Songoftheday 5/21/21 - Should've been different but it wasn't different, it was the same old story and "Dear John" and so long...
"There's Your Trouble" - Dixie Chicks
from the album Wide Open Spaces (1997)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #36 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 1
Today's song of the day comes from the (Dixie) Chicks, who came together in Texas in Dallas at the end of the 1980's, with sisters Emily and Martie Erwin, along with Laura Lynch and Robin Lee Macy. The group independently released three albums, starting with Thank Heavens for Dale Evans in 1990, before being signed by Columbia Records. In that time both Macy and Lynch left the Chicks, to be replaced by singer Natalie Maines, the daughter of a steel guitar studio troubadour that played on their earlier work.
The new lineup's first major-label album was Wide Open Spaces, and the lead single was the sassy "I Can Love You Better", which did decently on country radio, climbing to #7 on Billboard magazine's Country Airplay chart and popping on to the pop Hot 100 list at #77. But it would be the second offering that would catapult them to the big time. "There's Your Trouble", written by Mark Selby and Tia Sillers, has Natalie singing to a friend who's an obvious crush of theirs that he's being taken for a ride by the girls he dates and suggesting he dump her and hook up with her. It's direct and bold for a woman to be this way, and that definitely sold the record with the new generation of country music listeners that came with the rush of country dancing bars around. Also released as a retail single, the song got enough sales and airplay points to even make the top 40 on the all-genre "Hot 100" chart, which usually was reserved for pop and R&B tunes. But Natalie sang with the attitude of a rock diva, while Emily and Martie kept things groundly in country music with the fiddle and banjo prominent in the mix...
"There's Your Trouble" became the Chicks' first top-40 hit on the pop chart in America in August of 1998. The song was their first to reach #1 on Billboard's country songs chart as well, spending two weeks there. Internationally, the single was a surprise hit in the UK, scoring their sole top-40 hit on the singles chart there at #26 in 1999. The Wide Open Spaces album, released in January of that year, went on to crest at #4 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #1 on the Country Albums list, going on to sell over 13 million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 1999, "There's Your Trouble" won for Best Duo/Group Country Performance, and Wide Open Spaces won Best Country Album. The trio was also in the running for Best New Artist, which went to Lauryn Hill. They will be on this series many more times.
(8/10)
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Next up, on British TV with a live audience in 1999...
And finally, on tour in California in 2003...
Up tomorrow: Scottish rock vet goes to France?
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