Margo Price is in her villain era

The first line of “Hard Headed Woman,” the new record from Margo Price, begins with a battle cry. There’s a high and lonesome fiddle sounding the alarm, before a gloriously defiant harmony vocal: “I’m a hard headed woman . . . and I don’t owe ya sh*t.” It’s less a song than a preamble, setting the stage for everything that’s to come: an outsider following in the footsteps of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn and the rest of the country outlaws standing up and taking her rightful place.

“Hard Headed Woman” is a collection of 12 solidly country tracks, written by Price and husband/co-writer Jeremy Ivey, along with a couple of shared credits with Rodney Crowell, Kris Kristofferson, along with a cover of a George Jones song (“I Just Don’t Give a Damn”) and a Waylon Jennings song (“Kissing You Goodbye”) given to Price by Jesse Colter, Jennings’ widow. And there are guest spots from rising stars like Jesse Welles and Tyler Childers. This is a Country Album.

No matter how you choose to define it, Price’s previous four records were also country records, despite the attempts by the ruling establishment to keep her outside and relegated to the edges. But for the first time, Price made this record in Nashville, in RCA’s hallowed Studio A, the home of the “Nashville Sound.” There’s no logical reason it should have taken her this long to get to this place, but now she’s here. “I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to make this record, in a way,” she told Salon. “It’s a return to storytelling and the lyrical songwriting of some of my early albums. It’s also coming back with all this knowledge and being able to have the experience under my belt to know what it’s like to be in a studio.”

We’re a couple of years out from Price’s last record, the fantastic “Strays” (released in 2023), which was country in the same way the Flying Burrito Brothers were country (they were!), and now almost a decade from her debut, the perfectly titled “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” the title pulled right out of Brian Wilson’s brain, the tradition of one great American songwriter borrowing from another. Despite the obstacles, the naysayers and the haters, Margo Price has always made the records she wanted to make, but this record feels a little different. “I have lived in Nashville all this time,” Price says, “and I wanted to make a record here that felt like it was on my terms.”

Price’s vocals on this record are stellar — without equivocation, her best performance so far — and the songs manage to be both instantly memorable and yet feel like you’ve known them forever, and the perfectly balanced production gives each song room to breathe and room to shine. There’s so much space and texture and warmth. And the songwriting is one step up; if you’ve followed her career, you’ll see it as the rightful culmination of her years and years of digging in and continuing to do the work. “Hard Headed Woman” is the logical place for her to be right now.

The record also could have been called “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” a song inspired by Kris Kristofferson’s advice to Sinéad O’Connor when she was being booed by 20,000 Bob Dylan fans at Bobfest in 1992 for simply daring to exist. “I love Sinéad so much and I never want the story of Chris saying that to her to overshadow also what she meant to me,” Price told Salon. “. . . she just embodies truth and fearlessness, she’s somebody that I look up to the way that I look up to Patti Smith and the way that I look up to Loretta Lynn.”

“Bastards” features Kristofferson’s voice at the end, intoning the line, and is the reason for his co-writing credit, given with permission from his widow. But the song isn’t just about O’Connor; instead, it’s a cheerfully froward bop that feels (as do many of the songs on this record) at least quasi-autobiographical. “All the cocaine in existence/Can’t keep your nose out of my business” is, quite frankly, a genius lyric. But this isn’t a dirge — it’s a fight song and a taunt, and it sets the tone of comfortable, mischievous defiance that threads through the entire album.

Price’s songwriting chops (alongside songwriting from life partner Jeremy Ivey) have always been rock-solid, and even going in a more psychedelic direction as she did on “Strays,” she was still telling stories that other people could see themselves in. On this record, “Red Eye Flight” could be a goodbye to a lover, or it could be a Dear John letter to addiction. Price recently marked two years of sobriety, and the woman who used to take a tequila shot with her band before going onstage every night is instead gathering her musicians for a moment of silence.

“Red Eye Flight” is also a farewell to Price’s long-time band, the wonderfully named Price Tags, who played on the record but won’t be out on the road performing it. “I’m out there with a five-piece band right now. It’s just guitar, bass, drums, and me. I loved experimenting with all the rock stuff, and I know that I’ll be back in that territory again, because all of that is just a part of my DNA,” Price told Salon. “But there was something that also happened when I was with the same band for so long. And it was like, we had the double drums up there, and I’d pop back on the drums and pound away on them, which I love doing. But there were less of those moments that were about storytelling, like a song like ‘Close To You.’”

