margo price book tour

Margo Price travels long road to 'overnight success' in memoir; see her in Austin

• "Maybe We'll Make It," published in October by University of Texas Press, traverses the highs and lows of a long road to country stardom.
• Price doesn't shy away from difficult personal subjects in her memoir, which focuses on the years leading up to her 2016 solo debut album.

When Margo Price finished the first draft of a memoir she’d begun writing in 2018, she didn’t know quite what she had.

“I was 500 pages. It had no ending. There were no chapters,” explains the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. “It was like (Jack) Kerouac’s scroll: It was just one big thing of word vomit.”

But, like the music career she nurtured for more then a decade until she broke through with her 2016 album, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” Price knew she had something worth pursuing. 

“I got on the internet and ran my mouth on Twitter,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I think I'm actually writing a book.’ And then Jessica Hopper reached out, and she asked to read the manuscript.”

Hopper, a Chicago author and music critic, recently had become an editor for the University of Texas Press American Music Series, which has published two dozen music biographies and memoirs over the past decade. And just like that, the project had a home. UT Press published “Maybe We’ll Make It” last month, sparking a book tour that brings Price to Austin for a 3:15 p.m. Nov. 5 appearance at Central Presbyterian Church as part of the Texas Book Festival. She'll also sign copies of the book at 7 p.m. at Waterloo Records.

Editors helped her pare down her original manuscript, resulting in a 270-page journey that begins with Price’s childhood in rural Illinois and ends with her April 2016 appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” Most of her fans have followed the music she’s made since then, but “Maybe We’ll Make It” sheds light on the long road that got her there.

Along the way, she moved from Illinois to Nashville with $57 to her name; worked for years as a waitress while touring with the band Buffalo Clover; survived some harrowing episodes with alcohol, which she finally gave up two years ago; and had three children with husband Jeremy Ivey, including a twin who died a few days after being born.

More: Margo Price feels at home visiting the city Doug Sahm once roamed

Sharing such personal memories wasn’t easy. “You lose so much ambiguity when you're telling the story of your life,” she says. “With songwriting, it's really easy to be able to use metaphors, and you can be ambiguous.”

Price’s book is up-front about the hard living and hard times that dominated her teens and 20s. She took a lot of principled stands but also made her share of mistakes. “It was important to get all that stuff down, because who you see standing before you today (exists) because of all those things that happened,” she says. “And I'm really grateful for the struggle.”

We recently spoke with Price via Zoom. Here are some highlights from our conversation.

From the Carousel Lounge to the Devil's Backbone Tavern

American-Statesman: There’s a photo in the book of you performing at Austin’s Carousel Lounge in 2008 with your band Buffalo Clover. Do you remember much about that show?

Margo Price: We have a lot of photos from that night. We hung out real late; even when they closed the bar down, we just hung out in the front parking lot. We met a couple of girls who were in their 20s, and one of them told me I sounded like Cat Power. There weren't really that many people there, but everybody who was there was super cool. That was such a fun show.

More: Our review of Margo Price at Emo's in 2018

There’s also a colorful passage in the book about your visit to Devil’s Backbone Tavern, in Fischer southwest of Austin, on that same trip. What do you remember about it?

I love the Devil’s Backbone. I’ve been there maybe 10 times (since that first visit in 2008). The jukebox was amazing. I was listening to that Guy Clark record (“Old #1,” which was on the jukebox), and playing their piano, and hanging out with the locals and sitting out back and smoking weed. I'm going to do a show there someday. Mark my words, I've got to play out there.

How Willie Nelson helped her give up alcohol (but not weed)

Like Austin icon Willie Nelson, you’ve given up alcohol but not cannabis. (Price teamed with Nelson to produce a marijuana strain for the Willie’s Reserve brand sold in weed-legal states.) Has it been your personal experience that one is more destructive than the other? 

I have never blacked out and forgot what I've done after smoking a joint. But I have had some hell-raising times drinking. And really, I don't even regret it all. I think at times, alcohol absolutely saved my life. Because I was in so much pain, and if I did not have the ability to numb myself with that, I don't know that I would be here. But at a certain point, it just wasn't helpful to me anymore. It just was making it hard to do what I loved.

I also really have Willie Nelson to thank for showing me the way and destigmatizing plant medicine. I had read that he threw away his cigarettes, and he just rolled 20 joints and put them in a cigarette pack and rolled them up in his shirt sleeve. He got off the whiskey and everything. And I thought, if he can do that, I can do that, and I can function better.

I've also been trying to destigmatize psilocybin and psychedelic medicine. I've really struggled with depression, and I've seen nothing but benefits from taking mushrooms. I'm not endorsing that to anyone. Everyone has to make their own decisions, and what works for me is not necessarily going to work for someone else. But this is just what's working for me right now.

How difficult was it to write about losing your son Ezra just after he was born in 2010?

