Margo Price Returns With a Psychedelic Sheen on 'Strays'

The Nashville staple uses a trip to Topanga Canyon to explore new sounds on the enjoyable new album.

After so much focus on new music within my playlists last year, I want them to be a little more fluid going forward. If there’s a lot of great new stuff in abundance, it’ll all be included. But starting this week, the playlists will be more reflective of everything I’m enjoying, no matter how old the song is. Let me know anything you’re digging!

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"I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating. You get stuck in the same patterns of thinking, the same loops of addiction. But there comes a point where you just have to say, 'I'm going to be here, I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm not going to put so much stock into checking the boxes for everyone else.' I feel more mature in the way that I write now, I'm on more than just a search for large crowds and accolades. I'm trying to find what my soul needs." 

- Margo Price

By the time Margo Price released her debut album Midwest Farmer's Daughter, she had already spent a decade trying to get her break in Nashville. The wait was well worth it, as Price's record took the city by storm and ended up in the top ten for the country album charts. 

It's easy to see why Price is still an outsider in the scene, even if she's now considered a country giant seven years later. Her observations are typically left of the genre's shit-kicking good ol' boy musings. At the same time, that scene-stirring debut still didn't find the traditional Nashville scene approval, instead releasing on Jack White's Third Man Records. Most notably, she's always interested in something other than country music's trappings, often dipping into Americana and pop.

All of these ideas come to a gorgeous crescendo on Price's newest album, Strays, one in which she's more interested in exploring psychedelic music and taking songwriting cues from the AOR soft rock classics of the seventies. This fresh approach may be thanks to a few changes since we last checked in with Price a few years ago on the pretty good That's How Rumors Get Started. 

After quitting drinking, Price and her longtime husband and collaborator, Jeremy Ivey, moved their songwriting sessions to South Carolina, where their six days on the beach, often on psilocybin trips, were spent mining new creative inspiration. Price also let the idea of a new record stew for a year before loading up her longtime band, the Pricetags, and taking them out to California to work with the cosmic country shaman and producer Jonathan Wilson at his Topanga Canyon studio. 

Recorded live to tape in a single week, Strays benefits from Price and her band's seat-of-the-pants approach, adding warm west coast psychedelia to her repertoire. "Been To the Mountain" and "Light Me Up," the one-two punch that opens the record, is the most potent examples. The first finds Price reintroducing herself as a no-bullshitter who has lived a hundred lives in a burning world. The latter falsely introduces itself as an acoustic ballad ala Led Zeppelin III before turning into a wah'd-out sixties number that soars thanks to a welcomed appearance from Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.

Speaking of guest appearances, "Radio" is an enjoyable duet with the ever-present Sharon Van Etten. I give Price kudos for an attempt at something more indie pop than her usual wheelhouse, but the single would perhaps be better served on one of Van Etten's albums. Frequent duets-for-hire duo Lucius is also on the record, lending a choral effort to "Anytime You Call." Despite this, the ripping George Harrison-esque guitar solo is the piece of the song that you'll remember.

The ballads on Strays also work well, thanks to Price's continued work as an incredible lyricist. "Country Road" is a genuinely dark song that Price wrote for Ben Eyestone, a Nashville scene stable who passed away at 28 because of undetected cancer. The song is a brisk six minutes that explores everything from the failure of the American healthcare system to gentrification and the other side of the pandemic while including personal treasures like, "remember when we got drunk that time in Ontario, listening to Warren Zevon on the stereo?". Just as devastating is "Lydia," a portrait of a woman debating an abortion while navigating America's lower class, which Price says is inspired by a trip to Vancouver, a city currently known for its opioid addiction and homelessness struggles. And although closing track, "Landfill" finds Price declaring, "I could build a landfill of dreams I deserted," the song ends the record on a peaceful, slightly brighter note. 

While this may be Price's best album yet, it also feels transitional. Not everything clicks, like the country pop single in "Change of Heart" or the easily forgettable "Hell in the Heartland." It also falls just short of other recent Jonathan Wilson team-ups, like the excellence in the records from Angel Olsen and Erin Rae last year. Still, I would love to hear Price and her band work with him in Los Angeles again.

Strays is available on Loma Vista Recordings.