The Best Concerts of the Year: The Chicks at Hayden Homes Amphitheater

As time hurtles forward and our world spins faster and further off its axis, the hit-making heyday of the Dixie Chicks gets smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. It feels like you have to squint to even remember that it happened.

Part of that is the simple passage of time; this month marks 25 years since the release of Wide Open Spaces. Part of it is the arc of their career, which was forever altered by a disapproving comment singer Natalie Maines made about the then-American president in 2003. You still won’t hear them on mainstream country radio, and when you Google their name, you get suggested questions like “Why did they get rid of the Dixie Chicks?”

And part of it, perhaps, is that the Dixie Chicks don’t even exist anymore. They dropped the “Dixie” in 2020, citing the word’s racist connotations, and are now just The Chicks.

None of that stuff mattered very much, though, on a gorgeous August evening at Hayden Homes Amphitheater in Bend, Oregon, where Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer packed a couple hours with big hits, old faves and new cuts from their 2020 album Gaslighter, reminding me that they are one of the great American bands of their era.

The setlist was a treasure chest of bangers, as The Chicks played arena-pop anthems (“Taking the Long Way,” “Gaslighter”) alongside soulful protest songs (“March March,” “For Her”), plus pedal-to-the-metal barnburners (“Sin Wagon,” “White Trash Wedding”) that proved there’s still a top-shelf string band at the core of The Chicks’ global operation. They smartly morphed “Long Time Gone” into a cover of Beyoncé‘s “Daddy Lessons” (which, of course, samples “Long Time Gone”), and went into full zydeco blues-jam mode for “Lubbock or Leave It.”

And when they played the songs everyone knows by heart—“Travelin’ Soldier,” “Cowboy Take Me Away,” “Wide Open Spaces” and my favorite, “Goodbye Earl”—they inspired a sea of people to sing along at the top of their lungs in a way that felt not like nostalgia, but real and relevant and now. It was a good reminder that The Chicks’ chart-topping days might—might, I said, not “are”—be in the past, but the songs that got them there resonate as much now as they ever did.

Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.

Listen to an exclusive Dixie Chicks concert at Tramps in New York from July 29, 1998 below.