From The Record Shelf: Let some Chicks take you Home...

Well, that escalated quickly. Or, you know, it didn't. When I posted the Dixie Chicks' Fly back in *checks notes* May 2024 (?!?), the idea was to in the following weeks and months to their next two albums as the trio of albums the Chicks started with Fly are all great. Yeah, you read that right, weeks and months. Not, you know, years apart. But as usual, I started to post a bunch of other cool stuff and then kind of forgot about the Chicks. But no more! Maybe because Easter is coming up? Nope, that's not it, though. What really brought me back Home is the recent post about Ron Sexsmith's fabulous Cobblestone Runway album. Thinking its slight electronic embellishment sheen made me think of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Beck's Sea Change, and wouldn't you know it, they all came out the same year. You know which great album also came out in 2002? That's right, the Dixie Chicks' Home which has some claim to be the Chicks' best album. 

About twenty years ago I was hanging out on the Warren Zevon Bulletin Board, and regularly getting into fights - internet fights, thus the stupidest fights imaginable - with that one guy. I've forgotten his name, but I distincly remember him commenting when someone posted a music magazines - probably Rolling Stone - Top 250 albums of, uh, the laf-decade maybe? "If they are so obtuse as to not list Home, their list is coompletely worthless" opined that dude, and while his name might be lost to the fog of memory, his very personal and insistent use of the word obtuse. So, WZBB internet rando from around 2005 - you were wrong about pretty much everything else, but you were right about Home being a great album! 

Home saw the Chicks leaning further into the things that worked so well on Fly. That album introduced some Celtic influences, so Home has an entire jig (or reel?) called "Lil' Jack Slade" that is, uh, Irish bluegrass (?!?) and bring out the uillean pipes and tin whistle for "More Love". Bluegrass is actually a pretty constant presence on the album, and listening back to it it's pretty amazing how bluegrass Home  really is - for a projected megaseller. There's two reasons for this: One is that the Dixie Chicks' confidence level was through the roof, the other was the unprecedented success of the old-timey sounds of the O Brother Where Art Though? soundtrack in between Fly and this album. 

The Chicks still don't trust themselves completely as songwriters, though we have three band songs here, up from one of Wide Open Spaces and but they picked top notch songs from top notch writers, including two from Patty Griffin, Stevie Nicks' old Fleetwood Mac warhorse "Landslide"the beautiful "A Home" by Maia & randy Sharp, a great storytelling song from Bruce Robison ("Travelin' Soldier"), the rollicking opening number "Long Time Gone" penned by Darrel Scott, which has a couple of great lines, poking modern country radio: "They sound tired, but they don't sound Haggard, they got money, but they don't have Cash, they got Junior, but they don't have Hank".   

Of course, country radio would soon poke back, and hard. Natalie Maines' critical comments about George W. Bush and the Iraq warmongering of his administration(boy, were we innocent babes in the woods when we thought that guy was the worst president ever and you couldn't stoop lower than that doof...welp...) saw country radio drop the Chicks like a bad habit, making fourth single "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)" their lowest charting single ever and have "Sitting On Top Of The World", one of the two Griffith numbers, miss the charts entirely. The Chicks and country radio would never be close again.  

History would of course be on the Chicks' side, and on Home's which remains a classic. So, let these chicks take you home for some very fine bluegrass-flavored country music...

And just for funzies, here's my top ten albums from 2002:

1. Patty Griffin – 1,000 Kisses

2. Dixie Chicks – Home

3. Ron Sexsmith – Cobblestone Runway

4. Beck – Sea Change

5. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

6. Counting Crows – Hard Candy

7. Dan Brodie – Empty Arms, Broken Hearts

8. Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band – The Rising

9. Coldplay – A Rush Of Blood To The Head

10. Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around