My Top Twenty of 2020: #16

 

I don’t want to talk anymore about the teenagers. We left them behind. I hope never to see them again, unless I have a baseball bat. But they weren’t the only reason we came to hate that house.

One of the big things that sold Louise on the property was the view from the back garden. Over the fence you could see for miles: all the way down to Huddersfield and beyond. When we moved in, she loved to sit in the back garden early in the morning with a cup of tea, watching the trees and the fields and the weather moving up the valley. At night, we stood out there and stared at the lights of the town.

Then, a couple of months in, the next door neighbour decided to erect a summer house with a felt-tar roof that raised itself a foot or so above the fence and cut off that much of our view. It wasn’t the end of the world, but looking back… it was a sign. The guy was a tinkerer too. The kind of self-made man, jack of all trades with a weird beard, who wanted to do it all himself. Usually late in the evening when he got home from work. Hammering. Drilling. Building his little empire. So he could sit out there in the late summer listening to his Maroon 5 albums. L’enfer c’est les autres.

This was the year they dropped the Dixie. I can see why they did it in the midst of Black Lives Matter, they’ve never been afraid of standing up for their beliefs, even at the risk of alienating their core fanbase. If for no other reason than that, The Chicks deserve a place in the year end countdown. 

Apparently they were going to release a covers album, until one of the Chicks was treated pretty badly by her other half… I don’t know the full details, but putting together the non-too-subtle lyrical clues, he had a party with another lady on the boat belonging to his Chick, and the other lady left a prominent item of underwear behind that tipped off said Chick… The result is this record. A bitter but funny ‘fuck you’ album that strays further from country into pure pop than the Chicks have ever ventured before. Losing the Dixie in more ways than one. It must have worked: it’s rare I see an album I’m listening to on the new CD shelf in Sainsbury’s.