Wide Open Spaces

Got my daughter’s Valentine today. Opened it up and my heart caught in my throat. I’m not going to reveal what she wrote—that’s personal between her and me—but it sure is nice when your kid doesn’t think you’re a s**t after everything you’ve done to her in your life. (Is there a parent alive who doesn’t think that they’ve failed their children in some way?)

So…as I was driving away I popped in the Dixie Chicks and played Wide Open Spaces in her honor off the CD of the same name. I was playing that CD back in August when her mom and I were dropping her off for her freshman year in college. I turned my daughter on to it on the drive out there, and all of the emotion of day just came out in that song.

That’s the thing about country music: how it can just nail an emotion. It’s also the one criticism I have of popular country music, that a lot of it nails the emotion and then you just wallow in it. I mean, just how long can we pick that sore? The thing that I like about the blues is how it can nail an emotion and then it takes you somewhere else. And then of course, there’s really bad country, songs along the caliber of Kenny Chesney’s She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.

But the Dixie Chicks do have those nice harmonies going.

So, for Allison’s and everyone else who has ever struck out on their own, here are the lyrics to Wide Open Spaces:

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about 

Who's never left home, who's never struck out 

To find a dream and a life of their own 

A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone 



Many precede and many will follow 

A young girl's dream no longer hollow 

It takes the shape of a place out west 

But what it holds for her, she hasn't yet guessed 



[Chorus:] 

She needs wide open spaces 

Room to make her big mistakes 

She needs new faces 

She knows the high stakes 



She traveled this road as a child 

Wide eyed and grinning, she never tired 

But now she won't be coming back with the rest 

If these are life's lessons, she'll take this test 



[Repeat Chorus]


She knows the high stakes 


As her folks drive away, her dad yells, "Check the oil!" 

Mom stares out the window and says, "I'm leaving my girl" 

She said, "It didn't seem like that long ago" 

When she stood there and let her own folks know 



[Repeat Chorus] 


She knows the highest stakes 

She knows the highest stakes 

She knows the highest stakes 

She knows the highest stakes