Margo Price has always been a 21st-century artist with 20th-century style. Her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, was a Bobby Gentry fever dream that played out a hot writing hand: vintage country-soul lit with rap-lyric vividness. The record also sketched her moving, hardscrabble personal narrative (further unspooled in a 2022 memoir)—the basis for an exceedingly compelling persona Price has built alongside her records. She rocks the “outlaw country” label as hard as anyone in the game (praising psilocybin and posing on a Manhattan corner puffing a fatty in 2022 New York Times feature); wears her politics proudly on her sleeve (NB: her two-word introduction to a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee” at Newport Folk Festival); and, to judge from her countless collaborations, ranks high among your favorite artists’ favorite artists. All the while, her music’s been shapeshifting, blossoming wider on 2017’s All American Made and roaming further afield, with mixed success, on her last two LPs and a truckload of one-offs since.
In some ways, her latest, Hard Headed Woman, is a return to classic country form—recorded in Nashville at RCA Studio A, where Waylon Jennings cut the 1973 outlaw-genre touchstone Honky Tonk Heroes. But Price’s record is also an integration and exhalation. The opener is a fragment of secular gospel that announces “I’m a hard headed woman and I don’t owe ya shit.” That dovetails into a rewrite of Kris Kristofferson’s “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” that recasts the late outlaw-scholar’s scathing anti-war ballad as a rowdy, funny, defensively personal honky-tonk screed. The track takes ostensible aim at “tone deaf sons of bitches” in the music industry: “Dudes lookin’ down their noses/Thinkin bullshit smells like roses,” she yawps with gusto, “All the cocaine in existence/Can’t keep your nose out of my business.” Price was friends with the late Kristofferson, and was raised in the church, so she’s entitled to her formal script-flips, which flex folk tradition (rap tradition too) as they repurpose classic forms.
It’s an approach she uses across the album, playing to strengths while dodging pigeonholes. In this political moment, for example, a fan might expect—or even long for—sharp commentary from the outspoken writer of “All American Made.” But here, we get a Dylan-esque heel-turn towards other matters. “We played the jukebox while democracy fell,” she sings wistfully on “Close to You,” a dreamy Mexicali love song that sounds like something from Springsteen’s recent Lost Albums. That disconnect is echoed on “Don’t Wake Me Up,” featuring Jesse Welles, with a video recalling Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” protest-sign-cum-cue-card shtick. “Don’t wake me up, I ain’t up for that/The way this world is going, ain’t where I’m at/And sooner or later we’ll all be dead/I’d rather be living it up, up in my head,” the two activist artists sing, positing a refusal to be perpetually triggered as a significant act of resistance in itself.
Known for collaborating with older heroes, Price works here with peers where she’s on more equal footing. With Welles, the talented young Woody Guthrie acolyte known for his potent “singing the news” clips on social media, she’s in fact the elder, and the two have good chemistry. “Love Me Like You Used to Do” features Tyler Childers, a successful outlier like Price who’s also unafraid to address social issues. But here, the pair Tammy-and-George their way through a flirty slow waltz, mixing pathos with punchlines, Childers rhyming “empty boxes of tissues” with “trust issues” and positing “life ain’t always roses/Let’s forget all our woe-ses/And go out and pick up some wine.” (That both singers have publicly struggled with alcohol deepens the jokey wistfulness.)
Much of Hard Headed Woman is similarly about love and its trials, and its focus on the verities of songcraft suggests an artist confident enough to lean harder into tropes, formulas, and covers (including a spicy take on Waylon Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye”). It may feel like fiddling while Rome burns, but artistically it pays off. The aching “Nowhere is Where,” a ballad nodding to Patsy Cline’s “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down”, feels near-classic itself. “Red Eye Flight” is a souped-up ’80s honky-tonk stomper. “Losing Streak” is a perfect nugget of Rolling Stones country-rock swagger that makes hitting bottom sound almost fun (having Stones wingman Chuck Leavell on board certainly helps). Like a lot of music that speaks to this moment, Price’s latest set is mostly about taking pleasure where you find it—not just to avoid the darkness, but to survive it for the long haul.
