Left, on Emily Strayer: Zimmermann blouse. Makeup colors: TattooStudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil eyeliner in Deep Onyx, The Falsies Lash Lift mascara in Very Black, and SuperStay Ink Crayon Lipstick in Laugh Louder by Maybelline New York. Center, on Natalie Maines: Rodarte blouse. Makeup colors: HyperEasy Liquid Pen Eyeliner in Pitch Black, The Falsies Lash Lift mascara in Very Black, and SuperStay Ink Crayon Lipstick in Trust Your Gut by Maybelline New York. Right, on Martie Maguire: Zimmermann blouse. Makeup colors: HyperEasy Liquid Pen Eyeliner in Pitch Black, The Falsies Lash Lift mascara in Very Black, and SuperStay Ink Crayon Lipstick in Laugh Louder by Maybelline New York.

To understand you have to go back to London.

You have to go back to 2003. To a place called Shepherd's Bush Empire. As music venues go, it's pretty small — only holds about 2,000 people. It was there, one night in March, that the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, Natalie Maines, walked out and said to the crowd, "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

That was nearly a week before the American-led invasion of Iraq, and those comments wreaked more controversy than most bands know in a lifetime. Country music stations banned them. Fans turned against them, burning their albums and, in some cases, crushing them with bulldozers. There were death threats.

"I wanted the audience to know who we were and what we were about," says Maines.

We are having lunch — Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, the three members of the band — in a private dining room in a swanky West Hollywood hotel, with waiters moving silently in and out, listening but not listening. ("Lunch" is debatable: There were fries, maybe a chicken salad, bottomless glasses of prosecco. It was hard not to be charmed by the cliché of it all.)

"I do not like when artists get on their soapbox — it's not what people are there for," Maines continues. "They're there to listen to your music." At the same time: "The politics of this band is inseparable from the music."

But it's more than just the politics. In fact, I would soon learn that it's a shit ton more than the politics. I am meeting the Dixie Chicks to not discuss their new album, Gaslighter. It is their first in 14 years, but due to ongoing legal disputes, we cannot talk about it.