It was hard. I went into a dark place when I was writing through some of that. But with a lot of things in this book that were hard to write, it just feels very freeing, like I can move on from a lot of it.

The first draft of my book didn't have everything in there. It made me look a little bit better than than I was. Going back in and deciding to add a lot about what what tore apart my band and everything that happened in my marriage — that was a decision that we made later as a family. It just felt like there were pieces missing in the story.

So I've been nervous to get this book out. But at the same time, I'm just trying not to worry about if people are going to judge me, because it's just what I went through. I was just a kid at that time. So even though people are like, “Oh, you're 39, you can't write a book,” I’m like, just read the book and then get back to me.

A new album, and a future that's wide open

You have a new album, “Strays,” due out early next year. From the two singles that have already been released, it sounds a good bit heavier and less country than your first three records. Is that the case?

I'm a little disenchanted with a lot of things about the country scene, but I just want to keep myself turned on creatively. And I think the album has a lot of different palettes. There still is some pedal steel in there, and it's just me and my band playing live in a room. But yeah, it's different. I think it's my favorite thing I've done yet. I’ve got to feel that way. Otherwise, what's the point of even putting it out?

I started writing it when I was still drinking, and then by the end of it, I wasn't drinking, but we were doing lots of psychedelics. So it's out there, but it's still grounded. I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith and Bob Dylan and Tom Petty when we started writing it. So it's all over the place, but it holds up. I'm really excited for everybody to hear it.

I know that I'll make country records again. And when it's going to be a country record, it’s going to be (expletive) country, too. (laughs) … But I don't think I see a lot of people that are doing psychedelic rock. Maybe they are, but it's weird to not have a scene for that in a lot of ways.

More: Our 2020 interview with Margo Price

This book is your life story up to now, but in many ways, you’re still just getting started. You’re now about the same age that Willie Nelson was when he moved to Austin and reinvented his career. What might the future hold for you?

I've been in a hard place. After my career took off, I think a lot of people assumed that everything just clicks together. But those first few years were really tumultuous. I was still going through a lot of stuff in my personal life. And when the pandemic hit, I really feared that it was all over.

I kept saying, “When this thing ends, I'm going to come back like Tina Turner after Ike.” (laughs) She just came out swinging. And hearing that Willie was the same age (when he moved to Austin), too, that makes me really hopeful. I think being a woman, I've had a lot of anxiety about getting older. But it's kind of different now. I'm just ready to get out there and kick some ass.

Margo Price stops in Louisville on a book tour for 'Maybe We'll Make It'

She's performed at The Forecastle Festival , released three LPs, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and was a featured musical guest on Saturday Night Live .

This month, Margo Price adds 'author' to her resume.

And boy, does this 39-year-old country-Americana artist have a story to tell. Tuesday, Price will visit the Louisville Free Public Library during a promotional tour for her literary debut " Maybe We'll Make It ."

In her new memoir, Price bares her soul about loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony experienced by many aspiring musicians: bad gigs and long tours, rejection and sexual harassment, too much drinking, and barely enough money to live on.

"This book is me taking control of my destiny," the two-time Americana Music Honors & Awards award-winner told The Tennessean . "By giving people a glimpse into my career's 'good ole bad old days,' I'm [actually] owning my truth."

Price writes about being a 19-year-old college dropout who moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, played open mics, and even threw out her TV so that she would do nothing but write songs. Along the way, she met Jeremy Ivey , a fellow musician who would become her closest collaborator and her husband.

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After working on their craft for more than a decade, the couple had no label and no band. The turning point occurred when Price started writing music about her lowest moments. Those classic country songs eventually comprised the debut album that launched her career.

The singer's album, " Midwest Farmer's Daughter " debuted in the Top 10 (No. 10) on the  Billboard Top Country Albums chart: the first time since the chart began in the 1960s that a solo woman's debut album did so without having charted on the Hot Country Songs chart .At a free event sponsored by Carmichael's Bookstore , Oct. 18 at 7 p.m., the Nashville-based artist will play a bit of music during a special appearance at the Louisville Free Public Library , 301 York St.

Price will speak during the event with fellow musician and Kentucky native S. G. Goodman about her long road to success and after the interview, the two will play a few songs for the crowd.  

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To reserve your spot at the Louisville Free Public Library's event, visit Carmichael's Bookstore event page . Registering will allow the store to have copies of "Maybe We'll Make It," ($27.95) available at the event. Price's book can also be purchased at Carmichael's Bookstore , 1295 Bardstown Road and 2720 Frankfort Ave.

Reach Kirby Adams at [email protected].

• Consequence

Margo Price Announces New Album Strays, 2022-2023 Tour Dates

She's also shared the new single "Change of Heart"

Margo Price has a big year ahead. The country artist will release her next album,  Strays,  on January 13th, and to coincide with the project, she’s announced a 30-plus date North American tour that kicks off in November (grab tickets here ). Ahead of all the excitement, she’s shared a new look at the album, “Change of Heart,” which you can listen to below.

