COVER STORY | The Year of Margo Price

It’s been a whirlwind 12 months for Margo Price. In October 2022, she released her first memoir Maybe We’ll Make It on the same day that her guiding light, Loretta Lynn, passed away; in January 2023, she put out her critically acclaimed fourth album Strays; she’s been on tour ever since, already having played nearly 80 gigs across America, Canada and Europe in the last 10 months alone. And, just a few days before our interview, her tour bus broke down in the middle of the night while en route to the 38th iteration of Farm Aid in Noblesville, Indiana. Luckily, she slept through that last part. But it must be said, very few artists have left their mark on this year quite like Price, who’s on a fast trajectory to, likely, securing a Grammy nomination or two for Strays. It’s an inevitable final chapter in this big, bold step towards forever stardom that she’s taken—an endgame she’s more than earned.

But first, Price has got a few more songs to sing, all in the form of Strays II—a nine-song continuation of her towering, genre-evading masterpiece. I’ve been trying to make this conversation with her happen all year and, given her massive tour itinerary, it’s no surprise that nine months had to pass in order to make it happen. But I’m grateful regardless; Strays has stuck with me, and it might just be the record that I’ve returned to the most since January. I was lucky enough to catch Price for an hour while she was back at home in Nashville last month. When she got on our Zoom call, she was perched up near a desk in her music room. Her kids’ legos were strewn across the floor behind her, colorizing the decor of retro wallpaper, a leopard-print drum kit in the corner and guitars hanging on the wood-panneled walls. It was, perhaps, a miracle to catch Price making no movements—as, every night, she’s in a new city donning a new sequined dress and delivering almost a decade’s worth of tunes to massive crowds.

In 2021, Price was invited to join Farm Aid’s board of directors, along with Neil Young, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews—the former three of whom founded the benefit concert way back in 1985. Price grew up in Aledo, Illinois, a small, 3,600-person town in Mercer County that’s a stone’s throw away from the farmlands of Eastern Iowa. Being a working musician from such an inequitable part of the country surrounded by farm families, Price understands just how critical and crucial of a time it is for the organization. “[Farm Aid] has really been ahead of their time for so long, because they’ve seen the problem coming and they’ve seen the changes and the obstacles that family farmers are up against,” she says. “It’s full circle for me to be able to not only do the concert every year, but to be able to have these conversations and these meetings and talk about where the money is gonna go, who’s going to benefit, what organizations are going to be helped out. It’s been pretty surreal.”

There are similarities between being a touring musician in 2023 and trying to make a living running a farm in Middle America. If it weren’t for Nelson and Mellencamp having family farmers testify before Congress about the industry—and Congress’ subsequent passing of the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987—who knows how many farms would have suffered under the weight of foreclosure. Farm Aid, too, has long operated a fund to help farmers recover if they lose their crops or possessions because of natural disasters.
Given how so many farms in the United States are in close-proximity (or immediately within) Tornado Alley, having that kind of resource is momentous and affirming. The music industry—or arts culture, in general—is not quite there yet here in America, as places like Canada have outpaced us, starting the Live Performance Program to help assist Canadian artists by subsidizing touring costs and showcases both abroad and domestically. The US Government hasn’t done much of anything at all to address the disparages that creatives in this country are facing which, until the 1980s, was a similar rap for farmers (and blue-collar workers or self-employed folks in general). “Being an indie artist is also like owning a small business,” Price explains. “I think that being able to hear about some of the challenges that farmers of color, some of the benefits that ended up coming out of government handouts and in bonuses before and how they affect people, who they affect—it’s very similar, I think, when you look at the music industry, unfortunately.”

This year’s Farm Aid, like those that have come before it, was a massive success. A big takeaway from the weekend, beyond the important discussions around equity and mutual aid, was that Bob Dylan (whose comments about family farmers being in danger of losing their farms through mortgage debt at Live Aid 1985 catalyzed the creation of Farm Aid) showed up and played a surprise three-song set with The Heartbreakers—the hardest secret Price has had to keep in her whole life. “I couldn’t tell my band or anything. I couldn’t tell anybody,” she says. “I was like, ‘Dylan is gonna be backed by the fucking Heartbreakers.’”

