Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way
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Free Music Notes for Taking the Long Way
Free Music Review: the Dixie Chicks are great!!
Hit: 5 Stars
The music on this latest Dixie Chicks is fantastic! It is definately an answer to all those who refused to listen, burn their music and live narrow minded and small. The CD makes even more sense if you had the opportunity to watch "Shut up and Sing" (which was really interesting to watch their process in making music and gave a really nice insight into their lives...bravo!).
Anyway, the music itself, I think is even more mature and complex than their previous CD's.. Overall, I would say it is a great addition to any Dixie Chick fan's collection...any music fan's collection for that matter.
Free Music Review: MUSIC
Hit: 5 Stars
How did these Gals express my feelings so well? They did it one song at a time!
There is not a bad song on this one..........they are all 5 Stars!
This Group just keeps getting better!!! Please keep writing music in this vein...........
Free Music Review: Very Progressive Country & Rock Music
Hit: 5 Stars
I'm a Progressive Rock person, but the Dixie Chicks have exceeded My wildest expectations with this Album. One will fall in love with every song on it, & if your a Progressive Person, You will understand & feel for the Lyrics of each song. J.E. Silverton, Blue-Oregon.Free Music Review: Taking the Long Way is such a political Album that it reflects Maines' Axl Rose-like Martyr Complex & Bush Derangement Syndrome!
Hit: 1 Stars
Taking the Long Way--should be called "Taking the Liberal Sellout Way for a Pop Audience While Stabbing Country Music Fans in the Back"--is the Dixie Chicks' notoriously billed "comeback" album, after Natalie Maines ineptly ruined their careers by provoking the real, American patriots called country music fans!!!! It's impossible to separate politics and current events from the music on this CD since Taking the Long Way glaringly symbolizes the Chicks' defiant attitude towards those (real Americans and patriots) who demanded an apology from them for their anti-American, anti-Bush tirade on foreign shores in 2003.
Since they alienated the country music fan base--where they rightly received death threats and had their CDs symbolically boycotted by country music radio stations--the music on Taking the Long Way is totally a 180 degree turnaround from the country on their prior CDs. The vast majority of songs on this CD are pop/rock, and as such, they egregiously appeal to a new audience, that audience being those in the more liberal, blue states with an appetite for thoughtless pop/light rocky music--the complete opposite of the patriots, real Americans and conservatives making up the country music fan base. The Chicks' calculatingly necessary shift to the musical left was born not out of artistic "merit"; it was pressured on them by a country music fan base that Maines segregated/antagonized with her anti-Bush tirade. Likewise, because of their shunning of country music fans, their tour last year saw many E-M-P-T-Y arenas and sub-par ticket sales with only liberal, big cities really going to their concerts!!!! Taking the Long Way also debuted with the lowest number of first week sales of ANY of their albums.
This treasonous shift to pop music is seen instantly on the first song, The Long Way Around. Though it begins subtly like a country tune, it's clear they plotted a rockier tune due to the overpowering basslines and speedier guitar "licks." The lyrical content of The Long Way Around is also planned to appeal to a stereotypical liberals' school of thought because of the shamelessly outright rejection of traditional values espoused in that wreck of a song. Maines sings, lewdly, about smoking (obviously some illegal or self-destructive substance) with hippies and also repels the honorable, traditional virtues of her high-school classmates from Lubbock, Texas, for settling down and raising families with their husbands!!!! Predictably, impressionable, liberal apologists will find merit in the song's quaint resolve set to a hopeful melody.
From there, the album's ALL downhill in a worsening, downward spiral as the Chicks furiously plan to attract liberals with their suspicious, newly found values system and remorselessness about Maines' anti-Bush tirade. In Not Ready to Make Nice, Maines scornfully sings of berating Bush all over again if she had a second go at it!!!! Contradictorily, Maines defies reconciliation, then wonders why the heck she keeps paying the price of being hated by a large segment of patriotic Americans, and rightly so. Also disturbing in the song's lyrical content is Maines' admission that her tirade against Bush was totally unwarrantable hatred of a perfect stranger and her plans to tell her daughter that it's "ok" to do so. When Maines sings, "I'm mad as hell," she's clearly using her continuous upkeep of her anti-Bush controversy as a maneuver to generate interest around her band.
Despairingly, simple-minded liberals will misguidedly credit Maines for what they misconceive as her "standing up" for what she believes in. But, the impartial listener will sentence her for being so arrogant that she presumes the world revolves around her and her little controversy. Also noteworthy in that song is the feint-but-audible rock guitar that's prominently used to underscore Maines' resolve--again, verifying the theme that the Chicks have basically turned into a rock/pop outfit.
Though I analytically went into detail on only two songs, I could've just as easily dissected other songs like Easy Silence (comfort in family interspersed with complaints about war and radio stations), Everybody Knows (paranoia and insecurity about being in the spotlight), Bitter End (irreconcilable partings), or Lubbock or Leave It (ridicules Maines' southern hometown of Lubbock, Texas, with scorn of liberal elitism). But, I focused on The Long Way Around and Not Ready To Make Nice to make a convincing case and convict the Chicks for writing an album with a political agenda.
Though the Chicks insecurely made their first, brittle foray into writing some songs, they didn't independently write this record, getting help from liberal radicals like Sheryl Crow. As such, the songwriting quality is noticeably lowered from CDs like Home. This album is just a phonily dressed-up version of the girls exercising their martyr complex, as in assuming that they've been "through hell" because of Maines' foot-in-mouth slur against Bush, yet it reflects on them as a CD wherein they presume that their rightly deserved backlash somehow elevated them to the status of "heroes," totally furthest from the truth.
Free Music Review: Thank you Chicks!!
Hit: 5 Stars
I have to admit that I didn't buy this album when it first came out. Rather it took me until they won 5 Grammys for me to pay attention. After the Grammys, I rented their documentary (one of the greatest things I've ever done!). Now I regret not being a diehard fan and following this amazingly talented band from the beginning. I missed out on 10 years! I've been trying really hard to catch up since!
Like all the Chicks' albums, as I've discovered, this one grows on you with each listen. The lyrics are honest and tell a story - a personal story - and the music wasn't slapped on haphazardly like most albums. Emily and Martie are musicians first and foremost. They take their time with the music, making sure the nuances, the solos and the emotion are just right. They are a perfect match with Natalie who is first and foremost a singer and an entertainer. She understands how to put emotion into a song - whether it be happiness, sorrow, confusion, bitterness, anger, tenderness or love. She sings everything with conviction and passion. I love it!
The documentary was great because you got to see the story behind each of these songs, and each one is intensely personal. There are some political allusions, but only because politics - and the desire of some to blow nothing into a huge something - affected their lives so profoundly. However, you won't find it to be a political album. If you didn't know their history, you would have no clue that politics are being referenced or even where the Chicks stand. Many of the songs are about relationships, and there's a great one for their kids.
If you love this album, you HAVE to work your way back through all the Dixie Chicks albums. Go back through Top of the World Live, Home, Fly and Wide Open Spaces. You'll appreciate each one more as you go backwards. You'll appreciate the growth of a band that has become one of country's all time greats. (Country may not play them on the radio these days, but they still claim them as one of their greats...ironic, no?) In me, they have made a life long fan, simply by being who they are and paying attention to the music (plus they're awesome in concert!).
So, my review? I love love love the Dixie Chicks. Buy this album! You won't regret finding a new passion.