Price recorded  Strays  in Summer 2021, producing the album alongside Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) at Fivestar Studio in California’s Topanga Canyon. Tracking each song live with her band the Pricetags, and enlisting additional vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Lucius and guitar from Mike Campbell, Strays  marked Price’s most collaborative album to date.

“I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” Price said in a statement. “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.”

Strays  arrives in January via Loma Vista Recordings ( pre-orders are ongoing), but Price will begin performing cuts from the album much earlier. Beginning November 29th, she’ll embark on a North American tour that extends until March of next year. General ticket sales for the tour begin Friday, September 23rd at 10:00 a.m. local time, while pre-sale begins Wednesday, September 21st at the same time (use code VENUE ). Before that, Price will be on the road promoting her upcoming memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It , due out October 4th. See all of her tour dates below.

In new single “Change of Heart,” Price delivers her signature brand of resilient country-rock with insistent, buzzing keys and a swaggering guitar riff. “I quit trying to change the past/ I had a change of heart,” she sings, already miles away from the subject of her kiss-off. Watch the track’s psychedelic, Courtney Hoffman-directed music video below.

Last month, Price shared the single “Been to the Mountain,” which opens Strays.  Before that, she joined Mavis Staples and Adia Victoria for the abortion rights song “Fight to Make It.”

Strays  Artwork:

Strays  Tracklist: 01. Been to the Mountain 02. Light Me Up (feat. Mike Campbell) 03. Radio (feat. Sharon Van Etten) 04. Change of Heart 05. County Road 06. Time Machine 07. Hell in the Heartland 08. Anytime You Call (feat. Lucius) 09. Lydia 10. Landfill

Margo Price 2022 – 2023 Tour Dates: 09/23 — Lewisburg, WV @ Healing Appalachia 09/24 — Raleigh, NC @ Farm Aid 10/04 — Nashville, TN @ Grimey’s * 10/05 — New York, NY @ P&T Knitwear * 10/06 — Brooklyn, NY @ Greenlight Bookstore * 10/07 — York, PA @ White Rose Music Festival 10/15-16 — Nashville, TN @ Southern Festival of Books * 10/17 — Lexington, KY @ Joseph Beth Booksellers * 10/18 — Louisville, KY @ Carmichael’s Bookstore * 10/20 — Traverse City, MI @ National Writer’s Series * 10/22 — Iowa City, IA @ Prairie Lights* 10/23 — Chicago, IL @ Chicago Humanities Festival * 10/24 — Winnetka, IL @ The Book Stall* 10/27 — Live Oak, FL @ Suwannee Hulaween 11/01 — San Francisco, CA @ Green Apple Books on the Park * 11/02 — Santa Cruz, CA @ Bookshop Santa Cruz * 11/03 — Los Angeles, CA @ Vroman’s * 11/05 — Austin, TX @ Texas Book Festival * 11/06 — Dallas, TX @ Interbang Books * 11/16 — Nashville, TN @ Parnassus Books * 11/29 — Fayetteville, AR @ George’s Majestic Lounge ^ 11/30 — Baton Rouge, LA @ Chelsea’s Live ^ 12/02 — Lake Wales, FL @ Orange Blossom Revue 12/03 — Charleston, SC @ Music Farm ^ 12/05 — Charlotte, NC @ Neighborhood Theatre ^ 12/06 — Louisville, KY @ Headliners Music Hall ! 01/30 — Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel ! 01/31 — Atlanta, GA @ Variety Playhouse ! 02/02 — Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall $ 02/03 — Austin, TX @ Scoot Inn $ 02/04 — Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater $ 02/06 — Phoenix, AZ @ Crescent Ballroom % 02/07 — San Diego, CA @ The Observatory North Park % 02/09 — Los Angeles, CA @ Fonda Theater % 02/10 — San Francisco, CA @ Fillmore % 02/11 — Arcata, CA @ Van Duzer Theatre % 02/13 — Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom % 02/14 — Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom % 02/15 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox % 02/17 — Bozeman, MT @ The Elm % 02/19 — Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue % 02/20 — Madison, WI @ Majestic Theatre % 02/21 — Chicago, IL @ Vic Theatre % 02/22 — Indianapolis, IN @ The Vogue % 02/24 — Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre # 02/25 — Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre # 02/27 — Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground Ballroom # 02/28 — Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club # 03/02 — Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club # 03/03 — Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts # 03/04 — New York, NY @ Webster Hall # 03/09 — Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium ~

*= Maybe We’ll Make It Book Tour ^ = w/ Kam Franklin (of The Suffers) ! = w/ The Deslondes $ = w/ Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country % = w/ Lola Kirke # = w/ Tre Burt ~ = w/ Jessi Colter

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Margo Price Announces New Album, ‘Strays’, 2022–2023 Tour Dates [Video]

The rise, fall, and redemption of Margo Price  will be told with her new album, Strays . Out on January 13th, 2023, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2020 LP  That’s How Rumors Get Started   will chronicle the dizzying highs and crushing lows of the singer-songwriter’s recent life. Along with Tuesday’s announcement, Price shared the second single, “Change Of Heart”, which follows “ Been To The Mountain “, released earlier this month.