Price knew for a little more than a week that Dylan was going to decamp to Indiana, and his presence foiled her initial plans for a “Light Me Up” reunion with Mike Campbell. When she caught wind that he and Benmont Tench were going to be at Farm Aid, she was itching to get them to play a cover of “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” with her during her set (because they were in Indiana, of course). Obviously, the Heartbreakers had bigger plans—so Price performed four songs with her longtime collaborator and friend Sturgill Simpson instead which, I think, is a pretty solid settlement to make, given the circumstances. “I didn’t want to steal Bob’s thunder and his surprise of having them there,” she laughs. “They had to rehearse and stay in a very tight little bubble. So, I didn’t get to make that dream come true. But, just being able to watch them perform those three songs, it was really special.”

Ever since she released her breakout debut album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter in 2016 and earned a Best New Artist Grammy nomination the next spring, Price has embraced her no-fucks-given attitude of disinterest in conforming to any sort of telegraphed direction that the industry has—or has not—laid out for her. The release of Strays in January confirms that. For seven years, Price has been considered a country performer, but that’s not a label she’s had much interest in holding onto—instead, preferring to endure as a singer/songwriter who isn’t pigeonholed into any box by putting out a project that embraces psychedelia, gospel, blues, stadium-sized rock balladry and electronica, with contributions from Campbell, Lucius and Sharon Van Etten. Even on Apple Music, the streaming service categorizes Strays as a country record (it certainly is not), and there’s a good chance that the Recording Academy is going to reward Price with a nomination for Best Country Album or Best Americana Album. It’s a textbook case of an industry and its writers continuing to turn a first chapter into the entire novel; folks thought they were cleverly writing Price’s destiny in full before it even had a chance to unravel.

“I’ve never been played on mainstream country radio, I’ve never been to the award shows, I’ve always been outside of it,” Price says. “To me, it was just like, ‘I don’t have to stay in any one box. I can make whatever record I want to.’ And, of course, if I want to make a country album again or if I want to have a pedal steel or a fiddle on my recording, I’m very much allowed to do that. But I don’t ever want to get stuck remaking the same album. I can’t make Midwest Farmer’s Daughter again, I will never be that person again. It’s like, just keep moving forward. And, of course, that’s not to say that moving into other genres—that there’s not racism, sexism or misogyny in rock music or anything—but I think I have to keep changing lanes to keep myself interested in what I’m doing.”

Price calls to mind her fellow Farm Aid board member and hero Neil Young, how even he took steps to admonish what everyone wanted from him—that he would make destructive career choices and burn bridges for the sake of following his own muse and creative inclinations. I think about his run of records in the early 1980s, when he put out the largely panned (but, actually, very underrated) Trans and his label boss David Geffen, jaded by the record’s critical failure and Young’s subversions, demanded the Crazy Horse conductor make a “rock ‘n’ roll album” next—so he wrote and recorded Everybody’s Rockin’, which sounds like a caricature of everything Young had ever made and an even bigger fuck-you towards Geffen. Strays is Price’s fuck-you record, a grand, unbelievable gesture that obliterates any preconceptions anyone might have once had about what the enterprise of her music should, or is supposed to, sound like in 2023.

“The more that anybody ever tries to push me to be one thing or to do one thing, I’m just gonna come back and do the most defiant shit just out of spite, probably,” Price says. “I’ve had so many musical influences growing up, and country music is a genre that was, basically, born out of blues and folk music—things that were all brought together. So, I did get sick of seeing people just say ‘country star Margo Price.’ I just want people to refer to me as a singer/songwriter or just a writer or musician. I think that boxing yourself into any one genre is really, really dangerous and limiting.”

