If Margo Price is taking a sharp turn into her traditional country roots, rest assured that “I’m a hard-headed woman/and I don’t owe you shit” will be the first words on the resulting album.
“We need those songs. We need a candle in the darkness right now,” Price tells Rolling Stone of Hard Headed Woman, which drops on Friday. It’s her fourth studio album and first since the psychedelic-rock-laced Strays in early 2023.
We’re at a coffee shop in Portland, Maine, ahead of Price’s set at the inaugural Back Cove Fest at Payson Park a mile up the road. She had hoped to talk over oysters at a nearby bar where she once found Bill Murray holding court over cocktails, but the hours-long wait on an early-August Sunday afternoon would have encroached on her festival set. Price’s mind is racing even before we settle on coffee as a backup plan. In the 15 minutes it takes to get her from the festival grounds, she tells me about Murray, then about opening in Portland for John Prine, who confused bartenders with his standard order of a “Handsome Johnny” (ginger ale mixed with the cheapest vodka in the room). When I mention I have a rapport with the Turnpike Troubadours, who are playing immediately after her at the festival, she gets wide-eyed and asks, “Do you think they’d let me sit in?”
Before that, we must work through Hard Headed Woman, a record filled with twang, introspective songwriting, and enough nostalgia to keep it special for Price.
She recorded it at RCA Studio A in Nashville and tapped Matt Ross-Spang to produce it, the same person who produced Price’s debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter in 2016. It has 12 tracks. Price and husband Jeremy Ivey wrote or co-wrote nine of them. Tyler Childers and Jesse Welles have cameos. There are co-writes with Rodney Crowell and a “co-write” with Kris Kristofferson. She covers George Jones and an obscure Waylon Jennings number with an entertaining backstory. Her long-time band, the Price Tags, which included Ivey, joined her in the studio. However, in the time between recording and releasing it, the group parted ways. Price put together a new band that places a premium on vocals and country melodies.
“I really wanted to get back to focusing on the storytelling, the lyrics, and being able to weave together almost, like, The Great American Novel in album form,” Price explains.
“I had so much fun making Strays, but I missed those early days of being around one microphone and just singing a song with me and my guitar. That’s always been my home planet. I love this Björk quote where she is like, ‘Everyone has their home planet.’ You can visit Saturn or wherever, but I had to come back to Earth. That’s where I’m at now. I’ve never worked so long on an album, making sure that every single song was perfect.”
This project started in 2023, when Price played at Orville Peck’s annual rodeo in Joshua Tree, California, at the venerable Pappy and Harriet’s. She stayed at a house a friend owned that was built into the side of boulders and once was the home of the first Native American Playboy Bunny. The vibes took hold, and she wrote “Close to You” with Ivey. “That was when I knew what we were tapped back into,” she says. “That song tells the story of Jeremy and I meeting.” Shortly after, she played a charity event with Crowell and Emmylou Harris, who liked the new music they heard from Price. In the wake, she reached out to Crowell, who helped her finish two songs — ”Redeye Flight” and leadoff single “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down.”
The latter takes inspiration from Kristofferson’s 1992 political anthem of the same name, but Price wrote it as a kiss-off to the country music establishment — and even had the title tattooed on her body, as she told Rolling Stone‘s Nashville Now podcast. “All the cocaine in existence couldn’t keep your nose out of my business,” goes the song’s crescendo.
“It was written about my frustration with people I had been working with in the music business. I won’t say specifically who,” she says. “It’s funny, because, now that the song has come out, with the way that the world has gone, it feels like it could be about any number of businessmen or assholes. I’m glad. We need songs for these times.”
Price calls the late Kristofferson a “North Star of songwriters” and gave him a writing credit on the song. Kristofferson’s influence is also clear on “Losing Streak,” which picks up Price’s life story where Midwest Farmer’s Daughter left off.
She had already written “Don’t Wake Me Up” when she played Farm Aid with Welles in 2024. The two struck up a friendship, and when Price needed harmony on the tune, she reached out. “The tune reminded me of Dylan,” Welles says, “so I was extra stoked on that. Margo means the things she says and sings. I love singing with folks that mean it.”
But the biggest collaborations on Hard Headed Woman are her covers of Steven Knudson’s “Love Me Like You Used To” and Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye.” (The final cover is George Jones’ “I Just Don’t Give a Damn.”)
Barely a month after releasing Snipe Hunter, Childers finds himself playing a key part in another of the year’s defining country albums. He and Price sing “Love Me Like You Used To” together, as a tender waltz.
Time has moved fast enough that there is already a generation of fans who likely do not realize the impact Price had on Childers’ career a decade ago. When Price headlined the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for the first time in 2018, it was Childers who opened and brought out Sturgill Simpson as a special guest.
Before they both got sober, Price and Childers would party together, and they’re still apt to play or sing when they’re in the same place. Getting Childers onboard for this record was a mere formality.
“I’m so grateful that we have come up together, because he has really stood by me when others have not,” Price says. “Both of us have grown a lot since knowing each other in those early days when we partied together. Obviously, both of us have put the booze to the side, but he is still chasing the song. He’s still following his muse. I think it’s incredibly inspiring to see somebody that is using their entire capacity.
“I hate when people say, about either one of us, like, ‘You were better when you were fucked up.’ No. He is in his body. He’s in his mind. He’s making the best music of his life. And, the way that he has used his platform, it’s been beautiful and inspiring.”
