I’m writing a song about sex… we shouldn’t be ashamed of it, says Margo Price
TO sum up where she is in life, Margo Price quotes the last line of her recent memoir.
“I let my mind wander like a wild horse, galloping toward the future while keeping one eye on the past.”
Speaking from her home in the Tennessee countryside, the 39-year-old singer adds: “It’s important to know where you came from. How else do you know where to go next?”
A fiercely independent spirit, Margo’s story is a classic case of triumph over adversity.
It involves personal tragedy, being broke, menial jobs, drinking too much . . . but also enduring love and finally fulfilling her dreams.
Her autobiography, Maybe We’ll Make It, took her nearly five years to complete and was, she explains, “really painful work at times”.
It includes a devastating account of how her son Ezra, twin brother to Judah, died just a week after his birth in 2010 because of a heart condition.
Margo found the experience of writing it all down therapeutic. “It was freeing to own my truth, to own my mistakes and to know I can live through it,” she tells me.
She first came to the notice of the wider world in 2016 when her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, saw her hailed as “country’s next star”.
Now her fourth album, Strays, finds her heading to bold new sonic horizons where West Coast psychedelic rock comes storming into view.
She wrote the songs with her partner in life and music, Jeremy Ivey, during a six-day retreat to South Carolina at the height of the pandemic in 2020.
At this point, you need to know that Margo gave birth to their daughter Ramona (named after the Bob Dylan song To Ramona) the previous year.
“So we’d been cooped up in the house with the children through Covid and my husband had been incredibly sick,” she reports.
“He’d lost a ton of weight and he had to go to ER (America’s version of A&E) twice. And I was in a bad place too because I had no help with a young baby at home and felt very isolated from friends and family.”
When the opportunity arose, however, the pair packed up their Jeep and headed for the wilds of South Carolina, a few hundred miles south-east of their home outside Nashville.
“We threw in a bunch of guitars and a bag of (magic) mushrooms,” she says with a smile about her mind-altering quest for inspiration.
“When we were out there, we sat outside and listened to a ton of records . . . Patti Smith’s Horses, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.”
Margo reserves a special mention for Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out Of Mind. “Bob influences absolutely everything I do. To Jeremy and I, he’s the top.”
Bowie’s sound advice
With her new songs taking shape, she didn’t “feel the need to make another country record. I wanted to follow my muse, wherever it took me”.
She draws my attention to words of wisdom from the ultimate sonic adventurer, David Bowie. “Always go a little further into the water than you feel capable of,” he said.
“And when your feet aren’t quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
To help realise her ambitions, Margo found an ideal collaborator in Jonathan Wilson, a producer with peerless psychedelic rock credentials who runs a studio in Topanga outside Los Angeles.
A fine solo artist in his own right, Wilson has worked with Father John Misty, Angel Olsen, Conor Oberst and a couple of British prog legends, Roger Waters and Roy Harper, among countless others.
Margo says: “I interviewed a lot of producers but got the best feeling from Jonathan. I just knew when we got off the phone that he was the guy. And he was fine when I said I wanted to do the album with my band (The Pricetags).”
The resulting Strays opens with Been To The Mountain, a burst of unfettered energy with uncompromising lyrics. She likens it “to going on a rollercoaster and getting that feeling in your stomach”.
“We’ve already been test driving it on audiences and they’ve been reacting in such a visceral way,” she adds. Been To The Mountain alludes to her hard-up past . . . “used to be your waitress” and “I’ve been on food stamps” . . . but is mostly a forward-facing celebration of new-found freedom.
The song is followed by the equally liberating Light Me Up, which, you may not be surprised to learn, is about sex.
It starts quiet but reaches its climax, so to speak, with a searing guitar solo from one of Margo’s heroes (and now close friend), Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.
“Mike has become a guardian angel in my life,” she affirms. “Not only have I done songs with him but we also have incredibly deep conversations about music and life in general.
“I feel very honoured because he doesn’t collaborate with just anybody!”
As for Light Me Up’s lyrics, Margo explains them with refreshing candour. “It’s a song about making love and, as a woman, being completely open about her sexuality, about her pleasure . . . but without being objectified.”
With women’s rights a burning issue, Margo felt “it was the right time to write that song. Sex is one of the great mysteries of the world and we shouldn’t be ashamed of it”.