Spending time with a record like Strays challenges me as a listener, as Price is zigging and zagging across different touchstones in an effort to make this visceral, harmonized vision. It’s refreshing, to be able to continue returning to an album and exiting the final song wanting to continue researching the rabbit holes of genre and language that were presented across all 10 tracks. We should want our favorite musicians to constantly be defying their own propensities; it makes for a rewarding life spent growing, creatively, alongside them.

Price made Strays with Jonathan Wilson, the multi-instrumentalist and producer who has largely become synonymous as Father John Misty’s right-hand man—a proclivity you can hear in the grandiose, theatrical DNA of a song like “Anytime You Call.” Price is a live performer to a default, having spent copious amounts of time on stage and barely any at all in the studio in comparison. She’s conscious of the brutal truth that, if she had the time or the money—or if streaming hadn’t created a world of instant-gratification in music—she’d spend two years making a record and be writing and recording every single day.

On That’s How Rumors Get Started, Price had employed Simpson to produce the album, and it’s fascinating to see how his and Wilson’s respective imprints have each rubbed off on her—as their distinctive energies can be felt exponentially on Strays. With Simpson, Price learned a lot about the uncharted places that her vocals can go and how to perform in a studio space, as opposed to the confines of a stage. She and him share a common attitude, in that they don’t like being told what to do. By contrast, Wilson is soft-spoken and otherworldly in his chillness. With him, there are no time constraints or pressures to be in the studio at any certain time. It’s a mode of effortlessness that, along with Simpson’s energy, helped Price get to a place where she is no longer dreading the act of making a record. “All of that pressure is absolved and you can get back to making music and enjoying it,” she adds.

In the past, Price has collaborated on her own records with Nelson and Band of Heathens, but the guestlist has never been filled to the extent that it is on Strays. Along with Campbell, Van Etten and Lucius, Ny Oh and Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek also make potent appearances. But there wasn’t much intentionality behind Price expanding her cabinet of players. “I didn’t go into this record thinking that there would really be any collabs,” she explains. “They all just happened super organically. And Jonathan, I really owe him a lot for bringing so many people together and making me feel really welcome and introducing me to people. I didn’t know who Big Thief was, and he was like, ‘Oh, my buddy Buck is coming over. He just wants to listen to the sessions and hang out.’ And then, I started listening to their records and got really into it.” On “Malibu,” Price needed some harmonies, so Wilson and Meek hopped in the vocal booth and started singing. With Ny Oh, she was Wilson’s neighbor, so she came over and lent her voice to “Closer I Get.” “It’s so nice to get different textures of voices in there, because I like doing my own harmonies but, when you add somebody else’s voice, it can breathe new life into it,” Price adds.

With Campbell on “Light Me Up,” though, Price got to use The Heartbreakers’ organ and elevate the importance of Strays not just in a musical sense, but in a spiritual one, too. Price is a scholar of music, someone who has not shied away from showing just how deep her appreciation for such a wide spectrum of music runs. There are moments on Strays, especially on a song like “Radio,” where the rhythms feel so akin to Petty’s Southern Accents—helping usher make the connection between Price and Campbell even more full-circle. “I grew up just consuming all of [Tom Petty’s music] and pouring it into my veins. And when I started hanging out with Mike, I was so nervous,” she says. “But he was just always building us up and acting as this mentor that I could turn to and be like, ‘What do you think about this chorus? How could I make the song better?’ Because we studied the formula of what [The Heartbreakers] do, so getting a poetic license, like ‘It’s okay, lean into The Heartbreakers thing. You guys are doing it well.’ He’s always telling me what a great band I have and, anytime I have any hard advice—whether it’s stuff with my label or my business or my band—I can call Mike and he shoots it to me straight.”

