“Not Ready to Make Nice”
The Chicks
Written by Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer, and Dan Wilson
2006
The most cathartic live music moment that I have ever experienced happened on the Accidents & Accusations tour back in 2006.
The Chicks had finally returned following the scandal that nearly ended things for them, and it just in terms of their career, as we would come to find out.
“We had reached a point where we were laughing a lot about it,” Martie Maguire recalls, “and people didn’t really know how far it had gone. I realized I had suppressed a lot about the death threat. It all came flooding back in the process of writing this song, I think we all realized just how painful it had been for us.”
The band had teamed up with producer Rick Rubin for the follow up to Home, a damn near flawless album that was derailed by the controversy that engulfed the Chicks in 2003. He insisted that they had to write the album themselves, as nobody from the outside could fully understand what they had gone through. He paired them with Dan Wilson of Semisonic fame, who proposed that the Chicks respond to their exile with a call for unity.
“We tried to write about the incident a few times, but you get nervous that you’re being too preachy or too victimized or too nonchalant,” says Natalie Maines. “Dan came in with an idea that was some kind of concession, more ‘can’t we all just get along?’ and I said, nope, I can’t say that, can’t do it. And we talked about it, and he said, what about ‘I’m not ready to make nice?’ From the outside, normal people really weren’t aware of how bizarre and absurd it got. Dan was really good at cluing in to that, saying something that didn’t back down, but still had a vulnerability to it. This album was therapy. To write these songs allowed me to find peace with everything and move on.”
Therapy for their fans too, as I learned that summer night in Madison Square Garden, when the first note of “Not Ready to Make Nice” was played. Coming in the middle of a set that assumed their signature hit was still “Wide Open Spaces,” those opening guitar plucks set off an explosion in the arena. The entire crowd roared, then sang along with every word.
Because we’d felt the rejection, too. When country radio exiled the Chicks, it wasn’t an isolated incident. In a pivot that I still cannot get my head around but Music Row journalists insisted was a necessary reversion to the mean, the 9/11 terrorist attacks somehow meant that country radio listeners didn’t want to hear women anymore. Records from Lee Ann Womack, Shania Twain, SHeDaisy, Faith Hill, and Trisha Yearwood were disregarded. Too frothy for a post-9/11 world, you see.
But the Chicks were too big to touch, and they remained the one superstar female act on the radio, scoring three top two hits from Home and resting at No. 1 with the anything but frothy “Travelin’ Soldier” when the scandal broke and they were banned across the country. Suddenly, the one act everyone agreed was beyond reproach were treated like traitors for speaking their truth in the same tradition as Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.
The silencing of the Chicks closed the door on country music’s era of inclusion and female empowerment, and it would take the democratization of the streaming era to finally jar it open again, country radio and Music Row insiders be damned. And not just for white women, mind you, but for demographics that country radio never played enough to be exiled in the first place.
Back in 2006, we had no idea how long that door would remain shut, and we weren’t terribly optimistic that it ever would. But for one hot summer evening, an arena of true blue country music fans came together for a moment of solidarity and let out a primal scream for what we lost. Eighteen years later, it still only takes that one opening note to transport me back there again.
Additional Listening:
More great post-scandal Chicks records
- “Lubbock or Leave It”
- “Voice Inside My Head”
- “Gaslighter”
- “My Best Friend’s Weddings”
Another cathartic response to the scandal
- Mary Chapin Carpenter, “On With the Song”
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While all the Chicks’ problems happened twenty-plus years ago, it still sickens me to this day that one comment about a sitting president, and one who was about to take us into a war in Iraq that was knowingly based on lies, could at the very least stall (and arguably even wreck) a group’s career and at the most extreme result in their lead singer, the one who made the comment, getting at least one overt threat on her life. And then, three years after that, to be told “Can’t you just get over it?”–that’s an insult to one’s intelligence. All of that was what provoked “Not Ready To Make Nice” to exist in the first place; and unfortunately, thought maybe Natalie herself won’t admit it, the song still seems as relevant now at the end of 2024 as it did in the summer of 2006 (IMHO).
I will always say this song is probably my favorite song of all time regardless of genre. Just the production, harmonies, and for me the bridge in the second verse when Natalie Maines’ voice gets more and more furious is just historic and amazing.
It’s a shame that the country music industry dropped The Chicks and inserted the blade on their radio and mainstream career with them, and never really forgave them. I do luckily still here The Chicks on occasion on radio, but nowhere as I should be.
Back to “Not Ready To Make Nice”, it’s just a song that I think captures righteous fury, and anger that is still relevant to this day.
…feeling deeply hurt at its most power- and artful. this even tops lorrie morgan showing up in that restaurant making a rather convincing point how good she had been.
Thank you for this post and for these words, Kevin. The overreaction to Natalie’s rather mild comment was indeed a pivotal moment for so many of us. I’ve not been able to fully embrace country music — a genre I had adored for years — since then. And I definitely have not forgotten or forgiven Reba McEntire for her unfunny joke at the ACMs in 2006 (“If the Dixie Chicks can sing with their foot in their mouths, surely I can host this sucker.”) It was a moment when the Dixie Chicks really could have used a fellow female superstar’s support. Instead, she threw them under the bus for a cheap laugh.
This song never personally moved me the way that the best of the Dixie Chicks’ songs did, but I loved what it represented and wish it could have brought about a Dixie Chicks revival. At the time of this song’s release, the Dixie Chicks were already vindicated for their comment by all but the hardest-core partisan dead-enders. They shouldn’t have been ready to make nice because it was them who deserved to be apologized to! Twenty years later, the darkest irony is that the same knuckle-draggers who were bulldozing Dixie Chicks’ CDs have put their chips down on someone with a lot more vicious things to say about the mid-2000s “wartime President” than Natalie Maines ever said. But they’d never even recognize this tribalism even if directly pointed out to them….and the ones who are old enough would still spew venom about the Dixie Chicks.
The other thing that bugs me about this is how so many of those dead-enders on the Right and in certain parts of the country music community like to b**ch, whine, and bellyache about so-called “Cancel Culture” these days, when they practically invented it by effectively “cancelling” the Chicks. It is rank hypocrisy and stupidity on an industrial scale (IMHO).
As a sonic experience, I agree with Raymond. I cannot think of any other songs that even come close to rivaling the rising rage in Maines’ vocals in the bridge; it’s cathartic and volcanic.
It is punk to the extent it is pure emotion.
The dramatic intensity of the fiddle and other instrumentation that crashes down and rolls over the final chorus flows with the defiant urgency and cinematic confidence of the musical score from a battle scene from The “Lord of The Rings” trilogy, just as your allies arrive to turn the tide and help hold the high ground.
As important a country music song, and a political song, as has ever been recorded.
Pure brilliance from the lyrics to the performance to the video.