The Chicks Play Taking the Long Way in Full at Nashville Anniversary — SkimNews
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- The Chicks performed Oct. 15 at Nashville's new venue the Truth, playing Taking the Long Way front to back with Sheryl Crow — who was part of the original recording — joining them for the 20th anniversary show
- Concert merch included "still not ready to make nice" sweatshirts and "we're ashamed the president of the United States is from the United States" tees, directly echoing Maines' 2003 London comment about George W. Bush
- Natalie Maines told the audience to vote in November's midterms, citing a recent visit to the Obama Center and calling the current president a "deranged nutjob," explicitly linking the band's 2003 stance to present political urgency
- Motherhood themes from the album were foregrounded: Maines' son Slade joined on "Lullaby," and Maguire opened "So Hard" by sharing her fertility struggles on tour, including candid references to "egg drops" and showing her vagina to many doctors
- The second set featured country radio staples that had uneven histories with programmers, including "Goodbye Earl" — once rejected for being a murder ballad by women — plus "Wide Open Spaces," "Cowboy Take Me Away," "Landslide," and "Travelin' Soldier," which was topping charts when the London incident occurred
- The Beyoncé collaboration "Daddy Lessons/Long Time Gone" was staged as a rebuke to gatekeeping, framed by the article as proof that both artists were "country enough" despite industry resistance — with the fiddle and banjo doing the arguing
- The band members played multiple instruments throughout — banjo, guitar, dobro, fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, tambourine — in what the review frames as a deliberate counter to purist expectations and a showcase of the musicianship that defined them even before the controversy
Why it matters: Twenty years on from the incident that defined them, The Chicks have chosen amplification over apology — Maines used the Nashville stage to explicitly extend 2003's political stance into 2026 midterm mobilization, while the setlist construction (album in full, then classics that country radio once rejected) reframes their career as a sustained act of defiance rather than a single regrettable moment.
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