Fly by The Chicks

Fly, the second major-label album and fifth overall from the Dixie Chicks, came out on Monument in 1999, and it's the record where Natalie Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer took a firmer grip on the songwriting, co-writing five of the fourteen tracks. Blake Chancey and Paul Worley, who had produced Wide Open Spaces, came back to produce it.

It's bright, bold, fiddle-and-banjo country with a wicked streak, and it was a juggernaut. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 341,000 copies in its first week, the first country group ever to do that, and became the most successful country album of 2000. Eight singles came off it, among them "Cowboy Take Me Away", "Without You", "Ready to Run" and "Goodbye Earl". It won Grammys for Best Country Album and Best Country Duo/Group Performance, went diamond in 2002, and Rolling Stone later ranked it at number 224 among the greatest albums of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.