Album Review: Margo Price hits the nail on the head with new record
In the unforgiving desert that is commercial country music, there is an occasional oasis of originality coupled with traditional roots. A shining example is Nashville-based Margo Price. She’s released her third studio album, That’s How Rumors Get Started on July 10.
It seems often times in the days of mass produced and marketed music, where some music executive designs an artist from their shoes all the way up, we either have the stereotype of slick, all sound alike example or someone trying to buck the system by pretending to be Earnest Tub from the 1940’s. Seldom do we find an example of an a singer/songwriter with any mainstream appeal, control over their own music who is going in a direction that feels like a normal creative progression rather than an engineered, pseudo-capitalist path. Margo Price is one of the few making the kind of music that illuminates the work for the last century.
Growing up in Aledo, Illinois, Price sang in her church choir and studied dance. She dropped out of The University of Illinois in 2003 at age 20. Then it was Nashville bound, where she found work waiting tables, installing siding on homes and teaching dance to children at the YMCA. She became a fixture of East Nashville, releassing her first solo album, Midwest Farmers Daughter in 2016. Price has enjoyed success on U.S. charts and became wildly popular in the United Kingdom as well.
That’s How Rumors Get Started is a solid album with its feet firmly on the ground and its head to the skies. The tracks have some straight-up country lyrics, driven to the beat of Price’s influences, which range from the levity of Todd Snyder to the emotion of Tammy Wynette. Sturgill Simpson produced the album, with Price and semi-legendary recording engineer David Ferguson co-producing.
Price wrote or co-wrote each selection. Her soft, yet powerful voice carries above smart musicianship and fresh sounding arrangements. Her lyrics are straightforward yet poetic. She isn’t wasting a word or bending a phrase to force a pattern. Price’s better angels can be witnessed shouting down the lesser demons of her mind and allowing her to draw those creations out through her songs. For a song-smith to excel as a performer is really more difficult than we might give it the talent due. Price makes it look easy.
In 2015, journalist Rollins Stone compared Margo Price’s voice to that of Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette. Aside from a similar powerhouse feel in her vocal pitch, I do not hear the similarity. I hear a dash of Emmylou Harris and a smidgen of Juice Newton, Price keeps true to her love of Soul music, as she puts her very soul into each note she sings and every song she writes. It could be that Price is just original enough that she simply sounds like herself, which is the very best of all possible outcomes.
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