The most pop-orientated Strays track is jaunty Radio, which features Sharon Van Etten. It takes its cue from Marilyn Monroe’s immortal line, “It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on”, and Joni Mitchell’s You Turn Me On (I’m A Radio).
Margo says: “The song is about drowning out the noise and leaning in to who I am and where I’m going. I’d been feeling frustrated by people who try to fit me into a mould so it was cathartic to flesh that one out.
“We were going for a Traveling Wilburys feel and Sharon was instrumental in helping me with a couple of lines. She also added some beautiful harmonies.”
In stark contrast to Radio, there are two tear-stained songs, County Road and Lydia. The first, driven by piano and pedal steel guitar, serves as an affectionate epitaph to a friend who died.
“That song is closest to my heart,” says Margo. “It’s about a drummer, Ben Eyestone, who we lost much too young. I have to focus so I don’t cry in the middle of that one.
Back in nature
This brings us to Lydia, set to acoustic guitar and strings. It’s less personal than County Road but just as emotional.
The song highlights the desperate plight of a woman who falls through the cracks into prostitution and drug addiction.
Margo says: “I was in Vancouver just walking around. A lot of people seemed to be on methadone or homeless or struggling with their mental health.
“I’ve always loved songs like Townes Van Zandt’s Marie, and Lydia is my way of giving a personal story to the struggles people face.
“There are shades of me and my life in there but I’m not Lydia.” She adds: “I read that 176 homeless people died in Nashville last year and I just think how lucky I am that my dreams have come true.”
Not only has Margo’s music career blossomed on her own terms but she’s also taken control of her life in other ways. “Yesterday, it was two years since I gave up drinking,” she reveals.
“Musicians have it kind of tough because it’s the only job in the world where there is alcohol every night, everywhere you go.
“People imagine it’s just the fuel we all run off of. That’s hard to sustain and I had drunk so much that I was like, ‘OK, I’m ready for the next chapter’.
“I still love to go to bars, to play the jukebox, to go dancing. I realised I didn’t have to quit seeing friends or partying, I just had to change the way I did it.”
Another significant lifestyle change came when she, Jeremy and their children moved out of Nashville into more rustic surroundings.
“No neighbours can see into our garden, so we have a lot of freedom,” she says. Margo believes the move “back to nature” has been great for her mental health, reminding her of growing up in rural Illinois.
“To quote Bob Dylan, ‘I was raised in the country, I’ve been working in the town, I’ve been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down’.”
Now she’s enjoying simple pleasures such as going for hikes of anything between two and five miles every day with her dogs among the waterfalls, trees and rocky outcrops of Tennessee.
“We have two dogs, two cats and we also had a bunch of chickens before the coyotes got them,” she says.
Crucial to Margo’s happiness is her musician husband Jeremy, who plays in her band and supports her every step of the way.
“He’s been absolutely instrumental in my success, whether it’s the co-writing he’s done or the songs he’s brought to me or his musicality. He’s also made a lot of sacrifices. We even had to sell our car to fund my first record.
A beacon of light
“Not everyone has a partner like that and so I feel so lucky. At times, he’s stayed home and played super-dad while I went to work and bust my ass.
“I love him and I’m so grateful that we have been able to stick it out through all the ups and downs.” Margo recalls the “tough day” when she had to pawn her wedding ring only for “chivalrous” Jeremy to get it back for her some time later.
“We had decided to get rid of anything of value. Now I have 20 guitars lying around.”
Before we go our separate ways, Margo spares a thought for her guiding light, country icon Loretta Lynn, who died last year aged 90. “Loretta’s influence on me cannot be understated,” she says. “I thought of her as a grandmother in a lot of ways.
“She invited me to be on her very last album (for a re- recording of her classic One’s On The Way).”
Margo says she “completely lost it” when she found herself pregnant with her daughter Ramona just as her career was taking off.
“Loretta gave me confidence that everything was going to be OK, that my fans would still accept me. She also gave me the blessing to use Lynn as Ramona’s middle name.”
Like Loretta before her, Margo stands as a beacon of light in the cut-throat music industry, a strong woman in charge of her destiny.
This helps explain why she called her album Strays. “Even on my first album I sing, ‘But I’m an outcast and I’m a stray/And I plan to stay that way’,” she says.
“I’m going to keep being myself, being different . . . and being free.”