The heat was getting to Natalie Maines. Sitting alongside her bandmates Saturday night at Perfect Vodka Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, the Dixie Chicks singer implored someone — anyone — to come onstage and put a fan "right in my face." If Maines was teetering on exhaustion on this muggy, moonlit August night, it wasn’t for lack of effort.

By the time the Texas band had reached that halfway point of its two-hour, 22-song concert, one of more than 50 on a world tour titled DCX MMXVI, it had already performed several of its biggest hits ("Goodbye Earl," "Long Time Gone"), paid tribute to Prince, covered two Patty Griffin songs (with a third yet to come), promised to take a selfie with a young fan and paused to express their appreciation for Howard Stern and his satellite-radio show. Yes, there were shouts of "Baba Booey."

Unacknowledged but still recognized within all that exertion, merriment and ground-covering was the steadfast defiance and independence that has long been a Dixie Chicks hallmark. Even before Maines and her bandmates, sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer, became country-radio pariahs in 2003 for daring to speak out against President George W. Bush and his imminent invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks were upending convention and kicking at propriety. When it was released in early 2000, "Goodbye Earl," a gleeful story-song about the murder of an abusive husband, was sharing airtime with Faith Hill’s saccharine anthem "Breathe" and Tim McGraw’s gooey ballad "My Best Friend." McGraw sings about staring into his lover’s eyes. Maines sings about stuffing Earl’s body in a trunk.

When the band performed "Goodbye Earl" on Saturday, an enormous movie screen behind it flashed images of America’s most notorious misogynists, among them O.J. Simpson, Chris Brown, Robert Durst and Ariel Castro. A doctored photo of Donald Trump wearing scribbled-on devil horns and a goatee elicited an approving roar, and not just from fans wearing red T-shirts reading, "Dixie Chicks for President 2016."

That movie screen was a constant throughout the evening, sometimes complementing the song being performed, but too often overwhelming it with bird’s-eye views of nocturnal city skylines, red-rock canyons, rushing rivers 　and other awe-inspiring but distracting landscapes. The band itself is a force of nature. It doesn’t need visual metaphors.

Subtle gestures and intimate moments were not in short supply, however. Despite early indications that the band was determined to play every song in the key of loud — leaving Maines’ voice to compete with three guitars, keyboards, violin, banjo, steel guitar, bass and drums — color and nuance soon prevailed. "Easy Silence," a lovely song about finding sanctuary from the world’s ills at home, led into the joyous honky-tonk of "Some Days You Gotta Dance." "Long Time Gone," with its wickedly smart digs at Nashville — "they’ve got money but they don’t have Cash/They got Junior, but they don’t have Hank" — preceded the first real breath-taker of the night, a shattering cover of Prince’s "Nothing Compares 2 U."

When given room, Maines’ lucent, Texas-shaped voice can draw fresh emotion from material that would appear to have little left to give. She did this with "Nothing Compares 2 U," offering only fleeting looks in the direction of the Sinead O’Connor hit, and to a lesser extent with "Landslide," the Fleetwood Mac song the Dixie Chicks first covered in 2002.

With most of the show’s songs having been written or originally recorded by other artists, the Dixie Chicks emphasized their appreciation for and commitment to the craft of songwriting. While introducing Patty Griffin’s "Don’t Let Me Die in Florida," Maines noted the Maine-born singer-songwriter's importance to the band, joking how Griffin’s songs eventually become Dixie Chicks songs. "Don’t Let Me Die in Florida," after "Truth #2" and "Top of the World," was the third Griffin song performed Saturday night.

The biggest surprises came during a largely faithful version of Beyonce’s country-flavored, foot-stomping "Daddy Lessons" — Maines admitted to being obsessed with "Lemonade" on this tour — and an outright staggering take on Bob Dylan’s "Mississippi," nearly unrecognizable with its jacked-up, chooglin’ rhythm and bold sense of invention. As with the best covers of Dylan’s songs — Jimi Hendrix’s "All Along the Watchtower," the Byrds’ "Mr. Tambourine Man" — the Chicks’ "Mississippi" flips the original around and around until it lands with both its head and tail facing up, an impossibilty made real and consequential. If Dylan isn’t already performing this new version of his song, he should start.

For an encore, the Chicks returned to perform "Not Ready To Make Nice," an argument-settling response to the senseless furor over the George Bush incident. "It’s too late to make it right/I probably wouldn’t if I could," Maines sang, her words as sharp as they were in 2006. As the song ended and a rainbow-colored heart filled the screen, the band offered its final cover of the night, a percussive, sing-along rendition of Ben Harper’s plea for change "Better Way," with members of opening acts Vintage Trouble and Smooth Hound Smith joining in to help Maines, Strayer and Maguire leave the stage as hot as they found it.