Margo Price has been gigging hard in Nashville for nearly a decade, earning a reputation as a fierce live act but getting barely any attention from labels or radio programmers. In the last few months, however, her fortunes took an abrupt turn: She signed to Jack White's Third Man Records, debuted on "Colbert," and released a string of hard-drinkin', hard-livin' singles. Even before she releases her debut, Midwest Farmer's Daughter, she has found herself at the center of some of the most intense buzz in country music, which means she has undergone a great deal of scrutiny. Most of it has concentrated on her backstory, which sounds like every country song rolled into one: Dad lost the farm, Nashville screwed her over, she shacked up with a married man, did a brief stint in jail, lost a child. To record this album, she hocked her wedding ring and car to pay for sessions at Memphis' legendary Sun Studios.
She owns up to all of it on her debut's epic six-minute opener "Hands of Time," which tells her own story better than any critic, press release, publicist, TV host, or awards presenter ever could. It's a remarkable cold open, an incredible introduction to an artist who is both a newcomer and a veteran, but what makes it so powerful is the contrast between all the bad shit she's endured and her modest goals for recovery: "All I wanna do is make a little cash." Rather than conquer the world or see her name up in lights, Price just wants get the farm back for her dad and buy her mom a nice bottle of wine.
On Midwest Farmer's Daughter—whose title is clearly meant to echo Loretta Lynn's famous origin story—Price emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes that split the difference between so many ampersands: country & western, rock & roll, rhythm & blues. It's an ambitious piece of music-making and storytelling, featuring a road-hardened backing band called the Price Tags and a singer whose flinty voice conveys both a guarded vulnerability and a reckless scrappiness. She fiddles while Nashville burns on "This Town Gets Around," three minutes of inside baseball that details all the unscrupulous managers and sexist promoters who populate the industry like fleas on a hound. "I guess it's me who gets the joke," she sings. "Maybe I'd be smarter if I played dumb."
On most of Daughter, however, Price is tough in conventional ways, on songs that fit a bit more squarely with country traditions. She threatens a bar patron on the honky-tonk fight song "About to Find Out," drowns the devil on her shoulder with whisky and tequila on "Since You Put Me Down," welcomes a wayward lover on "How the Mighty Have Fallen." They're sturdy tunes, strong examples of the country songwriting, but they don't hit with the same force as the more obviously personal songs here. Daughter is best when it's specifically first-person, when Price bends country to fit her own story rather than bend herself to fit the form. You root hard for Price to win these battles, even as you may find yourself wishing Midwest Farmer's Daughter could transcend the hype.