While Price’s previous work has dealt openly with her struggles with grief, addiction, trauma, and more, the Grammy-nominated songwriter is letting go with Strays . The death of one of her twin boys,  Ezra , in 2010 remains a constant source of pain, but with a newly alcohol-free outlook on life, Price has returned from the mountain with “a celebration of freedom in its many, feral forms.”

“I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” Price said in a press release. “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.”

Price recorded  Strays over five days in the summer of 2021 at Fivestar Studio in California’s Topanga Canyon, but the roots stretch back to the previous summer, when she took a trip to South Carolina. During a mushroom-filled six-day excursion with her husband and frequent collaborator Jeremy Ivey , Price began writing what would eventually become  Strays . The album of ten original songs also features additional vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Lucius , in addition to guitar from  Mike Campbell   and strings, synthesizers, and other previously untapped sounds for Price.

Related: Willie Nelson, Margo Price, Nathaniel Rateliff, More Sign On For Billy Joe Shaver Tribute LP, ‘Live Forever’ [Listen]

Margo Price will take  Strays  on the road with a run of over 30 new tour dates set to carry her from November 2022 through March 2023. The new shows will feature support from Kam Franklin (The Suffers), The Deslondes , Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country , Lola Kirke , Tre Burt , and Jessi Colter at various stops. A pre-sale for tickets to the newly announced shows begins at 10 a.m. local time tomorrow, September 21st, with tickets going on sale to the public on Friday at 10 a.m. local time.

Among the tour dates are a string of book appearances in support of Price’s debut memoir,  Maybe We’ll Make It . Out on October 4th via  University of Texas Press , the book tells the story of Price’s humble beginnings moving to Nashville with $57 through her ascension as one of the faces of the alt-country movement.

“Margo’s book hits you right in the gut—and the heart—just like her songs,” Willie Nelson said.

Check out the new Margo Price single “Change Of Heart” and click here to pre-order  Strays . Scroll down for the tracklist and album artwork as well as a list of newly announced tour dates.

Margo Price – “Change Of Heart” (Official Video)

Strays  Tracklist

Been To The Mountain

Light Me Up (ft. Mike Campbell)

Radio (ft. Sharon Van Etten)

Change of Heart

County Road

Time Machine

Hell In The Heartland

Anytime You Call (ft. Lucius)

Margo Price 2022–2023 Tour Dates

9/23 – Lewisburg, WV – Healing Appalachia

9/24 – Raleigh, NC – Farm Aid

10/4 – Nashville, TN – Grimey’s^

10/5 – New York, NY – P&T Knitwear^

10/6 – Brooklyn, NY – Greenlight Bookstore^

10/8 – York, PA – White Rose Music Festival

10/15-16 – Nashville, TN – Southern Festival of Books^

10/17 – Lexington, KY – Joseph Beth Booksellers^

10/18 – Louisville, KY – Carmichael’s Bookstore^

10/20 – Traverse City, MI – National Writer’s Series^

10/22 – Iowa City, IA – Prairie Lights^

10/23 – Chicago, IL – Chicago Humanities Festival^

10/24 – Winnetka, IL – The Book Stall^

10/27-30 – Live Oak, FL – Suwannee Hulaween

11/1 – San Francisco, CA – Green Apple Books on the Park^

11/2 – Santa Cruz, CA – Bookshop Santa Cruz^

11/3 – Los Angeles, CA – Vroman’s^

11/5 – Austin, TX – Texas Book Festival^

11/6 – Dallas, TX – Interabang Books^

11/16 – Nashville, TN – Parnassus Books^

11/29 – Fayetteville, AR – George’s Majestic Lounge*

11/30 – Baton Rouge, LA – Chelsea’s Live*

12/2 – Lake Wales, FL – Orange Blossom Revue

12/3 – Charleston, SC – Music Farm*

12/5 – Charlotte, NC – Neighborhood Theatre*

12/6 – Louisville, KY – Headliners Music Hall*

1/30 – Asheville, NC – Orange Peel%

1/31 – Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse%

2/2 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall&

2/3 – Austin, TX – Scoot Inn&

2/4 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theater&

2/6 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom$

2/7 – San Diego, CA – The Observatory North Park$

2/9 – Los Angeles, CA – Fonda Theatre$

2/10 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore$

2/11 – Arcata, CA – Van Duzer Theatre$

2/13 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom$

2/14 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom$

2/15 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox$

2/17 – Bozeman, MT – The Elm$

2/19 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue$

2/20 – Madison, WI – Majestic Theatre$

2/21 – Chicago, IL – Vic Theatre$

2/22 – Indianapolis, IN – The Vogue$

2/24 – Toronto, ON – The Phoenix Concert Theatre#

2/25 – Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre#

2/27 – Burlington, VT – Higher Ground Ballroom#

2/28 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club#

3/2 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club#

3/3 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts#

3/4 – New York, NY – Webster Hall#

3/9 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium!