Getting a co-sign from Mike Campbell (and an absolutely shredding guitar solo) on a track that evokes pastoral tinges of Tom Petty’s take on the sonic American Dream on it admonishes, I think, all accusations of mimicry. “I had this asshole hack journalist—can’t even call them a journalist, he’s just a blogger—who wrote this whole thing about my second album—I dedicated it to Tom Petty—and was like, ‘I don’t think The Heartbreakers would call this good or anything.’ Benmont’s my homie and I text him and Mike. It’s the biggest fuck-you to that guy, because he really said a lot of shit that was just speculation—and now we’ve got The Heartbreakers in our corner.” It would be really funny if the writer Price is talking about was actually a journalist and she just, in real time, decimated his entire career by calling him a blogger. If that happened to me, personally, I would quit on the spot.

But Price never got to meet Petty before he passed away. She’d gotten something of a cosmic message about him, though, as he died two weeks before All American Made—the album she dedicated to him—came out in October 2017. “I remember being in the back of our van and [I was] reading out loud to the band that Tom Petty had died and we were all just driving down the road bawling on our way to the show,” Price says. “Getting to know Mike, though, I get to hear so many Tom stories. There’s been a couple of times where he’ll be talking about Tom and telling us a story and he’ll be like, ‘Yeah, Tom would have liked you guys’ and I’d get all choked up.”

Strays begins with “Been To The Mountain,” a Janis Joplin-conjuring proclamation that Price has, indeed, gone to Hell and back and has lived to tell the tale. It’s an immediate and immense opening chapter to not just where and who she is now, but where she might even go next. After she put out All American Made and That’s How Rumors Get Started and spent years on the road, she found herself flirting much too closely with the limitations of her own output—and Price came back down to Earth yearning for a change of pace.

“I had a real self-reckoning, even after my career got off the ground,” she says. “I thought that I finally knew who I was and that I finally had a place in the world. I’m still a human, I still find myself in, maybe, not the best mental place. I was just working way too much and getting a little lost, so I felt like I had to burn everything down and start fresh. You can’t just be too in love with anything that you did. How will you ever be able to focus and be truly in the present? That’s something that I do have a hard time with, getting caught up in shit that happened a long time ago or feeling like you could have done something better, wanting to go back. It’s like, now, how can I be completely here in this moment?”

The first step into that new destiny came when she and her husband and collaborator Jeremy Ivey took a six-day trip to South Carolina in the summer of 2021 and experimented with psilocybin mushrooms the entire way. It spurred a period of hallucinatory, confident and comfortable songwriting that led to Price churning out 20 of the most important songs of her career so far. She and Ivey went back and listened to records they hadn’t played in forever, including Big Brother and the Holding Company, and came to the realization that she and her longtime band, the Pricetags, needed to get back to that unfiltered freedom. Thus, Strays was recorded with everyone in a room together, playing off of each other and exorcising any urges to fit into the Nashville or Americana music scene in some way. “I appreciate having that base and having that home, but I think that you just have to really keep reaching as an artist, otherwise I’m gonna be bored of listening to my record,” Price adds. To be clear, though, she still loves listening to and playing the songs from Strays every night.

There’s a common thread of moxie that you can trace between Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and Price’s Strays, the former of which she considers having been an album that “fucking changed everything.” There are psychedelic aspects to both, and they’re so keen and integral. It’s something Gram Parsons was doing 50 years ago, as was Wanda Jackson. Simpson was very vocal and explicit on Metamodern Sounds about LSD and DMT, but Price uses her history with mushrooms to try and articulate the life-affirming parts of her existence. “The War on Drugs created all of this fear and all of this propaganda that awasn’t true,” Price says. “I had taken mushrooms many, many times, and I had taken them when I was 20—and that was what led me to pursue a career in music in the first place. It’s hard to see yourself, sometimes, in all of those multi-faceted ways that a psychedelic experience can have. I was absolutely ready for it, at th etime that I did [mushrooms] again. I knew that I needed to shake things up, I knew that I needed to come at it from my gut and in a more visceral way.”

