Love Letter #1, The Chicks
Dear Chicks,
I feel like we are friends. I know we aren’t really, but I have grown up with your music as my soundtrack. It is a trip, really. Your songs work like bookmarks for me. I listen to Wide Open Spaces and am transported to a car 20 some years ago driving around Midland with my cousin Margy. Top of the World and I am saddling horses on a ranch in Colorado. Everybody Knows and I’m on Jamie’s screened porch in Austin, smoking a cigarette, wine in hand. Holding my (now) wife’s hand driving West on 71, where I figured out I am the cowboy, not the one that needs to be taken away.
We started out together sweet and naïve with Wide Open Spaces and Fly. I was wrapping up college in Texas and those were the perfect tunes to practice feeling what love and expansion and freedom would be like one day. I tried on heartbreak with your music that matched my wildness and gave me something to properly belt.
By the time Home was released, some of my dreams had started to fall apart. It rode me out to the mountains, where I would start to find myself and start to stare down some truths I wasn’t quite yet brave enough to live. When the angry, white country masses started lighting your records on fire it was in perfect time. Those masses gave me a visual confirmation that I needed. That they had no space for different or for truth. Seeing that behavior toward you all released me from an inherited mindset. It wedged into the cracks I had already seen on my own and gave me permission to leave convention to the rest of them.
I finally came out in 2004, right before Not Ready to Make Nice. If it had been the same year, I would have been too raw to access the rage that the record let me touch. It was the healing kind that was a war cry and a balm and I still sing it at the top of my lungs and it takes me right back to the place.
Gaslighter is right in time for this 42-year-old woman, who has traded in stardust and fairy tales for actual scars and life lived. In it, there is this unapologetic ownership of badassness that I am here for. It fits just right. It is an extra bonus that my kids, 6 and 8, now sing this record with me, at the top of our lungs.
So, thank you for giving me a soundtrack and riding the path. Thank you for wearing the heartbreak right out on your sleeves and speaking truth and bull shit to the power structures that want us quiet.
I know it has cost a lot. I have much love and appreciation for the gifts.
Martha
