“Without You”
The Chicks
Written by Natalie Maines and Eric Silver
Radio & Records
#1 (2 weeks)
January 19 – January 26, 2001
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
January 27, 2001
Among Chicks fans past and present, it seems like Fly is the consensus album.
It captured the band as they slowly matured from their girl power persona, while still actually fulfilling that image on many more tracks than they did on Wide Open Spaces.
As someone who still sees Home as the most astonishing leveling up of the current century, I can hear the promise of that upcoming set on several tracks on Fly, including “Without You.” But the song is so thematically and structurally similar to “You Were Mine,” that I can see it appealing to Wide Open Spaces-era fans as well.
I was lukewarm on “Mine,” but “Without You” remains among my favorite hits from their sophomore set. It feels less like a story written from an outside point of view, and more like a visceral expression of heartbreak, with stream of consciousness thoughts like, “I guess you got what you wanted…but what about me?”
Maines and company sounded a bit dreary to my ears on “Mine,” but here, they give me chills for the first time with their three part harmony going into the final chorus, right after Maines hits a twangy power note. When they sing together at that moment, it’s a preview of what I’ll love so much about their later work, triggering that same “hurts so good” feeling in me that happens when I hear Linda & Emmylou or Patty & Vince.
Fly also indicated that the Chicks were going to be album artists, as the most enduring hits from the album besides earlier chart-topper “Cowboy Take Me Away” have been “Goodbye Earl,” which missed the top ten, and “Sin Wagon,” which radio wouldn’t touch even after the Chicks swept the CMA Awards in 2000.
That a simple, heartfelt ballad like “Without You” got to the top warms my heart, and it’s a lovely record worth revisiting if you haven’t listened to it recently.
“Without You” gets an A.
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Yes, this is a great song. Great harmonies. This and Cowboy Take Me Away are probably the only songs I like by them. But this is beautiful and definitely deserves an A.
There are a number of beloved hit songs out there where I just don’t get the appeal. This is one of them. Both the lyrics and melody of “Without You” feel generic and interchangeable and it’s by far the least memorable of the eight singles The Chicks released from “Fly”. I don’t always agree with the oft-cited critique that songs need more specific details to sell the narrator’s respective adulation or heartbreak, but this is a perfect example of a song where the criticism fits like a glove. The only moment where I genuinely feel the narrator’s pain here is the one you cited, “I guess you got what you wanted…but what about me?”
And in further contrast to your take, I felt “You Were Mine” deeply in my bones, as well as future single Chicks’ single “Heartbreak Town”. This song feels like a thin-reed imitator of the former and an undeserved chart overperformer compared to the latter. The harmonies are strong and Natalie Maines does as good as can be expected on vocals selling a chorus as limp as “my heart’s stuck in second place…oooooo….without you”. I’m sure I’ll be in the minority here but this one falls flat as a pancake for me.
Grade: C
Why does this feel like their most forgotten #1 hit? I don’t think I heard it even once after it fell off the charts, and I never hear it named among their popular songs. And it is every bit as good as any of the other songs that made Fly and Wide Open Spaces such compelling albums.
I feel like the hits from the entire first quarter of 2001, outside “Born to Fly” and “One More Day”, just fell off the face of the earth.
I am ok with this grade although it might be a slight stretch. Maybe an “A-“. The Chicks were always hit or miss with me. This is certainly a very good performance.