In January 2021, when Price re-awakened herself to the greenery of psychedelics, the curse of her alcohol dependency was absolved and she was able to quit drinking. After multiple instances of almost checking herself into rehab, she’d found clarity—and was on a fast-track to putting the emotional DNA of Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, which illustrates her relationship with alcohol in detail, fully in the past. “When I first started writing [Strays], I was still drinking,” she says. “When Jeremy and I went to have that initial mushroom trip, there was a lot of tequila consumed. And then, the drinking stopped. And I had my first experience with MDMA around that time as well; that gave me a lot of empathy for myself and for other people. I can’t understate the effect that that substance had on me and where I needed to go next.”

In the last few years, I’ve connected with Margo Price’s roots. Her coming from a town of 3,000 people—and a town that is shrinking and getting smaller every year—stuck with me, because I share the same origin. She’s become one of the most notable Nashville musicians working at the moment, even if she doesn’t fully buy into her own place amongst the city’s storied history of country music. (She does, however, spare no expense telling me about when she saw Emmylou Harris grocery shopping in Trader Joe’s before the two singers formally met). In fact, she just celebrated 20 years of living there, having migrated south from Western Illinois in 2003 when she was a starry eyed 20-year-old working odd jobs waiting tables, installing house siding and teaching dance classes for children at a YMCA.

“I definitely have the Tennessee pollen in my blood by this point,” Price says. “But in that 20 years, I’ve been super nomadic and I’ve always tried to be really in tune to whatever place I’m traveling to and be open-minded and not get locked into one kind of mindset, like ‘Oh, I’m a Southerner. I’m a Midwesterner. I’m an American.’ I’m just a fucking human floating through space on this rock and trying not to feel all of the pain. But I do love it here, and I do think that Nashville is a really special place. It’s shaped who I am and all of the people that I’ve met here.”

Price has always been vocal about the challenges that come with balancing the responsibilities of being a mom and being a working and touring musician. Having made two albums’ worth of material during the recording of Strays, the productive, rewarding spell of writing she had was singular and special. “I feel really lucky that my inspiration hasn’t dried up and that the muse still comes to visit me. I think, because I have kids, because so much of my time is spent picking up Legos,” she says, gesturing behind her at the pile of plastic bricks accumulating mass near the backdoor, “it’s a juggling act. If I just had all the time to waste then, maybe, I wouldn’t be as honed in. I’m still trying to figure it out. Just going on tour, I’m staying up until four in the morning. The night I got back from Farm Aid, we all partied on the bus and didn’t go to sleep until 4AM and then you wake up at seven and the bus stops and kicks you off and I’m at a soccer game, just doing the regular shit. I’m trying to balance it but, some days, I feel like it’s absolutely impossible. A lot of moms that I’ll see at school functions, they’re like, ‘Oh, how do you do it? How are you gone?’ I’m like, ‘It’s really hard, but when I am home, I’m so happy to be home and present.’ I think it makes me a better parent, to have my own shit that I’m into instead of trying to make my kids live my dreams.”

A standout track from Strays, “Lydia,” was inspired by the small-town opioid crisis and has become synonymous with post-Roe v. Wade America. It’s gothic and it’s ugly and it’s familiar, especially for anyone living in close proximity to drug addiction or war on body autonomy. There’s a lot of honesty in the song, and that honesty is incredibly kind. Price wrote it while passing by a women’s health clinic on tour, and the result became a six-minute omen that pairs the story of a pregnant young woman with imagery of methadone clinics, used needles and musings on who gets to have access to health insurance in this country. Being somebody who is alcohol-free, writing about disparity shifts for Price as her own clarity grows. Conjuring empathy for the world becomes an easier task once you’ve found some of it for yourself, too.

“The way that I quit [drinking] was a very different way to quit,” she says. “It was the opposite of the shame of ‘You’re one of the flawed ones.’ I think, a lot of times, we try to blame the person instead of the substance. So, I really was able to give myself so much forgiveness. And that was one of the reasons I was actually able to, finally, give it up and change how I felt about it. I still find alcohol as a character and as a theme in my writing, because this is America and it’s something that has been with me from the time I was born—and it’s still there with me, and I still see people struggling with that.”

