Price painting outside lines of country music
Musician who has detailed her traumas turns her lens outward on new album
Alt-country musician Margo Price has a contrarian streak, and a wild one.
When she was preparing to write her fourth album, “Strays,” in 2020, she and her husband and musical partner, Jeremy Ivey, decamped from their cozy family home in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, and rented an Airbnb in Charleston, South Carolina. They brought guitars and notebooks, and a pile of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Tripping together in the backyard at a Live-LaughLove kind of cottage, listening to Tom Petty, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan, the couple reconnected and tried to “generate new sounds, new rhythms, new styles,” Price said, after a tumultuous period when her husband was gravely ill with the coronavirus. “It was, you know, big emotions and laughing hysterically in the kitchen, and then the next moment, I’m like, ‘I love you so much, don’t ever die,’ ” she said in a recent interview.
They wrote 20 songs, including the first two singles on her new album “Strays,” which struts through big-hearted indie country, honky-tonk stomp and ’70s guitar-explosion psychedelia.
“A lot of times, with the country world, they’re like, ‘Get in this box, and stay here,’ ” Price said. “So it was good to be able to paint outside of the lines. The mushrooms definitely helped.”
Since her breakthrough studio debut, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” in 2016, Price, 39, has tunneled her own path through the music industry, sometimes indignantly. She has always had ambition to spare and faith in herself as an artist, even in the face of repeated rejections, as she describes in her memoir, “Maybe We’ll Make It,” published in October.
“I admire Margo tremendously for her fierceness,” said her friend Brittany Howard, a guitarist and singer. “She doesn’t back down, and she won’t become the kind of artist that the industry wants her to be. She is the kind of artist that cannot be manufactured.”
Despite the friendship and cheerleading of legends such as Willie Nelson, who duetted with her on her second album, Price has never felt welcome in the country establishment, she said. (She has yet to be invited to the genre’s flagship honors, the Country Music Awards.) Even a Grammy nomination for best new artist at the 2019 ceremony left her feeling like an outsider, when she wasn’t invited to perform or present (she was also pregnant at the time).
She fretted about seeming irrelevant and losing the career momentum that she had worked to accrue over decades in Nashville if she stayed home with her daughter, Ramona, who was born in 2019.
“I think it was actually only 4 ½ weeks after my C-section that I had opening dates with Chris Stapleton,” she said. So she got back on the tour bus. “Just put the Spanx on, and had my breast pump out, just rolling down the road with a baby and a 9-year-old” — her son, Judah — “and a crew and a band.”
The pandemic stopped that trajectory. But Price found another outlet in writing her memoir, which chronicles her hardscrabble, super-broke but resolute early years in
Nashville; meeting Ivey, who is her co-songwriter and guitarist; getting pregnant as newlyweds while living under the poverty line; and the devastating loss of their child. Judah’s twin brother, Ezra, died two weeks after their birth in 2010, following surgery for a genetic heart condition. She had only been able to hold him once.
His death sent her into an emotional spiral — for three years, she had a recurring nightmare about not being able to save a drowning infant. She was unfaithful to her husband, and he followed suit, as she writes in the book, and she descended further into alcohol abuse. And then there was “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” a deeply autobiographical album about her family (she was born and raised in tiny Aledo, Illinois) and her flaws. “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle),” a barroom wallop,
became one of her signature tunes.
Recently, when her label, Loma Vista, wanted her to bring in collaborators, “I tricked them into thinking that I was writing with one of Taylor Swift’s co-writers,” she said. Using an industry pal’s connection, she sent over some demos — “‘Check them out, see if you like these more than the ones that me and Jeremy wrote.’ Well, meanwhile, it was just a song that I wrote.” The track, the boppy “Radio,” made the album, with Sharon Van Etten filling it out.
“Radio” could be the lament of a working mother during the pandemic, with lines about being exhausted and pleading to be left alone. But Van Etten said the magic of Price’s songwriting was that anybody can find themselves reflected in it.
“Radio” is “how we feel as moms trying to find our
own space,” she said. “But it can be anyone trying to have a moment, and that feeling of when you’re listening to a song, that’s all you can hear.”
Van Etten said Price’s skill at using the vernacular of traditional country — “the double-entendres and the turnarounds” — to talk about issues such as the gender wage gap offered a blueprint for other left-ofcenter artists.
Especially watching her in an early career turningpoint performance on “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, she said, “I just felt like she was a role model that actually had something to say.”
Lately, Price has made her songwriting more narrative and less personal. The single “Lydia,” on “Strays,” tells the story of an unsettled woman in an abortion clinic. It’s conversational and spare, with Price on acoustic guitar.
Her producer, Jonathan Wilson, had the idea to juxtapose her live take “with some really weird, atonal strings,” he said. Written before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 6-minute track was well-received and hailed as prescient.
Price is thrilled about any accolades, of course. But where once she was anxious about achieving them, now she wants to let all that go. “I’m trying to just be really happy with all that I’ve accomplished,” she said.
That doesn’t mean she has lifted her boot off the gas. “I have actually been writing more songs than I have in a very long time,” she noted. She hikes around her Nashville property, she listens to the birds; inspiration strikes. “I wake up feeling good every day,” she said, adding, “I just feel this urgency. I want to create.”