The Chicks talk bringing 2020 album ‘Gaslighter’ on tour, catching COVID-19 and the quirky way they pick old songs to perform

In 2020, The Chicks released “Gaslighter,” their first album of new songs in 14 years. They’d hadn’t disappeared — there were two live albums and a greatest hits sets in the past decade or so, popular collaborations with Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and international tours.

Yet “Gaslighter” marked a new era for the “Wide Open Spaces” and “Cowboy Take Me Away” hitmakers. It’s the first album they’ve made since changing their name (from The Dixie Chicks) in 2020, and it was produced by Jack Antonoff, known for his work with female pop stars as diverse as Swift, St. Vincent, Florence and the Machine and Tegan and Sara.

The “Gaslighter” tour was delayed two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s finally happening, with a show Thursday at Hartford’s Xfinity Theater. But the reentry hasn’t gone completely smoothly. A show had to be cut short last week, and two others were postponed when lead vocalist Natalie Maines found herself unable to sing.

Maines was resting her voice last week and unable to take part in interviews, but The Chicks’ other two members, sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, spoke with the Courant via Zoom from their Texas homes about what it’s like to be touring again.

How was the tour going before the postponed shows?

Maguire: So far there’s been an amazing response. I loved the Bonnaroo response [June 17 in Tennessee] because it’s such a young demographic and we feel we’ve been so far out of that age group now, and it was electric. It was amazing. That was a great shot in the arm because we’re not spring chickens anymore. I’m hopeful that all the shows are going to have this energy.

Has anything like Natalie losing her voice ever happened before?

Strayer: It’s never happened before. I was trying to put together the puzzle that made that happen for Natalie. I think it was allergies. This year, apparently, there’s a lot of pollen. Also, we rehearsed a ton, three different sets of rehearsing right up until we started the tour. I think in hindsight we’ll be careful about rehearsing right up until the last minute. We were running shows twice a day, three days before the tour started. That’s a lot.

Maguire: We’ve had a lot of different ailments going on. I remember Natalie once played with a very severe urinary tract infection. I played with food poisoning, where we saw the porta potty getting wheeled over to the side of the stage just in case. We’re sticklers for “the show must go on.” We do it hell or high water. But a voice is so important.

And your voices are fine?

Maguire: Yeah and I had COVID right up until before the first show. Our tour manager and our band manager thought that [the thing that] would trip us up would be COVID, but I had the lightest case. I had watched the dress rehearsals from Zoom, playing along in my bedroom. So that’s what we had the fear of. I don’t think we were thinking of other things like laryngitis.

Strayer: We had a lot of Zoom meetings for the tour, but I hadn’t seen Natalie in two years before we got together to rehearse. With COVID restrictions, we’ve had to get used to the rhythms of that, and when you’re bringing kids along it can get challenging.

Did you make the album before COVID?

Maguire: Yes. We were supposed to announce the tour in June of 2020. [We] were even nervous about touring this summer, seeing artists get sick and tours canceled or shortened. I just think we’re going to have to live with this, keep people working and keep on the road. So many musicians in Texas and music tech and audio people rely on this touring season so we’re being super strict. We’re even wondering if Mom can come out. We’re super careful because we want to keep everybody working.

Talk about your songs’ strong messages.

Strayer: I think as artists we’ve always wanted to fashion ourselves after other artists that we loved, that were direct. We don’t just sing pop songs. We’re storytellers, and we want to write about what we care about. Sometimes that’s relationships and sometimes that’s about what’s going on in the world. I don’t know if we feel outspoken, we just want to write about what we care about. So this album has a balance of that. The song “March March” was spawned from our experience at March for Our Lives, in Washington eons ago. The violence seems to be cyclical, unfortunately, but this was years ago. We were very inspired by that march, and we brought our kids. That’s where that song was rooted.

‘Gaslighter’ is a resonant word for these times.

Maguire: In 2018, I don’t think people were saying that word as much, and in 2020 it was the most Googled word I think. Natalie had come in the way she does with a little book of ideas, and that word was in her book. It was such a powerful word and title. I remember Dan Wilson, who we wrote “Not Ready to Make Nice” with and some other songs, he always said you had to have a title before you can have a song, and that was something I always thought was interesting. I don’t think you have to have a title, but this title was very important. It’s the whole song.

Did you have to change the band so you could capture how Jack Antonoff produced the new songs?

Maguire: Good question! That was the most challenging part of this entire tour, trying to sift through all the wonderful craziness that comes out of Jack Antonoff’s mind. We are, in the past, used to writing a song, learning a song, going in in some form or fashion as a band, even if we don’t everything done at the same time and play along with each other. He really crafts from the ground up, with “Why don’t we try this? Why don’t we try that?” and all those little pieces. Some of them stay, some of them don’t, and it’s this wonderful combination of sounds. So we did actually add a new band member as a utility person. It’s Natalie’s son Slade Pasdar, and he plays everything.

Strayer: His band was going to open for us in 2020, but the band broke up. We’ve known about Slade’s musicianship for a long time. He’s just a sponge, he’s a student of everything. You know when he comes back the next day he’s going to know exactly what his parts are.

Are you playing a wide range of songs?

Strayer: We realize that the best way to have a good show is to incorporate everything from all eras — but we’re taking it one step further. We have this dice game. We roll the dice. Each number correlates to a song that we haven’t played in a while or weren’t planning on playing on this tour. It gives every show a chance to have one of those songs — even a song like “There’s Your Trouble,” which for us was a task to relearn. It hasn’t been rolled yet on the first three shows. The fans will have a chance to hear some oldies but goodies.

Maguire: Maybe that’s why Natalie’s voice went out because we learned so many more songs than we had to.

Strayer: There are things that we played on the last tour, like “Ready to Run.” There’s “Travelin’ Soldier” in the dice game, “There’s Your Trouble,” “Give It Up or Let Me Go.” There’s a song called “Mississippi,” a Bob Dylan song that we’ve done a live recording of but never done on [a studio] album.

Maguire: It keeps it fun for us. As the tour goes on we want to start playing other things.

The Chicks play Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Xfinity Theater, 61 Savitt Way, Hartford. $24-$161. livenation.com.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.