Much like the work she does with Farm Aid, “Lydia” serves as a proper example to the compassion that Margo Price has long elected to put into her orbit. She might not want to be a country musician, but her audience exists in that quadrant of the industry and she hasn’t yielded from using her platform to give rural America more seats at the table. Her focus on trying to transform blue-collar epicenters of the country, be it through songwriting or, even, just having transparency about her own relationship to addiction, continues to speak volumes, and much of what’s been gnawing at Price shows itself vividly in “Lydia.”

“I think, even with the fentanyl and the opioid crisis that we are facing right now, it would be so helpful if treatment centers and treatment programs would re-educate themselves—because people go through rehab, and failing is a huge part of that,” she explains. “There’s a lot of blaming, a lot of shaming. Being able to write a song like ‘Lydia,’ it’s a character study but, of course, there’s shades of me in there for sure. I don’t judge anybody that I see living in the street or somebody who’s addicted to something, because our society makes it incredibly easy for people to end up that way. We don’t have the resources surrounding the issues that we need to have. Seeing people, especially in Nashville, I feel like that so easily could have been my story. And I feel so lucky that I got to become a musician. I don’t know where I would be if Jack White had not come along and plucked me out of obscurity. My career and my music and my husband and my kids, it gives me something to live for.”

And likewise, “Been To The Mountain” opens up a conversation around the all-encompassing destruction of climate change. The song, at its core, is a balance of self-love and grace in the face of a looming, unavoidable brutality—and it challenges the way that Price charts love and empathy in her writing and thinking. “Love is the ultimate rebellion,” she admits. “Being, in any way, a force of good against the force of evil is what gets me out of bed in the morning—because I think it’s really easy for any of us to live in absolute fear. When you turn on the news and you read about what’s happening with gun violence and leaders with their heads up their asses. Money is king and greed has been around since the dawn of time but, without evil, there is no good. Every day, I get up and do my best to just do a little bit. Even living in Tennessee, it’s so challenging. But I’m gonna stay here and I’m gonna vote and, eventually, I hope that these things pay off. I wish I had more money to fight evil, because I think that’s the one thing that our side is lacking.”

Despite some of these songs feeling more personal than Margo Price has ever been on record, much of Strays was made in-service to the people around her. The line between autobiographical and journalistic writing gets blurred under her direction as, even when she’s writing about someone or someplace else, it’s still a portrait of herself. “Anything that I do is always through the lens of my heart and my experiences. At times, I’ve said things are about other things and they are actually about me. I do like to be vulnerable, but everybody has their limits and everybody has their capacity for what they’re able to share. I’ll always take the opportunity to disguise some of my own flaws and fears and hopes and dreams into what I’m doing. I think it’s all just one big melting pot of being an overly empathetic, highly sensitive person and my way of coping and getting out all of the things that I’m worried about and sharing that experience with the listener.”

What can be said is that 2023 will go down as the Year of Margo Price. Beginning and ending with a different measure of Strays is a bookend I’ll take eight days a week. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and I have a gut feeling that we’re going to be talking about the album for a long, long time. It’s impossible to trace where Price might be heading next. The most likely answer is that she’s going to circle the country a few more times before settling down into whatever mode becomes definitive of her next chapter, but I’d put stock in her following up this chapter of her career with another genre-evading treasure trove and even more stories that intermingle her own mistakes and wounds with those that ensconce the world around her. Because, at its core, the theme of Strays is freedom—be it control over our bodies or exploring the ecstasy of orgasms or letting go of the disruptive forces of drinking. In a broad sense, it’s about learning to live with no longer wanting—or hoping—to change our pasts. That’s a very country-inspired and bold type of reckoning to project across an album that is very much not hinged to that particular turn of phrase. But, then again, the work of Margo Price can never be boiled down to just one thing.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.