That plaintiveness is part of what sometimes strands Taking the Long Way between adolescent bravado and adult angst. You can’t blame the trio for feeling hurt and angry over the way they’ve been treated. But at times they come close to self-pity. “Why isn’t she [Maines] singing about Iraq?”, Sasha Frere-Jones asked in his New Yorker review. Thank God she isn’t. That way lies didacticism. Throughout Taking the Long Way, the Dixie Chicks try to use the price they paid for speaking out as a metaphor for the price people pay for not conforming. But instead of enlarging their focus, the specificity of the songwriting (“They form commissions trying to find/The next one they can crucify”) narrows it to them. And the hurt that is palpable — as every other emotion she expresses is palpable — in Maines’s voice sometimes feels as if she were unconsciously admitting just how much her enemies have got to her.
The album is much more effective when the band spit nails. The opening lines have a real charge: “My friends from high school/Married their high-school boyfriends/Moved into houses/In the same zip codes where their parents live.” Those might not be the most compassionate lines — circumstance keeps some of us in our home towns. But there’s an impolite thrill in admitting you want nothing more than to get the hell out, and a shiver in realizing how close you came to the kind of stultified existence the song details. It can be even more of a thrill to admit that as an adult, to be thankful you haven’t settled for what so many of your contemporaries have.
This is not an album ignorant of the occasional need for compromise. Despite the slick professionalism of Rick Rubin’s production and songwriting aided by the likes of Linda Perry, Peter Yorn, Sheryl Crow, and Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, Taking the Long Way addresses some of the messier realities of married life without smoothing them out or providing melodramatic resolution. In the ballad “Voice Inside My Head,” a married woman wonders what life would be like if she left her husband and child for a former lover, and right to the end, the song remains suspended between the choice of a comfortable, known present and an unknown but possibly more passionate future. And despite the one or two “isn’t parenthood wonderful” lines, “So Hard” — which refers, subtly, to the need of Robison and Maguire to undergo in vitro fertilization — addresses the strain that having children can put on a relationship.
Years ago, praising ’70s teen-poppers the Raspberries, a critic said the band weren’t going to revolutionize rock music but they were going to democratize it, so maybe a teenager could turn on the radio and hear a song about his concerns instead of his older brother’s. In my mid 40s, I’m not ready to give up on rock or hip-hop. I think you’d have to be near dead not to respond to the urgency in Ghostface Killah’s FishScale or Rainer Maria’s Catastrophe Keeps Us Together. But democracy cuts all ways, and if parts of Taking the Long Way are softer than you wish, there’s still something satisfying about an adult-pop album that addresses the contingencies of adult life without turning into mush.
