Programme
- The Chicks announced a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of 'Taking the Long Way.'
- 'Taking the Long Way' is the trio's Grammy-winning album and its response to political backlash.
- The source headline, 'The Chicks Still Won't Make Nice,' echoes the band's defiant stance two decades on.
The Chicks have announced a new tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of "Taking the Long Way," the album that became the trio's Grammy-winning response to political backlash.
The announcement, reported in the source item under the headline "The Chicks Still Won't Make Nice," confirms that the band will mark two decades since the record's release with live performances. The tour news frames the album not as a nostalgia exercise but as the continuation of a stance the trio never retracted.
What is 'Taking the Long Way'?
"Taking the Long Way" is the studio album The Chicks released in 2006. The record arrived after the group faced sustained political backlash, and the album functioned as the trio's musical answer to that controversy. The project went on to win Grammys, a fact central to how the band and its audience now remember the period.
The source item describes the new tour explicitly as a celebration of the album's 20th anniversary and identifies the record as "the trio's Grammy-winning response to political backlash."
Why does the title 'Still Won't Make Nice' matter?
The headline riffs on "Not Ready to Make Nice," the band's signature defiant statement from the "Taking the Long Way" era. Twenty years later, the framing remains pointed. The word "still" carries the story: the trio has not softened the position that once made it a target of boycotts and radio bans.
That stance is the throughline between the album's original moment and the anniversary tour. The band built "Taking the Long Way" as a rebuttal; the tour presents that rebuttal again, unchanged in posture, two decades removed from the events that provoked it.
What does the tour signal now?
Anniversary tours routinely monetize catalog milestones, but this one carries a sharper edge because the album at its center was itself born from conflict rather than celebration. The Chicks are reviving a record whose commercial and critical success — including its Grammy wins — was inseparable from the political fight that preceded it.
Two decades on, the trio's refusal to disown that history remains the defining fact of the story, and the tour will test whether that defiance still draws the audiences that once made the album a phenomenon.
Source: NYT Arts
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Senior reporter covering technology and product news in arts in the broadest sense at Arts & Voices.
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