Dixie Chicks: Three Years After the Storm
May 23, 2006 — -- Three years after speaking out against the president and angering many in the country western music community, the Dixie Chicks say they are wiser but still spirited and unbowed.
Their new single, "Not Ready to Make Nice," is about their struggle for self-expression.
"It would have felt very false to just kind of go, 'OK. Nothing happened.' And there is obviously this important issue that hasn't been dealt with, because we did go away to have kids, and I think a lot of people thought we were in hiding," said group member Emily Robison. "But we went away to have lives and let things settle down a little bit, and to come back out and act as if nothing had happened would have been strange to me."
The Dixie Chicks, the best-selling female artists in the country, were riding the wave of a giant album "Home" and a No. 1 hit "Landslide" when lead singer Natalie Maines said that she was embarrassed to be from the same state as President Bush at a London concert. It was the eve of the Iraq War, and the group faced a torrent of anger and backlash.
Martie Maguire said that the reaction to Maines' comment was "really absurd, really strange, and then when I think back to what she said: 'She's ashamed our president is from Texas.' It's like where is the hoopla? How does that make somebody so angry?"
"Aren't there much more important things than what a country singer thinks about the president?" Robison said. "It's just being caught in a moment when our country wasn't tolerant of those things."
Country radio stations pulled their music, and people destroyed their album, hounded their relatives, and tracked them down with death threats.
In an interview with ABC News' "Primetime" during the immediate aftermath, Maines tried to explain that her words were about fear of heading into a war that she didn't think was justified.
"It's not that I don't ever want you to clean things up and fix things. It's just why can't we find the chemical weapons first?" she said. "Just why tomorrow?"
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