As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, Natalie Maines invited her bandmates—the sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer—to play some bluegrass in her living room in Austin, Texas. They’d been off the road for a few years, and their plan was to hang out, catch up, and remember how good it feels to hear their voices blend in harmony, for no audience but each other. Earlier that year, they’d sued their label for withholding royalties from their first two blockbuster albums. In the years after, they’d find themselves in a righteous battle against the industry, leaving their future as a band uncertain. But for now, they were enjoying the most relaxed, unburdened creative experience of their lives.

It was Maguire on fiddle, Strayer on banjo and dobro, and Maines with a voice like a gut-punch. No amplifiers. No drums. One song Maines suggested they try was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a classic rock staple that Stevie Nicks wrote at the age of 27. Maines, who had just turned 27 herself, found new resonance in its words after the birth of her first child and she thought she could hear her bandmates’ voices in its bittersweet sunshower of a melody. Also on the setlist were two songs written by the folk artist Patty Griffin. One was about speaking your mind in the face of public dissent; the other was about winding up on your deathbed with a long list of regrets.

They weren’t planning on making an album. And even if they were, because of the lawsuit, they figured they couldn’t release it anyway. As the music started coming together and Maines enlisted her father, behind-the-scenes steel guitar legend Lloyd Maines, to produce the sessions, they brainstormed a couple of strategies. After the surprise success of the bluegrass soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they thought maybe these songs would be served best in a film. They contemplated going indie. They considered breaking the mold and sharing the music directly on their website for free, a way to thank the loyal audience they’d amassed as a major breakthrough act in the late ’90s.

At the time, their lawsuit with Sony was the biggest controversy the Dixie Chicks had ever faced. But it was far from their first battle. By now, they were used to fighting for everything they wanted. There were problems with their Little Feat-inspired band name: the label didn’t like “Chicks,” other corners were uncomfortable with “Dixie.” At least one sound guy refused to plug in their instruments at a show, assuming them to be mere props. In the studio, there was the man who thought the iconic title track of their 1998 major label debut Wide Open Spaces wasn’t country enough for them to track; and then there were the industry people who thought it was too country and asked for a remix without banjo and fiddle. Their answer, of course, was hell no. They learned quickly their instincts were right.

When their follow-up, Fly, arrived a year later, the Dixie Chicks’ merging of country and pop had been accepted by the mainstream. But their subject matter hadn’t. There was the sex talk in “Sin Wagon.” (“That’s right, I said mattress dancing,” Maines sang, using her southern twang to tug the vowels of each word, like she was making sure the conservatives at country radio heard her correctly.) There was also “Goodbye Earl,” a singalong anthem about murdering an abusive husband without a tinge of regret. It’s their signature song, their unsubtle twist on the genre’s legacy of male-narrated murder ballads about cheating wives and no-good women. To make their stance clearer, they paired the single with an ironic B-side cover of Tammy Wynett’s “Stand by Your Man.” Men with powerful positions at radio stations weren’t crazy about that one either. Maines laughed it off: “We always figured whoever was complaining must be beating their wife.”

As the whirlwind cycle behind Fly calmed down, things got more personal. The band claimed the label was withholding over four million in royalties and tried to terminate their contract. The label countersued. The band sued back. In the end, they re-signed to Sony with a few conditions. They would get their own imprint (Open Wide Records), an increased royalty rate, and, most symbolically, they would effectively banish the men who had signed them and produced their first two records. “We felt like we were fighting a battle for our industry,” Maines explained.

This was all happening in the background as they worked on the pared-down story-songs that would comprise their third album together, Home. But they didn’t let it affect the process; Home became a state of mind, the place where no one could reach them. Recreating the living-room feeling of those early demos, they worked at a studio in Austin, within an hour of all their houses. They decorated it with candles and kept the mood light. “They’d be looking at catalogs of baby clothes and home furnishings,” Lloyd Maines recalled of the sessions. There were no deadlines, no demands. Family members stopped by regularly. “It just seemed like the next phase,” Natalie Maines said. “Just be laid back.”

They recorded tributes and inside jokes, love songs and lullabies. “Little Jack Slade” is an instrumental dedicated to Maines’ newborn son. It’s not just a sign of who the Dixie Chicks were becoming—proudly virtuosic, uninterested in trends, a family operation—but also a nod to where they began. In the late ’80s, the group formed as a quartet featuring Maguire and Strayer, costumed in cowboy hats and fringed jackets, playing bluegrass on street corners for passersby: a markedly old-fashioned vision of country at a time when people like Garth Brooks were starting to take the genre to commercial and theatrical extremes. After the original vocalist and guitarist quit in the mid-’90s, the sisters enlisted Maines, a younger singer who grew up surrounded by country music but gravitated more toward Madonna. She had a similar influence on the group, pushing them toward brighter, wider terrain.

The only song on Home that all three members wrote together is “White Trash Wedding,” an upbeat breather that was inspired by an episode of Jerry Springer. “I shouldn’t be wearing white and you can’t afford no ring,” goes the chorus, which is funny but also telling of the characters they were now interested in. These are songs that pit romantic idealism against blue-collar heartache, that establish American archetypes as settings for hard lessons and disappointment. “It was a broken dream right from the start/Bless their tortured, tangled hearts,” Maines sings at one point about a doomed couple miles from the sweeping romance of hits like “Cowboy Take Me Away.” The story in the opening track, “Long Time Gone,” takes the optimism of “Wide Open Spaces” to its logical conclusion; the narrator winds up embittered but at peace back in his hometown, where big dreams go to die and the country music on the radio sucks.

