Cowboy Take Me Away

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"Cowboy Take Me Away" is a country song from the Dixie Chicks. Appearing on their August 1999 album Fly, it was released as a single in November 1999. It reached Number One on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in February 2000.

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Driven by co-writer Martie Seidel's violin, Emily Robison's banjo, and Natalie Maines' evocative vocals, "Cowboy Take Me Away" quickly became one of the trio's signature songs. The lyric deals with a mixture of yearning for greater tranquility:

I wanna walk and not run

I wanna skip and not fall

I wanna look at the horizon

And not see a building standing tall

with plaintive desire for emotional, romantic connection:

I wanna be the only one

For miles and miles

Except for maybe you

And your simple smile

and simple joyous acceptance against a minor chord turning into major:

Oh it sounds good to me

Yeah it sounds so good to me

Cowboy, take me away ...

Starting with a quiet opening, the record ramps up to a mid-tempo country-pop groove and features violin breaks from Seidel as well as an exuberant outro. Maines was praised for a "sincere" vocal that escaped the clichés of "Nashville music-factory tearjerkers".^[1] "Cowboy Take Me Away" has become a staple of the Chicks' concert set lists, appearing from the Fly Tour onwards.

[edit] Music video

The first scene of the music video for "Cowboy Take Me Away" shows a car stopping on a busy street, with Robison's high hot pink cowboy boot splashing through a puddle, and Maines waiting in a crowded elevator until reaching the top floor of an empty industrial-looking loft, joining the other two Chicks. The three begin singing the song and playing their instruments up there at the building-top in the center of a large city, resembling New York City. Gradually, the scene around them begins to slowly melt (via various CGI backdrops) of forest floors and snow-covered mountains and the like appear, while the trio dance and sing. The city does not ever disappear entirely, but the point is made.

The filming captured them at the height of their early days, when all three women had hair either naturally or dyed blonde. Maines' hair was cropped so short she looked like the country Cyndi Lauper and Martie Seidel with cross-colored braids and locks. Looking back, Robison commented, "You have three girls, so automatically you get the roll-the-eyes, you know; it's the band that's been put together," Robison says. "And at the time we were all blonde. And, you know, it was just so - it was so packageable. You know, it was just so easy for people to say, 'Oh, this is something manufactured.'"^[2]

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