Since she first captured country music’s attention with her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, nearly a decade ago, Margo Price has been one of the genre’s most prolific songwriters, with a passionate, independent spirit that channels the outlaw legends of the past. With this in mind, after a few albums that strayed from her roots, Price makes her return to a more country sound on Hard Headed Woman. She says she hopes the album “inspires people to be fearless and take chances and just be unabashedly themselves,” and sticks to that promise.
Price reunites with producer Matt Ross-Spang, who helmed her first two albums, and she doesn’t leave a moment wasted. The album is tight and fiery, as she ruminates on the state of the world. As she sings on “Don’t Wake Me Up,” a song that tips its cap to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and features new-look protest singer Jesse Welles, “Sooner or later we’ll all be dead, I’d rather be living it up, up in my head.”
First single “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” is a throwback country rocker cowritten, like many of the tracks on the album, with her husband, Jeremy Ivey, along with outlaw legends Kris Kristofferson and Rodney Crowell. It’s a rallying cry urging people to keep fighting the good fight. That theme continues on the Pretenders-with-horns track “I Just Don’t Give a Damn,” and the autobiographical “Losing Streak,” where she looks back at her personal struggles when she first arrived in Nashville.
Despite its tone of lyrical defiance, Hard Headed Woman has its tender moments. Tyler Childers trades vocals with Price on the twangy ballad “Love Me Like You Used To Do.” And she sings about longing for a lover, circumstances be damned, on the pedal-steel driven “Close to You,” delivering the indelible image, “We talked about heaven/We talked about hell/We played the jukebox while democracy fell.”
Throughout her career, Price has consistently refused to compromise on her principles. Hard Headed Woman is no different and further adds to a catalog that unapologetically takes on the status quo.