In the last verse of that song, Maines aligns herself with outlaw heroes like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash as opposed to the genre’s more modern torchbearers. It’s a stance she would echo when she found herself in a feud with the country jock Toby Keith, of all people, and his awful, xenophobic “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Maines hated the song: “It’s ignorant,” she said, “And it makes country music sound ignorant.” Keith, who had somehow positioned it as a tribute to his late father, took her criticism personally, calling her a “commie heathen” and projecting a photoshopped image of her with Saddam Hussein at his concerts. He was not alone in this sentiment. At the 2003 CMAs, where Maines performed in a shirt that read “F.U.T.K.,” the audience booed when the Dixie Chicks’ name was spoken.

“This is our version of a good patriotic song,” she would say in concert while introducing “More Love,” a ballad on Home’s meditative second half. With a rocking-chair tempo and an insistence on empathy above all else, it’s a song about the tension between two people, only zooming out in its closing verse to address a country spiraling toward extremism. It’s sequenced on the record right before “I Believe in Love,” which the group first presented at a televised benefit concert in the weeks after 9/11. Their performance was one of the quietest of the night, as they sang about silence, solitude, and truth, huddled together, surrounded by candles. You can watch their performance and see the roots of the record they would make.

The sound is wistful and hushed, with a deeper focus on harmony. But the words remain pivotal, and the vision is strangely prescient. The two songs written by Patty Griffin, one of the band’s formative influences, serve as the heart of the album. In “Truth No. 2,” Maines belts in her powerful soprano how “you don’t like the sound of the truth coming from my mouth.” Without the direct narrative of their previous anthems, they mediate instead on the moral of these stories. Maines would become well-known for making enemies by speaking her mind; “Truth No. 2” would become the centerpiece of their songbook,

The other Griffin composition, “Top of the World,” finds Maines narrating from a haze between life and death, lamenting “a whole lot of singing that’s never gonna be heard.” The arrangement is the album’s most elaborate. Its orchestral swell is punctuated with dramatic pauses that stretch it out past the six-minute mark, as if the song itself is fading in and out of consciousness. It threatens a long, eerie quiet, an afterlife to be avoided at all costs.

The Dixie Chicks named their tour after that song. The original plan was to bring the album’s rootsy sound to small theaters, joined by a rotating cast of like-minded artists: “We’re thinking Lilith Fair with men and without politics,” Maines joked. They tested out a few shows in this style after the album’s release and eventually decided to take it to arenas. Full-band, big crowds. They kicked things off in London in March 2003. Before playing their latest single “Traveling Soldier,” Maines addressed the Iraq War that would officially begin in just nine days. She told the audience calmly that the band did not agree with the war and that they were embarrassed to be from the same state as George W. Bush. The crowd applauded; the band counted off and started the song.

In an alternate universe, the show goes on and everyone agrees with Maines that the war is a disaster. But because this is country music in the 21st century, because they are women, because of Bush’s approval rating post-9/11, because of Toby Keith and the angry American, they find themselves facing a violent backlash. There are death threats. Radio stations stop playing their music and urge fans to destroy their CDs. Sales decline. Sponsors drop. “I mean, the Dixie Chicks… They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two-way street,” Bush comments. “What a dumb fuck,” Maines responds, staring directly at the camera in a documentary called Shut Up and Sing.

The film, which documents the response to that night in London, also explores the making of Taking the Long Way, their follow-up to Home. A complicated, often autobiographical rock album produced by Rick Rubin, it plays like a new start—their first record on which every song featured a writing credit from a band member—but also a farewell. “Do you really think we’re going to make an album for you and trust the future of our career to people who turned on us in a day?" is how Maines explained their abandonment of country music. The first single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” remains one of their best songs, an explosive ballad about standing by your beliefs. When the song was first presented by songwriter Dan Wilson, it was an apologetic, crowd-pleasing track called “Undivided.” Maines had some edits.

By the time they performed the song at the 2007 Grammys, where they won every category in which they were nominated, the public perception of Bush and the war had changed. But the band still suffered the consequences. Album and ticket sales had fallen short of the label’s expectations, with little support from the radio stations they had previously relied on. The performance that night marked their last for years, as the members embarked on quiet side projects. It wasn’t until they heard a cover of one of their songs by Taylor Swift—and the massive response it got from her audience—that they decided to embark on a full comeback tour in 2013.

In their absence, the Dixie Chicks’ story was amplified and widespread. There’s Swift, of course, who found her own voice in their sugar-sweet melodies and arena ambition. (She also turned to their aesthetic decisions when it came time to face the world and reclaim a public controversy). Miranda Lambert dreamed of being her generation’s equivalent, and Kacey Musgraves, who waged her own battles against a sexist industry, cited them as an evergreen inspiration. Equally inspiring is how their influence traveled outside the genre: Indie songwriters like Katie Alice Greer and boygenius have covered them, while everyone from Beyoncé to Soccer Mommy heard their own stories in their songs. It’s a legacy tied both to their music and their message of integrity.

Despite what it came to represent, Home is not a political record. At the same time, it doesn’t sound like the gesture of domestic contentment the band initially presented it as. Instead, it plays like a refined but deeply unsettled record, one that envisions the years to come as contentious and dark, full of silence and loss, a drought of morality we’d all have to face together. “I don’t think I’m afraid anymore,” goes a lyric in “Truth No. 2.” The way Maines sings it, you could hear it as a kind of manifesto, something to roar along with and celebrate. And it is. But she also wants you to hear the hesitance, the questioning, the heavy dissonance in following your intuition to its loneliest corners. It might also be what struck her about “Landslide,” another song written in a moment of transition, where the word “afraid” is given as much weight as “love.” The Dixie Chicks figured the truth could always be found somewhere between the two.