Margo Price Is ‘Here to Push Buttons’: Taking on a New Sound, Jason Aldean, and the Haters

“A music career is something where I believe you have to constantly keep reinventing yourself to keep it interesting.”

It’s just before the release of Margo Price’s fourth album, Strays (out today via Loma Vista Recordings), and she’s sharing the story of the mushroom-fueled trip that inspired this latest reinvention.

Together with her husband, fellow musician Jeremy Ivey, she rented an Airbnb in Charleston, South Carolina, where she spent six days getting high and laying out a vision for this new music. It was during that trip that she decided not only to give up alcohol—a mainstay of her early career, as she details with brutal honesty in her memoir Maybe We’ll Make It—but also found total confidence in embracing the classic rock sound she adopted on 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started.

“I think as far as the instrumentation goes or whatever, that’s just lipstick and rouge,” she says of her evolving sound. “You can dress something up any way that you want. But when you strip all that away, do the words mean something and do the songs mean something?”

The result is her strongest and most collaborative album yet—a 10-song collection of psychedelic Southern rock that features contributions from Mike Campbell, Sharon Van Etten, and Lucius, and which covers everything from abortion rights (“Lydia”) to the female orgasm (“Light Me Up”) to death and nostalgia (“County Road,” a beautiful tribute to Ben Eyestone, a drummer who died in 2017 of colon cancer).

Throughout it all, Price proudly maintains the button-pushing attitude she’s become known for; during our conversation, she casually calls out country power players like Jason Aldean and John Rich while explaining why it’s “fun” for her to “make people think about what they’re saying and what they’re doing,” industry niceties be damned.

Below, Price talks to The Daily Beast about “fighting” for her career, why she doesn’t need a Grammy, and learning to love her haters.

“Been to the Mountain” is a hell of an opening track. It sounds like the cooler sister to Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch.” Do you see it as a thesis statement of sorts for the album?

Yeah, initially, when I wrote it with my husband, it was one of the first songs that came after our big trip. We came back down to earth and started writing, and we weren’t super-high when we actually picked up the guitar. But I thought initially that that song was going to be midway through the album. And then its shape started to reveal itself and I thought, OK, this is a really great first statement to make. You know, “I’ve got nothing to prove. I’ve got nothing to sell.”

I think everybody… you can’t blame them because it’s really hard to make money at music these days, but I don’t have this desire to become some sort of brand. I mean obviously I sell merch, I sell t-shirts; whatever, you gotta make a buck. But I don’t want to become some kind of lifestyle brand. I just want to make art. So yeah, that song was a really fun one to write.

I also love “Radio,” where you sing about people trying to push you around, change your face, change your sound. How have you dealt with that in your own career? And how have you learned to tune those people out, as you talk about on that song?

Lots of therapy! I have people on the internet that are constantly making comments about my appearance. I mean, the New York Times Instagram just posted a photo of me and the amount of negative comments… it’s like, “go get a face lift,” and people that just hate themselves. I really pity them, and I send them compassion and love. But it’s difficult to stand in the spotlight and have people making judgments about the way I look when I’m like, I’m not here to be some kind of supermodel. I’m a writer.

It’s a constant challenge to just stay true to who I am and to drown that noise out. It’s not easy, and some days I do it much better than others. Some days it really does get to me. And I think even in the business side of things, I have to pick my battles and I have to continue to stand up to follow my vision. Because when you get a lot of people telling you what you should do and what things should sound like and what things should look like, it’s frustrating. But then you just sit down and you write a song like “Radio” and it’s very cathartic.

I hope that as you continue to get more successful, those voices get drowned out. But I know sometimes that can swing the opposite way. And in your book, you have a lot of stories about having to fight your way to the top and about being rejected. Have you ever run into some of those people again and gotten one of those “hey, look at me now” moments? Like a Pretty Woman, “big mistake, huge” moment?

One of my favorite scenes ever! Yes, I remember accepting the award for emerging artist of the year at the Americana Awards ceremony at the Ryman, and looking out into the audience and seeing this one guy in particular from a distribution company who shot down my album without even listening to it. I looked him right in the eyes and looked around the room, and I said, “I just want to thank all the people who told me no, because that all led me to Third Man Records, being on Jack White’s label.” I really do like to thank my haters, because it just makes me stronger. I’ve got a couple of rejection letters framed up around the house, and I like to carry that with me. I still feel like I’m fighting for my career. But I like a challenge. I’ve been training for this.

One of those other challenging times you talk about in your book is your experience at the 2019 Grammys, when you were the only Best New Artist nominee who wasn’t asked to perform or present. I wonder if that turned you off to the Grammys and those other big music industry tentpole events.

You know, I would love to have a Grammy on my shelf. It would be a really cool thing. But it’s not going to make or break me as an artist. It’s not something that I feel like if I don’t achieve that, that I’m not an artist. I mean, Joni Mitchell didn’t get a Grammy for Blue. Bob Dylan didn’t get a Grammy for Blood on the Tracks. A lot of times the Grammys will realize that they have missed somebody and then, years later, they’ll give them some kind of award.

It’s all as my friend Sturgill Simpson said, “It’s all just a big meat parade.” All the pageantry and all that shit. I just don’t think about it one way or another. I know for some people that’s the ultimate, but it’s just secret committees. And it’s a very strange thing to think that you’ve got to have a trophy because I don’t think art is a sport. I don’t think that you can say “this is the best record that was made this year.”

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Right, it’s all so subjective. You say in your book that you quit drinking in January 2021, which puts you at almost exactly two years. Are you planning on marking that milestone in any way?

