The Midwest farmer’s daughter finds spiritual release and a new direction in gently psychedelic country.
Margo Price
★★★★
Strays
LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP
In the video for Been To The Mountain, the driving, hypnotic rocker that opens her fourth album, Margo Price tips back mushroom tea, throws up, and trips out, seeing visions of herself in the desert. It’s a scenario that was in some respects mirrored in real life when many of the songs for Strays were written, by Price and her husband/guitarist Jeremy Ivey, during six days spent in South Carolina, imbibing mushrooms and searching for new creative directions.
The result isn’t an overtly psychedelic record from Price, but it’s still quite a leap from the Sun Studio-recorded, Jack White-endorsed, bruised country sweetheart of 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, with its shades of Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn. Far less country, way more alt, Price has now arrived in a sonic world that sometimes swirls with rock guitars and Farfisa organ, backwards reverb and echoes of echoes.
Over Been To The Mountain’s trancey three-chord riff, the singer assumes various identities, real or imagined (“I’ve been a dancer, a saint, an assassin/I’ve been a nobody, a truck driver shaman”), hoping for some kind of epiphany or communion with the “high priest”, but succumbing, in a dizzying Patti Smith-ish rant, to paranoia. “Do you ever walk down the street,” she wonders, “and do you think to yourself, ‘Am I being watched, man?’”
It’s easy to see why Price would be seeking spiritual release. Even by the time of her 2016 debut, released three weeks shy of her 33rd birthday, she’d lived a tough life, involving years of low-level touring, drinking and drugging, jail and the tragic death of one of her and Ivey’s twin sons – all bravely documented in her recently published memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It (see Back Story). Recent years, post-success, have been smoother but still challenging. Price was forced to postpone the release of her third album, 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started, when Ivey was floored by Covid-19 and the couple were forced to isolate for two months.
At key points, Strays is bursting with a desire for freedom and wide-open spaces. Light Me Up, aided by one-time Heartbreaker Mike Campbell on guitar, sprints through multiple passages, from delicate acoustic guitar picking, to a headlong Love-shaped rush, into a country-rock stomp and on to a coda that slowly increases in tempo and intensity, as Price sees “Rivers quake/Levees break”. The thrilling band-speeding-up trick –
musicians cut free to run – is later reprised to maximum effect at the end of the battered and brooding Hell In The Heartland.
At key points Strays is bursting with desire for freedom and wide-open spaces.
Initially made at various studios in the Illinois-born Price’s adopted hometown of Nashville, the singer and her band The Pricetags then decamped to Topanga Canyon and co-producer Jonathan Wilson’s off-the-beaten-track facility, Fivestar Studios, for an intensive week of recording that in many ways defines the album. In parts, this is very much Price’s gold dust Californian record, further pursuing the ’75-77 Fleetwood Mac vibes of the lovely, reflective (if coolly vengeful) title track of That’s How Rumors Get Started.
County Road takes Nicks Sings Springsteen as its imagined starting point – part Dreams, part Racing In The Street – and ventures somewhere beautiful. Employing Price’s pure, aching country voice (as opposed to its gutsier counterpart showcased elsewhere), it relates the tale of someone left behind in a “prison town”, seeing the spectre of their former lover or co-conspirator everywhere. If the narrator is already suffering from a shifting sense of reality (“Maybe I’m lucky, I’m already dead and I don’t even know”), then in grand country tradition there’s a twist in the final verse: the “kid” she’s writing to has long since left this earthly realm.
Elsewhere, Price twists her traditionalist songwriting talents into new and interesting shapes. There’s the Sharon Van Etten-assisted synth-pop/rock of Radio, a concise two-minute, 49-second ditty that bets its chips on the theory that DJs love playing songs with the word “radio” in the title. Listen closer, though, and it reveals Price to be turning up the volume in order to drown out the white noise of our scary modern world. Another brazen effort to be commercial is fluffier: Time Machine sounds like Jenny Lewis and is pretty but throwaway. There’s more grit to the acid blues of Change Of Heart, which alchemises embittered feelings into resigned positivity, and still has the hooks.
If there’s always been a novelistic approach to Price’s writing, her songs populated by outcasts, and the strays of this album’s title, then it’s brought into sharp focus in places here. Standout track Lydia is as much of a grim character study as one of Price’s other landmark songs, 2017’s All American Made (also the title of her second album), but altogether more impressionistic and shapeshifting.
Price wrote Lydia in Vancouver when she was on tour, feeling tired and low, and watching lost souls wander in and out of neighbouring women’s health and methadone clinics. Tapping into this dark urban energy, she recorded a demo in her hotel room in “this meditative state”, addressing the verses to the near-broken figure of the title, with her “mascara bleeding”, “living off tips and meth”. Six minutes long and featuring just Price’s guitar and knowing, empathic vocal delivery, sympathetically supported by a string quartet directed by Father John Misty/Lana Del Rey arranger Drew Erickson, it’s haunting and moving, and may just be her greatest song yet.
Since her breakthrough six years ago, shaped by its preceding decade of obscurity, the authenticity of Price’s storytelling has made her stand apart. Strays maintains that, but further spotlights her melodic gifts and deeply soulful singing, while variously moving her both closer to the mainstream and further into the outer reaches.
It ends in a mood of clear-eyed nostalgia. Landfill depicts Price viewing the thwarted ambitions of her lost years as garbage strewn over a dumping ground, but with any traces of sadness or regret replaced by a sense of contemplative calm. Muted, syncopated beats, ghostly pedal steel and icy Solina string machine conspire to create the effect of a slow-motion scene: unwanted debris blowing away in the wind, with our stronger and more resolved singer standing at the centre of the wreckage. Even amid the ashes of her past, it seems, Margo Price keeps burning ever more brightly.
Strays is out 13 January via Loma Vista
BECOME A MOJO MEMBER today and receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts.