Being a people pleaser isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to Margo Price. Outspoken, yes. Fearless, perhaps. A rabble-rouser. Loudmouth, even. But hardly a pushover.
And yet, in order for the 42-year-old country star to record her fifth album, “Hard Headed Woman,” which came out in August, she first needed to learn how to stand up for herself.
“It’s been a lot easier for me to advocate for myself,” Price says about the making of this record, over a Zoom call from the back seat of a Lyft. She just arrived in Los Angeles and is on her way to a fitting for an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Coincidentally, her performance came during the episode that resulted in the host’s show being temporarily pulled from ABC over his comments about the alleged shooter of slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
“It’s hard to make boundaries sometimes. People get thrown off when you haven’t had boundaries and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘No, I’m having boundaries,’” she says. “People get mad about it.”
Price is no stranger to pissing people off. As far as titles go, “Hard Headed Woman” could just about be her mantra. But the music is vintage Price, steeped in classic country, wisecracks and crisp storytelling. There are covers of George Jones’ “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” and Waylon Jennings’ deep cut “Kissing You Goodbye,” guest spots from Jesse Welles and Tyler Childers, and cowrites with Rodney Crowell.
Her singing may be the best she’s ever put to tape. In fact, she sounds reinvigorated.
“All these songs feel very much like a taking back of who I am,” Price says.
That spirit is perfectly summed up by lead single “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” a beer hall stomper laced with typically golden one-liners, none better than, “All the cocaine in existence couldn’t keep your nose out of my business.” Price played the song, with a fresh anti-fascist lyric thrown in, on her Sept. 16 visit to “Kimmel” the night after this interview.
Fittingly, that appearance pulled her into the Kimmel craziness as arguments over the 1st Amendment erupted across the country. For several days, it appeared Price’s performance could be the last one ever on the show before parent company Disney allowed Kimmel to return.
Fighting back against political censorship was just the kind of thing Price had in mind when she wrote the songs on “Hard Headed Woman.”
“I wanted to show people what Nashville means to me, to show people what country music means to me,” she says. “I wanted to make some powerful feminist, left-leaning, pro-trans [statements] — you know, all the things they’re trying to say are the problem, but it’s not the problem.”
Along the way, there was a complete shakeup of her professional life, including hiring a new management team and, most dramatically, firing her longtime band, the Pricetags, whom she describes as “like brothers to me.” Each of those players, including husband Jeremy Ivey, had been with her for over a decade.
“I feel like I’m able to step into my power at this point and be like, ‘I’m the [freaking] boss,’” Price says. “If I don’t like something, if I don’t want someone to be here, if I don’t like the energy they’re bringing, I can fire them. That’s a big piece of where I’m at in this era.”
It’s all part of a journey of self-empowerment that started nearly five years ago, when Price, the hard-partying firebrand who made her name in part on old-school drinking songs like “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle),” gave up alcohol. That was in January 2021, in the days following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“I just feel like it’s such a numbing drug. Of course, everybody right now wants to numb out, because things are so awful,” says Price, who’s careful not to refer to herself as sober, given she still enjoys using weed and mushrooms. Kicking booze meant spending time with what she calls her “shadow self,” facing down her fears and anxieties without a protective barrier.
“Sometimes it’s painful to just sit in whatever you’re feeling,” Price adds. “[But] I feel like I’ve been able to be more accepting of my flaws and be able to to try to work on them, instead of sweeping it all under the rug.”
Among those perceived flaws was an addictive personality, a stormy temper and, yes, a desire to “not rock the boat,” as she puts it. Coming to terms with those patterns led her to some unfamiliar territory. “I thought therapy was for rich, entitled people. I thought that meditating was woo-woo,” Price says. She now practices both regularly. “It’s wild how far you can grow and how far you can come when you just change one thing.”
The break with the Pricetags, she says, was a long time coming. “I was scared to hurt anybody for so long and ruffle any feathers or change anything up, even though I was feeling really stagnant,” Price admits. The continued drinking and drug use of those around her didn’t help. A tour with Tedeschi Trucks Band in the fall of 2024 brought the situation to a breaking point.
The last straw, however, came when Price received a tepid response to “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” which was inspired by the advice Kris Kristofferson gave to one of her idols, Sinéad O’Connor, during Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration in 1992. “I knew I had to change things up because I wanted to play country music again,” she remembers. “I just felt like we had gone so far from that.”
Her last album, 2023’s divisive but underrated “Strays,” leaned all the way into psychedelic rock, a cosmic exploration of life without the hazy veneer of alcohol. “Hard Headed Woman” places Price back on firmer grounding — chiefly, her love for country songwriting and instrumentation. Recorded at the legendary RCA Studio A, where, she notes, Dolly Parton cut “9 to 5,” it was her first time making a record in Nashville as a solo artist.
There’s plenty of Price’s familiar sass on these 12 songs, such as on “Don’t Wake Me Up,” her duet with Jesse Welles that she says is all about “not let[ting] everybody just steal all of our joy.” There are beautifully brittle love songs, most memorably “Love Me Like You Used to Do,” where she’s joined by old pal and fellow non-drinker Tyler Childers. But the album truly lives when Price looks back on her own life, including her early struggles in Nashville (“Losing Streak”), her first encounters with her husband (“Close to You”), or on “Nowhere Is Where,” an intimate confession about where she’s from and how it shaped her. It’s her most personal album since her 2016 debut, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” full stop.
For someone known for speaking her mind and wearing her heart on her sleeve in song, Price admits she has trouble opening up about herself. Writing her 2022 memoir, “Maybe We’ll Make It,” which was re-released in paperback Sept. 2, helped her break down some of those walls.
“That book was definitely a lesson in, like, vulnerability and, I mean, maybe even over-sharing at times. But, believe it or not, I did keep things out,” Price says. She believes it’s important to “save a little something for myself” — and, significantly, as a mother and female artist, to keep her family safe. “I worry sometimes that people might try to use things against me,” she concedes. “I think it’s important to just, like, protect your peace.”
Doing so, however, has meant more than just watching out for herself. After all, parting ways with the Pricetags meant, in essence, that she was also firing her husband and longtime songwriting partner, Jeremy Ivey. “It was healthy for our marriage to do this for a while, and just for our family. We really needed it,” Price insists. Ivey’s now able to stay home with their three children while she’s on the road, a task that’s usually fallen on her mother in the past.
That extra time has allowed Ivey to return to recording his own music — including two new albums — while also popping in for the occasional gig, like Price’s appearance at Farm Aid, for which she’s on the board of directors, in Minneapolis last Saturday. He’ll also join her this weekend when she returns to L.A. to perform at the Grammy Museum downtown and the Ohana Festival in Dana Point.
“It’s great to see him come back into his own,” Price says of her life partner. “He’s sacrificed so much of his life playing backup to me. So I wanted to encourage him to do his own thing again too.”