The Chicks: The Essential Chicks (2LP) [LEGACY]

Why you'll love it

This gatefold 2LP set brings the Chicks' greatest hits to vinyl for the first time, plus "Daddy Lessons" with Beyoncé. Their run includes six No. 1 country singles, and Wide Open Spaces alone has shipped 13 million copies in the US.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Gatefold jacket

About the album

The band started out in Texas in 1989 as a bluegrass-leaning group. Then sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer found Natalie Maines, a singer with a voice that could cut through a stadium, and everything changed.

The set opens with "Not Ready to Make Nice" and "The Long Way Around" from Taking the Long Way, then works back through the years. "Travelin' Soldier" and their gorgeous take on Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" come from Home, where Maguire's fiddle and Strayer's banjo sit right up front. "Goodbye Earl" is a gleefully dark murder ballad with a wink, "Cowboy Take Me Away" and "Without You" are pure, aching radio country, and The title track of Wide Open Spaces, "You Were Mine" and "Tonight the Heartache's On Me" bring back the breakthrough years. Side four adds "Daddy Lessons," their stomping team-up with Beyoncé, and "Truth No. 2." Those three voices in harmony, with fiddle and banjo underneath, are a sound nobody else has managed to copy.

AllMusic called them the preeminent country group of their generation, and Taking the Long Way won five Grammys. Twenty-four songs across four sides, and Earl, we're sorry to report, still doesn't make it to the end of side three.

Also at Kops: more The Chicks on vinyl · browse Country

Tracklist

Listen

On Legacy.