They may look like nice cowgirls from Texas, but Grammy-winning trio the Dixie Chicks are bucking the good ol' country boys network. The chicks with attitude chat to Brian Boyd.
'First Martie got married, then me. Then I filed for divorce. Then Emily got engaged. Martie filed for divorce. Emily got married. I remarried, then Martie remarried. Martie met her Irish husband, Gareth, at my sister's wedding, but he already had a girlfriend and was with another girl at the wedding. But in the end they got married. So now Martie is my sister's sister-in-law."
Good God. Natalie Maines, lead singer with the Dixie Chicks, is trying to unfurl the complicated relationships shared by the three-piece band, and perhaps unwittingly providing an instant soap opera plot for anyone reading this. It does help a bit if you realise that Emily and Martie are sisters, but not much. "I know it's complicated, and it all makes for one gnarled family," she says. "It's not inbred at this point, but it is sort of. Anyway, it works."
Seems like everything is complicated in Dixie Chicks land. When their breakthrough 1997 album, Wide Open Spaces, became the biggest-selling album ever by a country music group, they were criticised by the Nashville musical thought police for flouting country music conventions. When they followed that album up with 1999's Fly, they were accused of "going back to their trad roots", and now with their new album, Home, they've gone all rootsy and bluegrass, which has wrong-footed their critics from both ends of the spectrum.
To add another layer of complexity, this current album is being released on a record label that, just two years ago, they were suing for "systematic thievery, fraud and racketeering". After the massive success of their first two albums - combined sales are near the 30 million mark - the Dixie Chicks went to their label, Sony, to renegotiate their record deal so they would earn more royalties. The row got messy, with Sony suing the group for breach of contract and the Dixie Chicks counter-suing that Sony owed them $5 million in unpaid royalties.
Before both parties appeared in court, though, an amicable settlement was reached with reliable sources saying the Dixie Chicks got a $20 million "bonus" payment and had their royalty rate increased to 20 per cent (almost double the industry average).
Now that they and their label are the best of friends again, they don't really like talking about what they refer to as "the situation", but Natalie Maines does say that the court case, if they had taken it, could have had massive repercussions for how record labels structure their contracts with musicians.
"We could have been in the history books, I suppose," she says, "but we had spent too much time and money on the case, and everyone is happy now with the deal we have. We didn't want to put our pride in front of our logic. Both us and Sony had to swallow some pride, but we're all OK about it".
And the final complication, for now, is that just last week their records have been burned and smashed by some US fans following Maines's remark at a concert in London that the Dixie Chicks were "ashamed" that George Bush was from Texas (all three Dixie Chicks live in Texas). The remark was made in relation to Bush's policy on Iraq and saw the group being dropped from US radio playlists (their airplay across US radio went down by 30 per cent immediately following Maines's remark). In one event organised by a Louisiana country music radio station, their records were run over by a tractor.
Maines later issued a statement saying, "As a concerned American citizen, I apologise to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect".
With the apology out of the way, Maines now says "the reason for the remark was that I just wanted to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers' lives are lost".
Maines says the group is almost inured to criticism and controversy now. They started out in 1989 when sisters Martie (fiddle) and Emily (banjo) were a cowgirl revival group who would busk on street corners. Taking their name from a Little Feat song, Dixie Chicken, they slowly moved towards a more contemporary sound and, by the time Maines had been drafted in (1996), got themselves some "attitude".
Dressing in a post-punk fashion (to the dismay of Nashville types), insisting on playing their own instruments and not using the usual session musicians, they began singing raunchy "liberated women" songs.
"Even though it seems like we're always making waves, it's never been intentional on our part," says Maines. "People said we shouldn't sing about subjects like wife-beaters, but we sing about what we feel is right."
Because of the way they looked (easy on the eye), what they wore and the amount of records they sold, they were dubbed "The Spice Girls Of Country" - and it wasn't meant as a compliment. "Ok, fine, we like to dress up and wear make-up," says Maines tetchily, "but listen to our music - we play all our own instruments - and tell me if there's anything in that stupid comparison."
The pressure has been there, Maines admits, to sweeten their sound for even more pop-crossover success, but she says that this is a band who, when asked to provide a mix of their album to music station VH1 with the steel guitar and fiddle mixed out, they turned them down flat.
Pleased that they have confused the critics again with their new album, Maines says that Home sounds as rootsy and as bluegrass as it does because, when they went in to record it, they weren't sure if they still had a record label to put it out.
"Because we were doing the whole thing ourselves with no record company involved, we decided to do what we wanted, so we did covers of some our favourite singer/songwriters (Patty Griffin, Radney Foster and Darrell Scott) as well as our own songs.
"This wasn't really supposed to be our third album, we certainly didn't record it with that intention because at the time the whole row with the label was still ongoing. We decided just to make it as experimental and as acoustic as possible. There are no drums on this album at all, which is unheard of in commercial country music. That's why, I think, we confuse people. We get criticised by different sections at different times, but we continue to baffle them. People say what we do is traditional country with a modern pop sensibility, but at this stage we've heard most every description possible."
However you call it, it's a winning formula. After picking up three Grammy awards earlier this year, the Dixie Chicks set another record just last month when they announced details of their new world tour (Irish date to be confirmed).
On the first day of ticket sales, they sold $49 million worth of tickets (867,000 tickets), breaking a sales record that had been previously held by Madonna, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney over the years.
"That might give our critics something to think about" says Maines.
Home is on the Sony label.