Margo Price isn’t just a Hard Headed Woman, the title she chose for her 2025 return to outlaw country music. She’s a tender hearted woman as well, which is what comes through on her righteous and urgent new project Days Of Unrest. With a cover featuring her cradling a shotgun, it’s a set of five blistering folk covers, one new Margo original, and some nicely composed musical interludes that make the first overtly political album of her solo career a complete, cohesive listening experience.
“It's important to talk about what's going on right now,” Price says in Episode 370 of The String. “Because you know that's the whole job of an artist - to reflect the times. And if not, you're just kind of the bread and circus for the masses to keep it distracted from what's really going on. But of course, music is great in all forms, and it takes all kinds. But this is a record I've been needing to make for a while.”
One could feel the energy building. Price has recently sung Bob Dylan’s magisterial and allegorical “Maggie’s Farm” at Farm Aid with Jesse Welles and Billy Strings. On the album’s hard-charging arrangement, she’s joined on vocals by her touring band member Logan Ledger. Even more remarkable is when the iconic Joan Baez makes an appearance. Price and Baez sang Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)” on stage at the Newport Folk Festival (where Bob and Joan sang songs of justice 60 years ago), and the grand dame of folk was able to lend her voice to the album’s heartbreaking rendition, backed by a mariachi band from Memphis.
“I mean, Joan Baez is like one of the reasons I picked up a guitar, you know? I've heard Emmylou Harris say that too. She just means so much to so many people,” Price says. “My husband and I started covering that song 20 years ago, and I just can't believe right now everything that's happening in our country and everything that's happening with ICE. It's just so heartbreaking to see families ripped apart and people who are legally allowed to be here, and who have gone through all of the paperwork, just ending up in detention centers - and children. I don't always know what I can do to help, but singing and singing a song like that, I'm hoping just maybe to change a few minds.”
Also on the album is a sharp revival of a Blaze Foley song about Ronald Reagan from 1984. “Oval Room” features the line “He’s the president, but I don’t care.” And well, we do care with part of our brains, but it makes a darn good t-shirt at Price’s merch store. Perhaps the most beautiful cut on the record finds Price singing in Spanish on the old folk song “De Colores,” again with Memphis Mariachi. She noted its wide-ranging implications and associations, from having lovers of different races to celebrating the harvest on behalf of farm workers.
Margo Price left college in her home state of Illinois to move to Nashville in 2003 at the age of 20. Thirteen years later, after her breakout with Midwest Farmer’s Daughter in 2016, her life as a struggling artist in the clubs and streets of East Nashville would be documented in quite a few profiles and interviews, but never with the gritty detail or candor that made her 2022 memoir Maybe We’ll Make It such a compelling read.
“A lot of bands in town had a good buzz going and could draw fans to their shows, but we sure weren’t one of them,” she wrote of her early project with husband Jeremy Ivey. “Aside from one write-up, we had no local press. We were outcasts and pariahs, and we were burned out on living this hand-to-mouth existence.” This was from 2006, so she only had another decade of obscurity and substance abuse to go before her big break!
I had looked forward to asking Margo about writing the book and about how it affected her, so we go there in this talk. And the implications were more profound than I knew.
“It was just a great exercise because through it I kind of really got my shit together in my life. I quit drinking five years ago now, and I don't know if I would have done it had I not been reading back my life story,” she says. It was one of the best decisions she’s ever made, she remarked. As for the vulnerability of sharing so many tales of debauchery, drug use and even petty theft, she said it was quite a ride.
“I had a lot of nerves. The couple weeks before the book came out, I was like, ‘This was the worst idea ever.’ I was having a panic attack.” But the reception was good. Fans told her the story had encouraged them to reconsider drinking or shown them a light at the end of personal tunnels. “So now I have no regrets.”
It’s a great book. Her recent two albums continue a catalog that’s going to amount to a wonderful Nashville legacy over time. I hope you enjoy this conversation with one of Music City’s most fascinating 21st century artists and activists.
