Margo Price goes deep with ‘All American Made’

Maybe the tide is turning at last for female country singers. Following the leads of Shania Twain, Faith Hill and Carrie Underwood, many younger hopefuls apparently chose dramatic high notes and stage pyro almost as their weapons to batter down barriers and break onto the charts.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Still, other paths have opened to artists of different temperament — specifically, to those who write more personally and poetically and give priority to song over spectacle. You could say that started with Kacey Musgraves and Brandy Clark a few years ago, but with Margo Price’s second album, All American Made (eeeg out of four; due Friday), this movement reaches a kind of apotheosis.

First of all, Price is an extraordinary vocalist, precisely because of her understatement. There’s only one track on which she soars into her upper register, but she does so because the words require it. That moment occurs during the chorus of Loner, a dolorous waltz-time, where she demands the right to solitude when “being born is a curse, dying young’s worse … and you go through the motions, confused and alone.”

Her reflections are nearly as bleak throughout the rest of album. Yet by caressing them sweetly she makes them hit harder still. Over a gentle, ambling rhythm on Pay Gap, she attacks the persistent inequities in compensation to men and women for equal work. Yet even her complaint that “I’m no more than a maid to be owned like a dog” is delivered with a kind of languid affection. The same applies to Heart of America, on which she recounts the brutal decimation of rural life when “big banks took the throne” with more resignation that fury.

Frankly, the pictures Price paints are relentlessly sad. In Cocaine Cowboys, an apparent extension of Blake Shelton’s Boys Round Here, she finds herself lost in a sea of sleazy poseurs who haven’t learned yet that “you can’t write a song with nothing to say.” On Do Right by Me, she confesses “sometimes I look down the road for a sight I never see” before reconciling herself to a more mundane destiny. And on the title track, she voices bitter disillusion over her country’s ills, referencing “mad cows being cloned,” “liver failure” and a pointless trek to California “in a rusted pickup truck” as a babble of presidential speeches intrudes now and then.

Yet she does all of this with such perception and eloquence that her music ultimately enriches and informs. And when she duets with Willie Nelson on Learning to Lose, they sing as equals, less concerned with locking together in perfect sync than with speaking as individuals both serving the old-school mission of making songs come alive.

IMAGES FOR AMERICANA MUSIC RICK DIAMOND, GETTY Margo Price’s All American Made is out Friday.