The band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks is revealing how they came to pick their new name. The three women who make up the newly dubbed band The Chicks — Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire — appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Thursday and discussed their decision to drop “Dixie” from their name.
“It’s because of everything that’s going on in the world. It was about time; we’ve wanted to change it for a long time, actually,” Maines said. “We started using ‘DCX’ a lot and ‘The Chicks’ a lot whenever we could — we hoped it would catch on, but it didn’t.”
“So, in the moment now, we just felt that it was right, and we didn’t even have to have much discussion about it,” she continued. “We just all wanted to do it right away, and so we did.”
Though they agreed on the name change, the name itself wasn’t always a sure thing.
“We had to make sure we had our ducks in a row legally. We thought The Chicks would be the easiest thing, but we did have to entertain a few other names,” Strayer said. “One of the ones that came up was our initials, but spelled out as M.E.N., so we’d go from chicks to men.”
“We had some names in the past that we would kind of call ourselves as our alter egos, we could’ve pulled those from the past,” Maguire added. “One was Puss in Boots, but there’s already a band called that.”
The Chicks announced their name change last month, a move that seemed to be in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, as “Dixie” is a nickname for the Confederate States of America amid the Civil War.
“We want to meet this moment,” the trio said at the time.
