It’s fair to say The Chicks have helped me raise my children.
On cross-country road trips, during late-night brownie baking, when I was newly divorced and terrified I broke my kids’ spirits and determined to start each morning with joy and hoping that a Dixie Chicks dance party would do the trick (they were the Dixie Chicks back then) — there they were.
Singing about wide open spaces and cowboys and the untimely demise of Earl. Blending beauty and wit and mistakes and nostalgia and righteous anger and heartbreak into something that always managed to resemble my life in that moment, if only my life had more banjos.
They cheered us up. They gave us a soundtrack. They gave us a common language, a starting point, a safe place. They filled empty spaces.
In 2006, I went to see them perform at Chicago’s United Center. They were slowly mounting a comeback from three years prior, when country music — and a sizable chunk of the country — turned on them for criticizing President George W. Bush and the run-up to the Iraq War.
“Just so you know,” singer Natalie Maines told a London stadium crowd in 2003, “We’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
The trio was banned by U.S. radio conglomerates, bombarded with death threats and labeled “Saddam’s angels.” Toby Keith started performing in front of fake photos of Maines and Saddam Hussein posing together. The band’s CDs and ticket sales tanked. The whole shameful episode is masterfully captured in the 2006 documentary “Shut Up and Sing,” if you’re curious.
I was mounting my own tiny comeback in 2006. My daughter had just been born and I couldn’t figure out who I was before her or who I should be after her or what sort of wizardry people around me were pulling off with their ability to parent and work and still make time for life’s luxuries, like friends. A Dixie Chicks concert was me fumbling around for answers.
I spent the concert wishing my daughter were with me. Not the infant version of my daughter, who was home in her crib at the time. But the eventual version of her I dreamed about — the one who stands by her principles, even when her principles invite blowback. The one who doesn't apologize unless she means it. The one who knows that when people want to change who you are, it’s best to move on without them.
That was 16 years ago. I don’t know, to be honest, if I would remember feeling all that back in 2006. But my daughter reminded me the other night.
The Chicks are on tour now (they dropped the “Dixie” in 2020), and my daughter and I got tickets. A few days before the show, she Googled my name plus their name to see if I’d written about them in the past, and a tiny little Chicago Tribune essay popped up from Aug. 18, 2006: “What the Dixie Chicks can teach my daughter.” I didn’t have a newspaper column, or even a writing job at the time (I was an editor), so I must have begged someone in the entertainment department to let me chime in. I wrote about wishing my daughter were with me, about hoping the band would still be around in a couple decades so we could see them together.
And we got to.
It was more and better than I could have imagined — 16 years ago or today. There’s something magical about experiencing live music in a crowd, and there’s something transformative about doing so with your child singing by your side.
“It's a scary world, and it’s not likely to get any less so,” I wrote, hilariously naive, in 2006. “But watching three fantastically talented women play their hearts out as they sing, ‘You don't like the sound of the truth, coming from my mouth,’ gave me hope that brave chicks can always do their part to make it a better one.”
The world has not gotten less scary. I’ve fumbled toward some answers about how to parent, work and make time for life’s luxuries, like friends. I’ve also learned that however fragile and full and raw and grateful my heart felt with a baby is multiplied by every moment she and I and her brother have spent together since, rounded up to infinity for good measure. Talk about scary.
But I’ve also learned the world is filled with companions and guides and teachers — walking alongside us, narrating our journey, offering examples we wouldn’t know to model, ideas we wouldn’t think to tap, language we wouldn’t know to speak, courage we might not know how to conjure. We just have to remember to look. And listen.
And when possible, sing along.
