America, in Margo Price’s country music, is not majestic, sprawling, or inviting. It’s broken. It’s oppressive. It’s stolen. Her second album, All American Made, plays out like a realist, modern Western film, offering a stark survey of a country whose “cowboys” are city-dwelling music industry vampires; whose farms are bankrupt and acquired by corporate overlords; whose citizens are treated like dirt because of their gender. The album’s loaded three-word title—a phrase that peers like Kacey Musgraves might sell with a sharp irony or Jason Isbell with a writerly wistfulness—ends up feeling more like an admission of complicity. Throughout the LP, Price tackles Steinbeck-sized issues with a no-bullshit humility in search of answers. When she turns to the late Tom Petty in the album’s final moments—“Tell me, Mr. Petty, what do you think will happen next?”—it’s a sincere, haunting question.
While her debut album, last year’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, succeeded through stark autobiography, Margo Price now seems a lot less interested in telling her own story. One of Nashville’s biggest recent breakout stars, Price doesn’t attach herself to any particular style so much as she does to an ethos defined by independence and self-motivation. She has noted that, despite selling off many of her possessions to record her debut at Memphis’ famed Sun Studios, the goal was never to make it big. Instead, she intended to craft an honest document of her experience, one that she could stand behind. “Maybe 20, 30 years down the road, or after I’m dead, somebody would find it and it would become a cult thing like Nick Drake,” she reflected in a recent New York Times profile.
On the contrary, the album took off instantly, culminating in a tour with the platinum-selling Chris Stapleton and a head-turning performance on “Saturday Night Live.” Her streak of country domination continues on the loose, wandering All American Made, which puts her side-to-side with a legend in its first 15 minutes. Sharing vocals with Willie Nelson in the slow-burning “Learning to Lose,” she bonds with him over their humble beginnings and the lingering self-doubt that remains in spite of success. “The only enemy I know is in my mind,” Willie sings wearily, sounding every bit his 84 years. When Price—half a century younger—joins for the chorus, she sounds bold and weightless as she weaves around his weathered croon. Their voices in tandem, never quite in harmony, are comforting and wise, like a community in song.
Alone, Price’s voice can summon multitudes. She crafts a hook out of one long howl sustained with primal intensity in the swaggering, soulful single “A Little Pain.” Softer moments, like the heart-wrenching title track and its sister song “Heart of America,” are sung tenderly. Like Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, on which Price balanced first-person accounts of recklessness and grief with rolicking, full-band fun, All American Made highlights a wide range of moods—a balm in one song and a bullet in the next. In its sharpest moments, she takes aim at the patriarchy. “We’re all the same in the eyes of my God/But in the eyes of rich white men, I’m no more than a maid to be owned like a dog,” she sings in a song called “Pay Gap."
The structure of All American Made works in a strange way, grouping like-minded songs together and moving at a galloping, constantly shifting pace. It hits its peaks at the beginning and end. While the opening salvo of retro country-soul songs seems designed to bring the house down in concert, her songwriting shines brightest in the more intimate closing tracks. When she performed the title track for NPR’s “Tiny Desk” last year, it was the morning after election day. Her eyes were red with tears as she sang about losing her family’s farm and heading west in an American-built pick-up truck. A lyric that might have once inspired hope now just seemed to make her feel more helpless. “The part of me that hurts the most is the one I just can’t spot,” she sang, “And it’s all American made.” Back then, her words seemed to suggest that there was no escape ahead. A year later, on All American Made, she finds power in sticking around and bearing witness.
