NATALIE MAINES

BEYOND COUNTRY

Dixie Chick Natalie Maines sorta goes it alone on her new solo album

by Matt Ashare |  
Published May 15, 2013

Natalie Maines is probably best known, especially outside of country music circles, as the face of Dixie Chicks, the Texas-bred trio who have, to date, sold something in the neighborhood of 30 million albums worldwide, fully shattering the glass ceiling for an all-female band in the modern era. She's second-best known, both in and outside of country circles, for a somewhat disparaging, off-the-cuff comment she made during a Dixie Chicks set at London's Shepherd's Bush Empire theater stage about the 43rd President of the United States as his administration was ramping up to invade Iraq — something about being "ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."
    Even though the comment was taken slightly out of context, the "incident," as it has often been referred to in the decade that's passed, generated quite a backlash from conservative pundits, who likened it to treason. Faced with boycotts and even a few tepid demonstrations back in the US, Maines quickly recanted, admitting the remark had been "disrespectful," while still holding firm on what had been her central point: "As a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldier's lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American."
    Any lingering doubts about how Dixie Chicks, and Maines in particular, really felt were more or less put to rest with the release of "Not Ready to Make Nice," the sweetly combative first single from the group's 2006 album "Taking the Long Way," which topped the sales charts even though it received little support from mainstream country radio. By the end of the following year, Dixie Chicks had announced that they'd be taking an indefinite hiatus. Founding members Martie Erwin Maguire and Emily Erwin Robinson began work on Court Yard Hounds, a bluegrass side-project whose debut came out in 2010. Maines, who'd moved to LA with her husband, actor Adrian Pasdar, and their two sons, had mostly kept a low profile until earlier this year, when her spare and haunting cover of the Pink Floyd classic "Mother" turned up on "West of Memphis: Voices for Justice," a fundraising soundtrack for a documentary about a troubling case in which three Arkansas teen outcasts were convicted of murder.
    "Mother," it turns out, was just one of a number of tunes Maines had been recording with singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Harper and his band in loose sessions that coalesced into her newly released debut solo album that includes, and takes its name from the aforementioned Pink Floyd song. It marks a definite, if not quite defiant departure for Maines in several senses. For starters, and most obviously, it's her first complete artistic statement outside of the comfort of Dixie Chicks. Produced by Harper at his personal studio, the album takes a mostly low-key approach to songs that, at their heart, are rootsy, but are definitively not in the vein of mainstream country. And, perhaps most surprisingly, Maines is not one of the primary songwriters on the disc, a new wrinkle, and a rather interesting one given that it's essentially her debut as a solo artist. Instead, she's collected a fairly diverse slate of mostly obscure tunes by a range of artists, including Eddie Vedder ("Without You" from his "Ukelele Songs" solo album); folkstress Patty Griffin (the title track from her unreleased but much bootlegged "Silver Bell" album); the Minneapolis alt-country band the Jayhawks ("I'd Run Away"); former Semisonic frontmant Dan Wilson ("Free Life"); and the late Jeff Buckley ("Lover, You Should Have Come Over"). Harper contributes a tune of his own, and co-write a couple of other with Maines. And there's also a re-recording of a Dixie Chick track that didn't make the cut for "Taking the Long Way."
    Now, it is tempting — so very tempting — to view this album, and so much of what Maines has done over the past decade, as an audacious, maybe even truculent reaction to the nasty backlash that her prescient comments on the war in Iraq generated. First, she offered and apology. Then, emboldened by support from Bruce Springsteen, Merle Haggard, and Madonna, to name just three luminaries who came out on her behalf, she stood her ground in "Not Ready to Make Nice." And, finally, in the wake of being very nearly blacklisted by the country music business establishment, she retreated for a time, only to reemerge as a Nashville exile, thumbing her nose at the cowboy-booted suits on Music Row by recording a rock-oriented solo album. It's a compelling narrative, I suppose. And a convenient one, at that. But, it ignores so many of the other tracks on "Taking the Long Way," which were not politically charged. And, it risks missing the poignant power of "Mother," a thoughtful, introspective, and often atmospheric album that largely eschews easy finger pointing in favor of hard-won insights into the emotional highs and lows that come with being a wife and mother of two at 38.
    Maines, who's more than proven herself as a songwriter, takes on a very different challenge here — using her voice and artistic sensibility to leave her own mark on tracks that come to her with a history. She takes Pink Floyd's "Mother," a dark tale of familial dysfunction in the shadow of the Cold War, and recasts it as a gentler discourse between mother and son, one that achingly explores the gray area where the parental impulse to protect becomes something darker and more controlling. Vedder's "Without You" is fleshed out into a Sheryl Crow-style roots rocker, with a solid backbeat, meaty guitars, and Maines full-throated intonation of the song's frayed romanticism — "I'll keep on healing all the scars/That we've collected from the start/I'd rather this than live without you" — lending the song the full weight it deserves. And, while her reading of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," doesn't stray too far from the hymn-like release of the Buckley original, she plays with the pronouns in the song's two epic verses in a way that suggests that the ennui cuts both ways in this relationship, where both parties are now, "to young to hold on and too old to just break free and run."
    If there's a misstep on "Mother," it the Harper-penned blues rocker "Trained," the disc's only overtly angry salvo, and a track that feels as if it were written for Maines to sing back when she was battling it out with country music's conservative establishment. Harper's much more in his element adding soulful guitar to uncountrified "Come Cryin' to Me," plying "I'd Run Away" with some gutsy slide work, and gracefully enabling Maines on the final track, "Take It On Faith." It's a song she co-wrote with Harper, that delves deftly into the muddy waters of desire and devotion. "I can be on fire," Maines croons, as violins join a deliberate, paired-back beat and skeletal guitars, "Yeah, I can hold my own/But inside I'm just a girl who's scared to be alone." Sure, that could be a allusion to how she felt amidst the fall-out from "the incident" a decade ago. But that reduces the song to so much less than it might be. And, like life, the song and the album are just a whole lot more complicated than that.