Scott wrote "Long Time Gone," Maia Sharp nd Randy Sharp wrote "A Home" (dreamy verses, brittle chorus).,  Gary Nicholson and Tim O'Brien wrote"More Love." 

The rest are by the Chicks, sometimes with help from
heavy friends: "I Believe in Love" and "Tortured Tangled Hearts" were both
written by Natalie, Martie, and Marty Stuart, John R. Cash's old accomplice.

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