Margo Price Continues to Make Country Music That Says Something

Talking to Price about All American Made, which drops this week via Third Man Records

Photo: Danielle Holbert

Margo Price doesn’t believe in the concept of the sophomore slump.

“They kept talking about the second-album curse,” Price says of the management types who were concerned All American Made — her follow-up to last year’s solo debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter — wouldn’t have the same impact. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never heard that, so I’m not going to let that, like, mind-fuck me.’ Can I say ‘mind-fuck’?”

We assure her that she can, and she continues.

“There was also a lot of this, ‘What are you going to write about now?’ I was like, ‘Well, the last album was a concept record about my life. And there’s so many things to explore in this world besides just me. … I will find something to be depressed about. Don’t you worry!’ ”

Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was an enormous breakthrough for the longtime Nashvillian, who’d spent years paying dues as the frontwoman for country-rock act Buffalo Clover. The band never quite hit it big, and when Price and her husband and bandmate Jeremy Ivey decided to pivot to a solo record, they had to sell the family car and pawn her wedding ring to pay for the album. After they shopped it to label after label, Jack White’s Third Man Records finally picked it up, and the rest was a whirlwind — she played Saturday Night Live and Colbert, and she landed at the top of countless year-end lists, including the Scene’s. She won the Americana Music Association’s Emerging Artist of the Year award, and Rolling Stone named Daughter’s “Hands of Time” the best country song of 2016.

It’s not lost on Price that hers is quite the rags-to-riches story, but that doesn’t prevent her from having plenty more to say. So she took to heart some advice that her label head, the aforementioned Mr. White, gave to her and her husband: “I know you’re busy right now,” Price says White told her. “I know you’re on the road all the time. But take time to write.”

“I definitely feel like I explored a lot of me in the first one, ’cause I’m a self-centered musician,” she says with a laugh. “I touch on that a little bit in the second album, but the way I’ve been describing it is postcards from all over America. All different types of American music. I was reflecting what I was seeing through the windshield touring in a Sprinter for the majority of the last year.”

Photo: Daniel Meigs

The result isn’t just an immaculately played record full of classic-country arrangements and Price’s grand vocal performances — it’s a country record that actually says something. “We are all the same in the eyes of God,” sings Price on “Pay Gap,” a song with a vaguely Tejano feel thanks in large part to its prominent accordion part. “But in the eyes of rich white men / No more than a maid to be owned like a dog / A second-class citizen.”

On the album’s title track, Price gets explicit with her criticism, referencing former President Ronald Reagan’s admission that the U.S. sold guns to Iran, as well as noting that “all the Midwest farms are turning into plastic homes” and asking if the president “gets much sleep at night.” Price says that “All American Made” was written during the Obama administration — in the transitional period between Buffalo Clover and her first solo record — but that it did “take on new life” thanks to the tumult America has experienced in the wake of last year’s presidential election. The track, which Price says was inspired in part by Simon & Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” and recorded in one long session that stretched late into the night, features clips of cultural and political figures giving speeches. Listen closely and you can make out the voices of Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Patti Smith, Bill Clinton and more amid the swirling noise.

But political consciousness isn’t the only arrow in Price’s quiver. All American Made’s “Learning to Lose,” a duet with her new buddy Willie Nelson, is a tender and melancholy ballad about hard luck and hard work. “Wild Women” extols the virtues of ladies who live fast and “have no time for the blues,” while country-funk number “Cocaine Cowboys” cracks wise on all-hat-and-no-cattle carpetbaggers who call themselves country but “can’t write a song with nothing to say.”

As promised, All American Made plays like a cross-country drive through our nation, full of admirable and despicable characters alike, and hope as well as dismay. Price admits that she’s felt what she describes as “coldness” from some elements of the mainstream-country establishment — notably, she was snubbed by both the Grammys and the CMA Awards last year, despite Midwest Farmer’s Daughter’s critical and commercial success. But she’s happy to let that roll off her back, in her words, and continue singing about what she thinks is important.

“Everyone in America is allowed to have their own opinion,” she says, “and that’s what’s beautiful about America.”