MARGO PRICE
Koko, London, January 30 A silver-tasselled, tambourine-shaking, mushroom-tripping country-rock bonanza
MARGO Price is barefoot as she crouches and spins across the stage, her oor-length, sky-blue dress swirling, rattlesnake tambourine beating against her hip. She’s singing “Been To The Mountain”, her opener tonight as it is on Strays, the album released in two parts last year. The song depicts the peak of the psilocybin mushroom trips she took with her husband, bandmate and frequent co-writer Jeremy Ivey, in 2020, helping Price to purge cycles of depression and addiction in warm bursts of revelation.
Strays and Strays II have accelerated her expansion from the musically orthodox country of her 2016 debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter into Southern rock, ’70s singer-songwriting, psychedelia, soul and even synth-pop. You can feel her joy and condence
owing through tonight’s dramatic engagement, as “Letting Me Down”, punched home by ris and drums, continues the exhilarating start.
The classic country kiss-o to a worthless man, “Four Years Of Chances”, is the rst of three songs from Price’s debut, showing the enduring threads running through her work. “Tennessee Song”, with its swampy, harmonica-haunted blues overture and whippoorwill wail bracketing a crowd-rousing hoedown, is a deceptively twisty anthem to her adopted home state.
Amid a sequence of Strays songs, “Change Of Heart” is tough, unforgiving Southern rock, one of the band’s regular extemporised codas leaning into
Eastern sounds. “County Road” remembers the loss of a valued friend from Price’s old scuing days, the late drummer Ben Eyestone, and the Nashville community broken by 2020’s tornado. “Listening to Warren Zevon on my stereo…”
Price recalls, raising a cheer for his mention. The song is dreamily sad, ’til the keyboards run into a dragging electric undertow, guitars bucking and raging against the darkness and death.
“This is a song about all the shit going on in America,” Price says, introducing All American Made’s
title track, a disaected road trip across a conservative country that condemns her as a woman while committing routine political crimes. Written before Trump, it waits for him now. Ivey’s “Loner” lances consumerism and conformity, Price tackling it as a slow country waltz on acoustic guitar, as Koko’s great glitterball turns.
Realisations while writing her recent autobiography, Maybe We’ll Make It, helped Price quit the alcohol her lyrics frequently reach for along the way. There’s no contradiction to this sobriety when she sings Tom Petty’s “Have Love, Will Travel”, demanding “a cheer for all those bad girls”. She kneels midsong, both supplicant and celebrant for the rock’n’roll life.
“Burn Whatever’s Le”, written for the lm Downtown Oil, is mesmeric and psychedelic, with brassy John Barry guitar. Then Price changes into a silver-tasselled outt and high boots which might suit Taylor Swi’s rumoured country album. In an Americana eld tending to the staid, and with Price body-shamed and bullied by conservative country trolls, she’s dressing for her own liberated pleasure. A nal Midwest Farmer’s Daughter song, “Hurtin’ (On The Bottle)”, testies to her old self while Ivey’s harmonica shivers and wails.
Price encores with her Sharon Van Etten collaboration, “Radio”, its pulsing synth surface and pursuit of musical relief in a “crazy” world showing how far she’s come. Janis Joplin’s ballsy, good-time “Mercedes-benz”, which Price sings leaning exultantly into the front row, embraces the roots that remain.