Margo Price - Hard Headed Woman
★★★★
LOMA VISTA RECORDINGS
“I will make country albums again,” Margo Price told MOJO circa 2023’s Strays, her fine, shrooms and psychedelia-led wander off-piste. What’s a tad surprising, perhaps, is just how quickly and wholeheartedly she has re-embraced her roots. With its classic country lexicon – rhinestones, liquor stores and tear-soaked Kleenex all figure – Hard Headed Woman is the first LP Price has made entirely in Nashville, her home of some 20 years. Tracked in RCA Studio A, that hallowed space frequented by Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton et al, it also has the blessing of Waylon Jennings’ widow Jessi Colter, who, sensing a good fit perhaps, urged Price to cover her husband’s song Kissing You Goodbye, a work that’s more scorpion sting than smooch.
Sometimes reverent flame-keeper, sometimes agitator and square-peg in a round hole, Price has remained irrepressibly individual, this lending her current place at the forefront of country’s ever-evolving dynasty extra spark and edge. It helps, too, that she writes from the crucible of her own extremely testing life, as unflinchingly detailed in her sometimes funny, often tragic 2022 memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It. When Price sings Losing Streak here, or duets with Tyler Childers on last chance saloon ballad Love Me Like You Used To Do, she convinces.
Hard Headed Woman sees her big personality fire straight-talking, sometimes blackly comic lyrics – “All the cocaine in existence/Can’t keep your nose out of my business” – while taking her music to new places. Yes, LP number five has chicken-pickin’ Telecaster and lachrymose waltzes, but Price’s take on 1975 George Jones B-side I Just Don’t Give A Damn swaps the original’s sedate front-porch trot for an itchy, horns-imbued groove seemingly built for the funkiest line-dance ever. With Matt Ross-Spang, producer of her 2016 debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, back at the controls, Price penned these songs with a trusted inner circle including her spouse Jeremy Ivey. Not for her, clearly, those ‘too-many-cooks’ writing pile-ons that can dilute an artist’s identity.
Close To You is a stirringly spare evocation of how romantic obsession can trump all other concerns, even the fall of democracy. Elsewhere, too, Price is anything but diluted, hence Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down. A juke joint floorfiller meets song of solidarity, it was part-inspired by the late Kris Kristofferson’s famed words of condolence to Sinéad O’Connor after she was booed off stage at Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary show at Madison Square Garden.
That Price should identify with O’Connor – another phoenix from the flames whose stellar musical career was forged despite the most testing of backdrops – makes perfect sense, of course. Thank god, then, for gentle souls and bold, hard-headed women.
Hard Headed Woman is out August 29 on Loma Vista Recordings
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
1. Prelude (Hard Headed Woman)
2. Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down
3. Red Eye Flight
4. Don’t Wake Me Up (ft. Jesse Welles)
5. Close To You
6. Nowhere Is Where
7. Losing Streak
8. I Just Don’t Give A Damn
9. Picture
10. Love Me Like You Used To Do (ft. Tyler Childers)
11. Wild At Heart
12. Kissin You Goodbye
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