^Maybe We’ll Make It Book Tour

*w/ Kam Franklin (of The Suffers)

%w/ The Deslondes

&w/ Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country

$w/ Lola Kirke

#w/ Tre Burt

!w/ Jessi Colter

New dates in bold

On The Site

American music series, maybe we'll make it.

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by Margo Price

256 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.90 in , 20 b&w photos

Sales Date: October 4, 2022

• Description
• AUDIO/VIDEO

When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, played open mics, and even threw out her TV so that she would do nothing but write songs. She met Jeremy Ivey, a fellow musician who would become her closest collaborator and her husband. But after working on their craft for more than a decade, Price and Ivey had no label, no band, and plenty of heartache.

Maybe We'll Make It is a memoir of loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony experienced by so many aspiring musicians: bad gigs and long tours, rejection and sexual harassment, too much drinking and barely enough money to live on. Price, though, refused to break, and turned her lowest moments into the classic country songs that eventually comprised the debut album that launched her career. In the authentic voice hailed by Pitchfork for tackling "Steinbeck-sized issues with no-bullshit humility," Price shares the stories that became songs, and the small acts of love and camaraderie it takes to survive in a music industry that is often unkind to women. Now a Grammy-nominated “Best New Artist," Price tells a love story of music, collaboration, and the struggle to build a career while trying to maintain her singular voice and style.

Margo Price is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter. She has released three LPs, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and performed on Saturday Night Live, and is the first female musician to sit on the board of Farm Aid.

Margo's book hits you right in the gut—and the heart—just like her songs. ~Willie Nelson

This is a love story. Whether it's gentle or tough love, and whether it's in times of ease or struggle, these pages reveal Margo’s true love affair with music, her passion for family and friends, and her weaving together of artistic victories in the face of life challenges. ~Valerie June

No artist in America is guaranteed a living; the best this country can offer is the chance to make a life in the margins while you search for an open door. Margo Price’s remarkable memoir is about what it really means to take that deal, and all the freedom and precarity that come with it. Of course there’s music in this book, on a pure phrase-by-phrase level--a driving rhythm, lines as true as over-the-shoulder darts finding the bull's-eye. But the whole point of Margo’s account of a working songwriter and working parent’s switchback climb to a sustainable twenty-first-century existence, both onstage and off, is that even talent on loan from God won’t put gas in the van. You have to be braver than an acrobat to walk this path at all, let alone walk it without compromise. Anyone who’s ever bared their heart to empty rooms and measured out time in smashed bottles, dreaming of just breaking even, will see themselves in this story. ~Alex Pappademas

Margo’s beautifully captured story pulled me in from the start. She’s my musical sister, and I loved this book. ~Lucinda Williams

[An] engaging and beautifully narrated quest for personal fulfillment and musical recognition...This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage...A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor. ~Kirkus, starred review

[A] dazzling debut...Told with moving candor, Price’s tale of overcoming squalor and pain provides powerful emotional context to her hard-won country music stardom. Fans will adore this story of survival. ~Publishers Weekly

[ Maybe We'll Make It ] documents [Price's] prolonged plight and the unsung truth of breaking into the biz: It’s not glamorous...Her candid memoir takes the reader on a life-affirming journey. ~BuzzFeed News

Brutally honest…a vivid and poignant memoir. ~The Guardian

Margo Price delivers an unflinching self-portrait of an artist striving to find her sound and make her Music City dreams come true...Artists of all creeds will find something relatable in Maybe We’ll Make It , with its raw depictions of the artist’s perennial dilemma: bridging the transcendental need to create with the very real need to survive. Beyond this, Price’s memoir offers a heart-wrenching account of her journey as a mother. ~Chapter 16

Price has a knack for telling stories and drawing readers into her life and experience, and Maybe We’ll Make It radiates with her bright candor; she’s not interested in hiding her heart in the shadows and covering her feelings with darkness. Price bares her soul and the jaggedness of her emotions, making Maybe We’ll Make It one of the best music memoirs so far this year. ~No Depression

An astonishing tale of an incredible journey...Of its many notable successes, the book efficiently and effectively seals the chapter on popular, mainstream country music's divorce from its diverse, rustic roots. Plus, Price's tales highlight that split's honest, near-destructive impact on the genre's metaphorical orphaned children. Even deeper, these artists energizing themselves and their careers via digital-era globalization and DIY bootstrapping—amid East Nashville-residing marginalization from country music's mainstream industry—reads like the most authentic and timeless outlaw tale combining elements of punk rock and country's crossover into 70s-era rock and roll. ~The Tennessean