When Price produced Jessi Colter’s 2023 LP Edge of Forever, the song “Kissing You Goodbye” came into her life, and ultimately became the closing track of Hard Headed Woman. Colter had a suitcase full of songs Jennings had written or had pitched to him, and she thought of Price.
The backstory to “Kissing You Goodbye” picked at an old wound. The song’s lyrics tell of a marriage-ending incident that reminded Price of a time when her and Ivey’s relationship hit the rocks — which Price recounted in detail in her 2022 memoir Maybe We’ll Make It. But she also found the song genuinely funny when Colter told her of its origins.
“Waylon had this lawyer who was also his drug dealer — as Waylon would do,” Price says. “Jessi was actually there for this moment: Waylon and this lawyer had been out having, like, a lost weekend — just partying their dicks off. This lawyer’s wife was so mad, because they’d been off good-timing. He tried to kiss her, and Waylon and Jessi both witnessed her saying, ‘Get your tongue out of my mouth, I’m kissing you goodbye.’ And I think she left him. Divorced him! Waylon took that and wrote the song.
“Jessi said, ‘I’m too old to sing this song, but you should sing this song,’” Price continues. “It feels like my very own ‘Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).’ I love to sing it at my house, because some of the lyrics feel like they were written just for us, unfortunately.”
Shortly after we finish our coffee in Portland, Price lands the invitation she wanted. Turnpike frontman Evan Felker asks Price to join the band on their cover of “Long, Hot Summer Day,” a stomping, swinging tale of working on towboats. He already knows that Price hails from Aledo, Illinois. “We’ve been doing this old John Hartford song about the Illinois River, so we thought we’d get somebody out with us who’s actually from Illinois and knows a thing or two about it,” Felker tells the crowd before calling Price onstage.
Later, when Turnpike loads out, their stage manager notices Price has left the case for her in-ear monitors behind, and I offer to take it to her. When I text this to Price, she replies, “Come do a joint with us!” Five minutes later I’m in her tour bus, where she’s holding court with her band and crew. The weed making its way from hand-to-hand is potent.
I learn that Price and Ivey became so enamored with Childers’ 2019 ballad “All Your’n” that the title became a running gag in their household. “We started calling everything your’n. ‘That shirt is your’n. This is your’n coffee.’ We couldn’t stop,” she recalls. When the conversation shifts to pets, she relays a tale of a house cat that used a sleeping family member as a litter box, simply to express its disdain for the person.
It’s a window into Price’s psyche that an interview could never open. Her usually-racing mind is at ease and infatuated with language and quirky memories. The songwriter who could come up with “Don’t Wake Me Up” and “Nowhere Is Where” is on full display.
Three years earlier, it was another substance — mushrooms — that helped Price and Ivey work through post-pandemic depression and angst to create Strays. When she toured behind that record, Price’s concerts matched the LP’s psychedelic rock energy. She would bound around the stage, full of energy, with arms, legs, and blond hair flying in every direction — imagine if the cartoon Tasmanian Devil could sing too. She would slip into the wings and pull off a wardrobe change, then return on the drum kit to jam.
It was freeing, but after Strays ran its course, Price moved on — mostly.
“I’m still using the mushrooms,” she says. “They’re great. They’ve really helped rewire my brain. I just feel so much less stressed than I used to, even though the world around us has never been worse — well, it’s hard to say that. But I feel like that was the start of this rebirth, for me having this new band, this new team of people around me.
“There’s that old quote about when you see a turtle on a fencepost. You know it didn’t get there by itself. I love my band. We are still all on good terms. But I just needed to shake things up. It was a challenge to do all that.”
Shaking things up meant that band overhaul. She replaced the Price Tags with Logan Ledger, Sean Thompson, Alec Newman, and Chris Gelb. At her Back Cove set, she and Ledger sang a pair of songs together: “Too Stoned to Cry,” her 2024 duet with Billy Strings, and a cover of “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man.”
The only constant between her current shows and the Strays tour is Price herself. Today, the singing, harmonies, and heavy layer of strings in her concerts are straight out of the oldest-school honky-tonks around.
“It has revived my live show,” Price says of the band revamp. “It has revived how I’m stepping onto the stage. I feel so lucky that I’m still doing this ten years later. It’s one thing to break into music, but staying there, and staying relevant, and staying turned on, it’s like marriage. You have to fucking work at it.
She does not overlook the fact that moving on from the Price Tags cut Ivey out of her touring party.
“I fired my husband from my band. That in itself is a fuckin’ country song,” she says. “It’s hilarious, and it’s also been really challenging. But I needed it.”
If a hard return to country was always in the cards for Price, she’s still doing it at a time when the culture of both politics and music feels largely disconnected from the climate in 2016 when she released Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. Merely being a progressive female with a platform in 2025 is fraught with risk — none more so than winding up on the wrong end of a social media frenzy for speaking out. She is finding solace in the music on Hard Headed Woman.
“I’m a highly-sensitive, highly-feeling person. I have a hard time when I see injustice, not saying anything about it,” Price says. “Singing these songs, and sometimes being the squeaky wheel saying, ‘This isn’t right,’ is hard, because people don’t like women. We’re living in a time where people are just stripping away women’s rights. That is why I wanted this album to be called Hard Headed Woman.
“They can try to silence me. They can gatekeep me out of their awards shows — and Tyler and Sturgill as well — and it’s fine. Our music is gonna get through. It’s gonna find the people that need it. I am more than happy to be the soundtrack for hard times.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
