When the final chapter is written on her life and career, we’ll likely remember Margo Price best for her steadfast individuality. Even when she gives the appearance of conformity, Price contextualizes herself within her reference points and influences; she makes the genres in her chosen sandboxes her own. The shades of Loretta Lynn on her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter; of Willie Nelson and Glen Campbell on her followup, 2017’s All American Made; of Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, and Tom Petty on her ambitious and expansive post-COVID masterpiece, Strays. They all bleed together in her songwriting and storytelling calculus.
Frankly, the closest Margo Price has come to casting herself in another’s image, be it derived from another singer or foisted on her by popular culture, is her choice of title for the first single on her latest release, Hard Headed Woman. With “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” she’s invoking The Handmaid’s Tale as well as Kris Kristofferson’s words of solidarity for Sinéad O’Connor at Madison Square Garden in 1992; taken together, she’s wielding a catchphrase forged by a creative spirit other than hers. It’s what Price does with the phrase that’s important, though, not the mere innocent act of referentialism. Anyone can nod to and riff on their inspirations. Calcifying them into a sound that no one else could produce? That’s an artist’s challenge.
Hard Headed Woman is Price’s tribute to coarse defiance and self-determination, born from and tied to this specific terrible, horrible, no good, very bad period of United States history, but entrenched in her experiences and sensations; it’s personal, political, and as such, very much a Margo Price album. Unlike Strays, which trades easy categorization for a swath of touchstones ranging from outlaw country to psychedelica, Price shunts Hard Headed Woman squarely onto the honky tonk track; the guitars twang, the bass makes its jovial undulations, and their sound combined gives an upbeat impression despite Price’s unvarnished ire. She doesn’t write anthems, but boy, she spins downright anthemic lines here, track after track.
If you keep up with the post, 2025 lacks a song of the summer. You won’t find that song on Hard Headed Woman, but you’ll find the lyric of the year at the top of the record on “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down”: “Dudes lookin down their noses, thinkin’ bullshit smells like roses / All the cocaine in existence couldn’t keep your nose out of my business,” Price chirps as the track rolls into its ending. She sounds positively delighted at the insult, mostly because the men she’s singing it to are likely either too coked out or plainly too stupid to know how badly she’s burned them; as icing on the cake, her words are both specific to the stuff and nonsense recording artists must put up with for the sin of playing music, and wholly pliable. You might work a thankless office job, but “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” anyway.
Playfulness is a shiv in Price’s hands. She often sounds chipper; the sound is deceiving. “Don’t Wake Me Up,” for instance, is a bubbly number, fueled by an ascending root to fifth bass line, a country music classic, where Price sings about dreaming away “the politician screaming on the television,” dreaming up “bad luck even when I’m lucky,” and dreaming in “the drunk tank,” before declaring on the chorus that “And sooner or later we’ll all be dead / And I’d rather be living up in my head.” So, the exact opposite of “chipper,” though it’s a mercy that Price gives civilization’s collapse an exuberant beat here. When the subject comes up again one track later on “Close to You,” a slow dance song rife with a kind of intimate dread, she recounts a night spent at the pub with her lover, drinking a couple of rounds and spilling their anxieties: “We talked about Heaven and we talked about Hell / We played the jukebox while democracy fell.”
The impishness on “Don’t Wake Me Up” and existential dread of “Close to You” wind up glued together in the end; these are two of Price’s faces, each equally important for understanding her persona as a musician. They always have been. But “always” doesn’t rob her of room to grow and change, especially when change is something often forced on us by external actors. Thinking of Price as tame in 2025 is a laugh. “Wild At Heart,” Hard Headed Woman’s penultimate track, is her lament for the free-spiritedness she’s shed over time: “We used to come here all the time / But that was long ago Back when we were both wild at heart / Baby where did all the good times go?” she croons over the chorus. There she is again, reflecting on bygone days and putting a neat little bow on the record’s examination of the “personal” and “political” all at once. It’s a clever dovetail of Hard Headed Woman’s driving motifs, and proof that as much as Price has changed, her rebellious soul is still intact.
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.