Her sobriety has definitely had an impact on the quality of her vocals on this record, as did a decision to re-engage with a vocal coach. Price explained, “I had a lot of vocal coaching in the past, and then I heard Janis Joplin and I tried to throw it all out the window.” But losing her voice just before going onstage to open for the Dave Matthews Band at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington in 2018 — the worst possible place for a performer to lose their voice, as the stage is literally perched on the edge of a, well, gorge, overlooking the Columbia River in arid Eastern Washington — changed her mind and got her back on track. “I feel like I can sing better,” Price said. “I was scared for so long to do anything about it.”

Another country tradition is paying homage to the musicians and songwriters who inspired you. “Don’t Wake Me Up” is a “Subterranean Homesick Blues”-esqe litany of all of the locations in which the singer has daydreamed: “Don’t wake me up, I ain’t up for that/the way this world is going ain’t where I’m at,” goes the chorus, which features Jesse Welles, probably best known as Instagram’s favorite protest singer. The aforementioned “Close to You” namechecks Lucinda Williams while also sounding and feeling like a song Lucinda could’ve sang, not a casual accomplishment. “We played the jukebox while democracy fell,” Price sings, while the bartender yells that it’s last call and you’re still crying in your beer. It’s exactly that kind of song.

Price’s interpretation of George Jones’ “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” retains the essential meaning of the original while being remixed in a very Margo Price fashion. There’s a guitar that sounds and swings like an electric piano, there are horns when you’re not expecting them — it is a thoroughly Memphis arrangement that holds its own. At the end of the record, Waylon’s “Kissing You Goodbye” remains intact, a slight switch of the gender of the narrator (“your polyester suit’s a mess”) but Price masters the same kind of fed up, heartbroken voice in the song, not that there’s probably any other way to deliver “So get your tongue out of my mouth, I’m kissing you goodbye.”

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But there are some devastating heartbreakers on this record, the kind of song that gets under your skin whether you want it to or not. “Nowhere Is Where” is silent but lethal, Price’s gorgeously textured voice over an acoustic guitar, small harmonies on the chorus, an upright bass over in the corner, a fiddle underscoring the anguish. “If you’re going nowhere, I could use a ride/Point the headlights south and drive.” “Keep A Picture” is a modern Appalachian mountain ballad in terms of the exquisite, tangible pathos. There’s another fiddle, there’s pedal steel, there’s a crystalline piano line winding its way through the depths. And yet, still, it swings and it moves, because the narrator is also moving forward: “It was so long ago,” she sings. “I keep a picture, baby, ‘cause I can’t have you.” What’s unsaid here is equally as powerful as what is.

“Love Me Like You Used To Do” has us down at the honky-tonk, Price trading verses with Tyler Childers — another Nashville outsider that’s now filling arenas — before coming together on the chorus: “We’ve got all our troubles combined,” they sing, before the pedal steel slides in and stabs you in the heart not once, not twice, but probably a dozen times. It’s the kind of deliciously painful tear-jerker that’s hard to write and even harder to believably pull off, but it’s also not surprising that this particular pairing will break your heart so beautifully.

Then there’s “Losing Streak.” It opens with a soaring organ courtesy of piano legend Chuck Leavell, and then Price comes in with a deeply centered, soulful vocal telling a hard-luck story, and after a listen or two, you’ll place it: it’s probably the most Janis Joplin that Price has ever evoked. Musically, the band is everywhere on this track; it’s Memphis again, it’s Muscle Shoals; the guitars shimmer, full of resonance. To anyone who’s read Price’s 2023 memoir, “Maybe We’ll Make It,” some of the stories might sound familiar, or at least adjacent, but it doesn’t matter if the song is a true story; it just matters that you believe it.

The memoir is being released on paperback in early September, and it feels like an accidental but inspired pairing, the story of how Price got to Nashville and everything she had to do to get to that first record against this moment. You don’t get “Hard Headed Woman” without everything that’s in that book. “I still stand by the book and learned so much about myself during the process of it,” Price said. “I feel like I grew up or something while I was writing it.”

Although the paperback doesn’t have any new material, its release in the middle of the time of COVID meant that it didn’t get the attention that it deserved. And the experience was clearly sufficiently enjoyable for Price because she’s hard at work on another one. “This book I’m writing now has a working title, ‘Close Encounters in Country Music and Beyond.’ It’s a little bit more surrealist” — think “M Train” vs “Just Kids” — “It’s kind of a collection of short stories and people that I’ve got to meet on the road, and kind of being in and out of the truth. There’s some fiction that’s in there, too. But I wanted to make something that wasn’t quite as linear. I don’t know that I’m ready for total fiction yet.”