The boat depicted in the song “Tights on My Boat” belongs to country-pop superstar and Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines; the tights, manifestly, do not. The song’s opening lines: “I hope you die [slightest pause] peacefully in your sleep / Just kidding, I hope it hurts like you hurt me.” The song’s refrain: “And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.” The song’s very probable target: Maines’s ex-husband. Hit the deck.
We should clarify that the vessel in question is not Maines’s, but maybe just named after Maines: Her ex-husband, former Heroes actor Adrian Pasdar, has long waxed rhapsodic about his beloved sailboat, the Nautalee. That’s what it’s called. We should further clarify that most of this is speculative: The unhappy couple were married for 17 years and finalized their divorce in 2019 after a two-year legal battle so gnarly Pasdar attempted to seize all of Maines’s unreleased music, lest her (speculatively) vituperative lyrics violate their prenup’s confidentiality agreement. Though a line like “I hope you never find a sock to match the other one / Hey, will your dad pay your taxes now that I’m done?” could be about anyone, really. Use your imagination.
“Tights on My Boat” is deceptively lighthearted, driven by little more than a slippery acoustic guitar and a tipsy silliness: It is a rough and rowdy and afterparty-only “bus song,” as in tour bus, in the road-warrior parlance of Nashville blowhard and longtime Chicks arch-enemy Toby Keith. But the band—known until late June as the Dixie Chicks, and since their mid-’90s commercial explosion consisting of Maines and multi-instrumentalist sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire—can never afford to be totally frivolous. The Texas trio’s fury, and vulnerability, and fearsome resolve bleeds into everything. As the song crescendos, Maines fixates on the line “You’re gonna get what ya got comin’,” the syllables warping and sharpening into a prayer turned lament turned threat turned mantra turned slightly avant-garde vocal exercise.
Maines, chatting with Vulture last week about the impetus behind “Tights on My Boat,” cheerfully offered the following: “I would say … well, never mind. I’m not gonna say a word.” A fine mist of unease and reticence and abnormality permeates everything about Gaslighter, the Chicks’ first album in 14 years, a spry but sorrowful affair released amid both a global pandemic and the progressive reckoning, triggered by the international protests following the death of George Floyd, that finally convinced the band to boot the “Dixie” from their name. The somber and extra-resolute “March March,” driven by a spare electronic beat and inspired in part by gun-violence activist Emma Gonzalez—“Standing with Emma and our sons and daughters / Watchin’ our youth have to solve our problems”—was not, of course, written with the specifics of this terrible and crucial moment in mind, but it fits in nicely nonetheless.
The rest of Gaslighter, from the peppy and mortifyingly pissed title track on down, is far more viscerally personal and less outwardly political, though of course, few artists living or dead have melded the personal with the political quite like the Chicks—with greater audacity, or with greater consequences. This is only their second album since Maines criticized then-President George W. Bush onstage in London in March 2003, triggering the single ugliest backlash (the piles of CDs crushed by a tractor, the death threats, the near-total country radio blackout) in pop music history. What I still hear in this band’s music is a profoundly upsetting sense of exile. Their spare and gorgeous 2002 album Home, an instant smash due in large part to their towering cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” is still my favorite, but even its best songs, like the weepy bluegrass ballad “A Home,” now have a doubly haunted quality. You can feel the searing heat of the armageddon they don’t yet know is coming.
The Chicks exorcised many of those demons on 2006’s grandiose and Grammy-feted Taking the Long Way, most notably on the defiant power ballad “Not Ready to Make Nice.” But there is trauma and defiance aplenty on Gaslighter, even at its brightest and poppiest. “My husband’s girlfriend’s husband just called me up / How messed up is that? / It’s so insane that I have to laugh,” Maines sings on the bombastic “Sleep at Night,” just before the supernova chorus hits, though not before she undercuts the tawdriness of it all: “But then I think about our two boys trying to become men / There’s nothing funny about that.” In the hardcore-walking video worthy of some other pop stars you know, Strayer and Maguire literally pull Maines back to her feet after she collapses to the ground.
Gaslighter was produced by beloved pop-star-whisperer Jack Antonoff, forever praised by deities from Lorde to Taylor Swift to Lana Del Rey to the Chicks themselves as a quirky, ’80s-cheese-indebted sonic genius, not to mention a world-class listener and empathizer. He is not the only reason “Sleep at Night,” with its triumphant pettiness and shrewd arena-rock enormity, could just as soon be a Taylor Swift song: Swift both worships the Chicks and, per her troubled 2020 documentary Miss Americana, regards their 2003 downfall as a cautionary tale about pop stars who get too outspoken.
But a little of Antonoff’s shiny fussiness goes a long way, and a little too much gets a little grating: “Everybody Loves You” is an effective slow-burn tearjerker with, only four tracks into the album, an awfully familiar lyrical theme (“Why does everybody love you? / They don’t know enough about you”), but Maguire’s searing fiddle solo has to work hard to cut through the twee gauziness of it all. It’s a duel between whimsy and grit, though on a Chicks song there’s never really a doubt as to which side will win.
In the very unlikely event you’re expecting this album to recreate the carefree splendor of country-megastar touchstones like 1998’s Wide Open Spaces or 1999’s Fly, the upbeat “Texas Man,” with its soothing acoustic-guitar chug and present-tense approach to love or at least lust, is a throwback that’s also, reassuringly, looking forward. But there’s a weariness even to the infectious joy of the chorus:
Everybody wants top market
But I’m a little bit unravelled
Everybody wants the new model
But I’m a little bit more traveled
Of the handful of melancholia-drenched ballads and hyper-ballads that punctuate Gaslighter’s second half, “My Best Friend’s Weddings” is among the most well traveled (note the plural noun) and the most hopeful, Antonoff’s soaring whimsy lifting the song up without quite weighing it down. But “Julianna Calm Down” is the one that got me, a murmuring wallow that slowly morphs into a pep talk that calls out the women it’s trying to empower by name, a series of thunderous personal appeals so passionate you can imagine it uplifting anyone, anywhere:
And Violet calm down
And Juno calm down
And Yaya calm down
And Berta calm down
Hesper calm down
And Amelia calm down
Naomi calm down
Julianna calm down
If the Chicks can survive what they survived, then you, Hesper or Berta or Julianna or whoever, can too. You emerge from Gaslighter as bruised and rattled and enraged as Maines does, but replenished as well, the outrage of what she’s had to survive giving way to the colossal sense of achievement of her having survived it. It’s not right, but it’s OK; those weren’t her tights, but she is the captain now.