I’m playing a show at City Winery, which is actually pretty funny that I’m playing in a winery on my anniversary. But yeah, I don’t know what I’ll really do to celebrate. It’s kind of a funny thing to think about, because it’s not something that I have to spend a lot of mental energy on. Like, I didn’t use willpower, or feel like I was being restricted in any way, when I quit. And in previous times, when I had made attempts to cut back or take a break or quit, I was using willpower. And so this felt like a very kind of mystical thing that happened.

It was a mushroom trip that I had, followed by a ton of information, reading a lot of books. It’s just been the best decision I’ve really ever made, and I kind of thought, you know, maybe I’ll just take a year off and then I’ll be back to it. And then once I changed my thought process behind what I thought alcohol was giving me, it was really easy to eradicate it. I feel like I have time, money, energy, to spare. It’s absolutely this superpower I feel like I have at this point, which is great, because I’m getting older and energy tends to deplete as you age. But I feel like I’m at the top of my game. I don’t know, maybe I’ll write a song. Maybe I’ll eat some more mushrooms and see what they tell me to do.

Yeah, you’ve talked about how the writing of this album was fueled partially by mushrooms, and I’d love to hear about what that did for your music and how you think it shaped this album.

I think as humans, we get kind of stuck in these same patterns of thought. And the older you get, I think it’s more difficult to try new things and step outside of yourself and try something new. And definitely a music career is something where I believe you have to constantly keep reinventing yourself to keep it interesting.

So Jeremy and I had been through deep COVID. We hadn’t seen any friends or family for over 100 days because Jeremy had COVID and he was deathly ill, I kind of wondered if he was ever going to be the same again. When he finally came out of the haze of COVID, we decided to book an Airbnb, and we took a giant bag of mushrooms with us. And I was honestly still drinking at that point, too. So we went, we were partying, and we had one of those trips that was just like… I hadn’t taken a hero’s dose like that in a really, really long time. There were a lot of emotions that were coming through there.

One thing that we wanted to do was figure out a vision for what this album was going to be and where we wanted to go musically and lyrically. I’ve felt at times like fans or people or press just thought, “OK, she’s old-school country. She’s going to do this Americana roots thing.” A lot of people said to me, “Oh, don’t ever change, don’t ever sell out.” And so you get these kinds of ideas in your head like, OK, this is what my fans want to hear. This is what the world at large expects for me.

There’s a lot of pressure when you’re in the process of writing another album, and really the mushrooms just allowed me to take chances and to take risks and to try new things. We’ve been in a million different bands, and in my life I’ve sung a lot of different styles of music. It was great to just think to myself, I do not need to be pigeonholed as one thing. After my last record, That’s How Rumors Get Started, I was trying to make a more rock genre album, and then I see the headlines, and it’s still “country badass Margo Price.” So I think the mushrooms were there to kind of help me reinvent myself.

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Do you see yourself as part of the country music establishment? Over the past couple of albums, like you said, you kind of shifted away from it and leaned into a more rock sound.

Well, I have never been accepted in the country music establishment, especially not with making country music. It’s a challenging place to exist as a woman. I relate very much to, say, Lucinda Williams, who I think kind of struggled with identity and genre as well, where it’s like, too country for rock and too rock for country. I just try not to think too much about any of it. It’s like, is the song good? Is the band playing something that’s interesting? Is the album saying something interesting?

Among country music fans, you’re often seen as outspoken. Do you think being a “squeaky wheel” is something that ultimately hurts or helps you as an artist? Because I could see it going both ways.

Well, I know that I can be a polarizing figure to people that are just cut and dry. I don’t know, it’s interesting to me that I get lumped into that category. I don’t know if it’s because I wear a cowboy hat every now and then? I mean, I grew up in the country, and I’m from a very rural area. And I know that my voice and the way that I sound when I’m singing has a little bit of a drawl or a twang to it. Or I scoop up to notes like George Jones. But really, at the end of the day, I am here to push some buttons and to push the boundaries of the national establishment as far as it will go.

I think it’s fun. I like to be the protagonist. I like to make people think about what they’re saying and what they’re doing. I think post-Black Lives Matter, we saw the people who were not going to say anything, and that says a lot. You’ve got some of the women that are in the Nashville country music establishment that, say, supported some conspiracy theorists, or said “how cruel to make children wear masks.” Or you’ve got Jason Aldean and Brittany Aldean and what they stand for, and people who associate with those people, like Carrie Underwood.

And we have reached the point where I think silence is compliance, and we have to say what needs to be said in these troubling times. A lot of those people, they preach Christianity or say that they walk like Jesus, and they just don’t. They just absolutely don’t. So I’m happy to sit outside here and maybe just say, hey, why don’t we think about doing things in a different, more forward-thinking way?

Do you think that things can improve and that change could actually happen? Or do you think that world is too stuck in its ways?

Well, change is happening in Nashville. And the Americana Music Association and their place in this city, and what they stand for, and what they represent. It’s becoming a bigger thing. It’s very divided, it’s kind of like our country, but we have to keep moving ahead. I don’t know as far as the CMAs or any of those organizations are concerned. I think they’ve kind of shown themselves, showed their true colors. And obviously, country radio.

But these people are all going to get old and die. That’s the beauty of how life moves, I think. The next generation [was] raised with a little bit more compassion and with a different scope on things. So yeah, progress is happening. And you see people like John Rich getting upset, and it’s like, well, good! Then we’re talking about things! If we don’t talk about it, then nothing’s ever going to happen.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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