The gritty struggle of how to get noticed in Nashville…Now established as a favourite songwriter of Willie Nelson, Margo Price had a hard ride to where she is today, her memoir reading like a soap opera borne from a song...As Price's music evolved, so her wisdom grows during the book, and at its heart is stoic love: for each other, for family and friends, and above all for music and creative freedom. ~Mojo

Courageously frank, utterly moving...Price tells us, with breathtaking honesty and courage, her story to achieve a sustainable career as a singer-songwriter. Through all manner of struggles, humiliations, disappointments, and personal tragedies, Price maintains her perseverance despite being tested to the core. ~The Current

Compelling, honest, and powerful... Maybe We’ll Make It should be required reading for anyone thinking about how music is made in the 2020’s. That applies not only to artists, but also (perhaps especially) to club owners, journalists, or record company executives. ~Americana Highways

[A] stunning, emotional, inspiring new memoir…In her authentic, no-nonsense voice, Price shares the stories that became songs, and the small acts of love and camaraderie it takes to survive in a music industry that is often unkind to women. ~Our Quad Cities

A rough, rowdy, and brutally honest story of dreams and frustrations, good and bad choices, pain and joy...Price’s willingness to be open and honest about her experiences and mistakes is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. She also avoids the twin traps common to memoirists, neither amping up her tales for exploitative shock value nor casting her past in self-pitying justification. Instead, she presents her stories of substance abuse, bad choices, and infidelity as simple facts...While Price’s personal journey centers the book, a larger story unfolds alongside it. Price’s encounters with the 21st-century mainstream Nashville music-biz complex are informative, entertaining, and, at times, unsettling. ~The Nashvillian

[ Maybe We'll Make It ] begins with Price’s childhood in rural Illinois and ends with her April 2016 appearance on ' Saturday Night Live .' Most of her fans have followed the music she’s made since then, but Maybe We’ll Make It sheds light on the long road that got her there. ~Austin American-Statesman

Margo Price's memoir of grit and resilience is one of our favorites to come out on University of Texas Press's consistently quality American Music Series. The Nashville-based, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter relates the twenty years since she dropped out of college to become a musician with a keenly illustrative narrative voice and invokes a storyteller who 'quit trying to change the past' in order to share the lessons for 'the recent future.' ~Rough Trade, "US Books of the Year 2022"

[Price’s] new memoir, which covers her childhood and her years struggling to start her career in Nashville, proves that she’s just as talented at penning prose as she is at writing songs – which is to say, really damn good. Reading this book feels like hanging out with one of your smartest, liveliest friends. ~NPR, "2022 Books We Love"

Maybe We’ll Make It is a beautiful, soul-bearing memoir…Despite her elegant prose, Price does not hold back any of the ugly details of her starving artist lifestyle…Her unabashed commentary on the sexist undertones of the country music industry, and the grueling need to prove herself to record labels that are only too eager to cast her aside, reveal her fighter spirit...Even in her darkest moments, Price writes with crushing honesty and humility. Her story serves as a poignant reflection on finding courage in chaos and leaning on a support system when life is too difficult to shoulder alone. ~SPIN, "9 Can’t-Put-Down Music Memoirs Of 2022"

[An] unflinching memoir...Price paints a vivid portrait of a musician who moves to Nashville with big dreams. ~The Boot, "10 Best Country Music Books of 2022"

Maybe We’ll Make It never becomes a morality tale, which would be out of character for the artist and a poor interpretation of her life. Price’s early years become part of the complexity of who she is, not just as an artist but as a person...It might be unusual for an artist to pen a memoir so early in her career, but Price has never done things the normal way, and in this case, the choice to write was an excellent decision. ~Spectrum Culture

[ Maybe We'll Make It leaves] you hankering for a sequel this sharply remembered, keenly written and marvelously self-perceptive. ~Variety, "Best Music Books of 2022"

Price is a forthright and spirited raconteur with a quick turn of phrase. Her affable, earnest nature draws in the reader, despite her occasional transgressions (and, at times, maybe even because of them). ~Relix

This is the best music memoir of the year. As she does in her music, Price lays her soul bare here, pulling no punches in revealing her highs and lows, including her struggles with addiction and the faltering early days of her marriage, with bright candor. Price knows well how tell a story and draws us easily into the shadows and light of her life and music. ~No Depression, "2022's Most Memorable Music Books"

[An] excellent memoir. ~Rolling Stone

It would be an understatement to call her poignant, pulverizing memoir, ... Maybe We’ll Make It , soul-baring. Price practically plops her heart, spleen, and a couple of kidneys onto the page. ~Jezebel

A riveting, often shocking read. ~Clash Music

In terms of heartbreaking honesty, [ Maybe We'll Make It ] gives Prince Harry a run for his money. ~The Irish Times

Much like [Price's] music, her memoir is written with an authentic, singular voice. She opens up more about loss, motherhood, drinking, her songs, and much more. ~The Bluegrass Situation

[ Maybe We'll Make It ] offers a beautifully wrought narrative of cheerleading, waitressing, poverty, substance abuse, drunk tanks and grievous personal loss as she was rebuffed by the music business for over a decade. ~The Telegraph

The writer and woman we find in the memoir is the same person we find in [Price's] music: candid and vulnerable with the ability to make you laugh with one line and make you cry with the next. Maybe We’ll Make It explores the balance of art and life, the ups and downs of 'making it,' profound love, and profound loss. Price’s writing is conversational, lyrical, and above all, human. You can hear the person behind the prose. ~Literary Hub

[An] outstanding and unflinching memoir. ~Nashville Scene

Price has to be praised for writing such an open and honest account of her early life as a musician, struggling to ‘make it’ in the modern day music business. Reading this book, you can’t help but think that every wannabe music star should be sat down and forced to read this before they embark on their first gig, because this is an incredibly honest account of just how difficult it can be to even get on the bottom rung of that long climb to the top...This book is every bit as compelling as her songs...[ Maybe We'll Make It ] is, quite simply, a great read. ~Americana UK

'Singing is not a real job,' a guidance counselor once told a teenage Margo Price. What she shows us in her moving memoir is what a heck of a lot of work it is...Here, you sense, is someone who has fought every day for what she wants to do—and a reminder of how much unseen toil goes into a creative life. ~Wall Street Journal, "Five Best Books on Country Music"

The story of [Price's] development as an artist—and a person—who, by almost any means necessary, is making it by sticking to her beliefs and doing it her way, makes for a interesting read. ~Ft.Myers Magazine

Price’s music is the soundtrack to her courageous story in progress. In the best possible way, this book reads like the liner notes: honest, heartfelt, and profound. ~Shepherd

She has never lost that early hunger, or her rebellious streak. Hers is a tale of committed endurance punctuated by euphoria, and gives insight into several unlikely influences – the Kinks and Sylvia Plath among them – on her irrepressible music. ~Times Literary Supplement

• Chapter 1. The Unpaved Road
• Chapter 2. Rearview Mirror
• Chapter 3. Fifty-Seven Dollars
• Chapter 4. Strays
• Chapter 5. Lay Around with the Dogs
• Chapter 6. This Town Gets Around (and Around and Around)
• Chapter 7. Black Water
• Chapter 8. Stealing from Thieves
• Chapter 9. Floating
• Chapter 10. Pearls to Swine
• Chapter 11. Hell in the Heartland
• Chapter 12. Everywhere
• Chapter 13. Mesa Boogie
• Chapter 14. C for California
• Chapter 15. Aimless Fate
• Chapter 16. Ball and Unchained
• Chapter 17. New Mama
• Chapter 18. Ezra and Judah
• Chapter 19. Drowning
• Chapter 20. Uppers, Downers, Out-of-Towners
• Chapter 21. Burn Whatever’s Left
• Chapter 22. Treading Water
• Chapter 23. Weekender
• Chapter 24. A Band of My Own
• Chapter 25. Midwest Farmer’s Daughter
• Chapter 26. One Dark Horse
• Chapter 27. The Recent Future
• Acknowledgments

The publication of Maybe We'll Make It was made possible by the support of the Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music Endowment .

Listen to Margo Price:

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• New Additions

Margo Price Sets 2022-2023 Tour Dates: Ticket Presale Code & On-Sale Info

by Francesco Marano

Published september 20, 2022.

Margo Price has announced 2022 and 2023 tour dates

Billed as Til The Wheels Fall Off, the newly planned concerts are set at mid-sized North American venues from November into March. The opening acts on select dates will be Kam Franklin (from The Suffers), The Deslondes, Daniel Donato's Cosmic Country, Lola Kirke, Tre Burt, or Jessi Colter. Before the headline tour, Margo has a few festival performances planned.

In addition to the new dates, Margo shared news that she will release a new album on January 13 titled Strays . Her previous album was 2020's That's How Rumors Get Started .

Margo Price Tour Dates and Tickets Near You

Margo price all tour dates and tickets, when do margo price 2022-2023 tour tickets go on sale and what is the presale code.

The general public on-sale begins as early as September 23. Presales for VIP packages and artist begin September 21. American Express cardholder, Spotify, Live Nation, LN Mobile App., and local venues / radio presales will follow. Keep in mind, each date is different and details are subject to change.

The Artist presale password is STRAYS . For the American Express presale, you can use the promo password INGOLD , but you will need the card to complete your purchase. The Live Nation presale password is VENUE , and the LN Mobile App code is COVERT . Click through the individual concert links for more information about the show you're interested in.

We recommend following Margo Price on social media and signing up for the email newsletter , in addition to checking your local venue’s social media and email subscription, to get the most up-to-date information.

Watch the music video for the first single from the Strays album, " Change of Heart ." For more, check out Margo Price's Zumic artist page .

Margo Price Opens Up Like Never Before: ‘It Feels Freeing’

By Angie Martoccio

Angie Martoccio

Two years ago, while tripping on mushrooms, Margo Price decided to quit drinking. This wasn’t her first attempt, but something about her psychedelic journey led her to an epiphany. “I know it sounds a little woo-woo, but I was touched by something,” says Price, 39. “I thought about fucking everything that had happened in my life up until that point, and I didn’t know what was holding me back from quitting.”

What inspired you to write a memoir? I’ve always wanted to be an author, but it was spurred by two things. One of them was Patti Smith’s Just Kids , and thinking how beautiful it was that she wrote a book that was just about her youth and her partner [Robert Mapplethorpe]. And then when I got pregnant, I just felt so purposeless. I was like, “OK, I can’t tour. I need something to keep me creatively fed.” I would drop my son Judah off at school and then I would go to this coffee shop in East Nashville called the Post. I would write from eight in the morning until noon, and I would drink tea and eat a couple meals, and Jeremy would usually be sitting there across the table and he’d be writing songs and poems. He was like, “You should write a book.” So I started obsessing over it.

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What kinds of things did you leave out? The first draft that I wrote, I hadn’t gotten sober at that point — I was not drinking because I was pregnant. So when I started going through things with my editor, I was having a lot of realizations. I didn’t have anything about my eating disorder. I didn’t have anything about just feeling ugly, not feeling good enough, struggling with my self-image in general. I was still going through a lot of it. I still am.

There [were] a couple other specific stories about things that happened to me on the music side of things, just with labels and certain things that I kept out that it was hard for me to bite my tongue on. But I thought, “I don’t know if I want to unearth this. Is this pertinent to the story?” Who knows. Maybe Volume Two I’ll let some more skeletons out of the closet.

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Was Jeremy cool with all of this stuff being out there? He was actually the one who encouraged me to talk about our problems. Because the book is Maybe We’ll Make It , not Maybe I’ll Make It. He’s been there with me writing the songs and doing all the things. He was the one who was like, “People aren’t going to get the full story if we just say, ‘Oh, we lost a kid and then that was it. Everything was fine. And then our music took off.'” Because it wasn’t. It was really ugly and it was really scary, and we continue to have disagreements and arguments. It’s a hard business to stay together in. I’m gone all the time. There’s things that just wear on a marriage.

In what ways was writing this book cathartic for you? During the pandemic it’s just nice to have a place to escape to, because here I’m writing about what I thought was the bad days. I’m like, “This was the time I was struggling.” But I was looking back on it and having this newfound fondness for the days that we struggled and understanding how it’s shaped me as an adult. Lots of processing. This really gave me a chance to examine where I went wrong. I know that people say writing’s not therapy because a therapist isn’t there, but I think I’ve accomplished some of my hardest work through my art. It feels really freeing to just get it out there.

At what point in the writing did you quit drinking? I had 400-some pages before the pandemic even started, before [my daughter] Ramona was born. But I didn’t have an ending and I didn’t have chapters and it was very shapeless. This January will be two years [since] I quit drinking. I did multiple edits while in that new frame of mind, and it also gave me the ending that I was looking for, because I was seeing all these things that I was going through. “You wreck your car, you do all this, and then [you’re] still not ready to quit.” Like, “I got it under control!” Even drinking through the election, I remember being like, “OK, this is not healthy and you can’t just turn to it when you’re stressed.” And that’s definitely what I did. 

How has being sober changed your songwriting process? I feel incredibly clear-headed. The clarity, the energy that I have, I’m honestly just more in tune with my brain — with my spirituality — than I have been in a long time. My skin looks better than ever. I don’t even really work out. I’ve reverse-aged.

It’s funny, because we hadn’t played “ Hurtin’ on the Bottle ” in quite a while, and I went out and played a show with Tyler Childers and I was like, “I’m going to play some of my country songs.” I was playing “Since You Put Me Down.” I was playing “Hands of Time.” There was foreshadowing in those songs with how much the drinking was hurting me, and how much it was self-sabotage. “Hurtin’ on the Bottle” is a sad fucking song. But Jeremy was like, “You don’t even drink anymore. Do you want to play any drinking song? Do you even think that that connects with you?” I was like, “It fucking resonates with me now more than ever.”

If you turned your book into a movie, who would play you? Oh, my gosh, what a great question. I liked Licorice Pizza. [Alana Haim] was incredible. I really loved that the casting agent addressed her nose [laughs] . So, we have to find someone with a really strong profile.

You released your book around the same time as Bob Dylan ‘s new one. I know. I’ve been waiting to devour his. Chronicles was huge for me, and I went back and read that a second time as I was in the process of writing my memoir.

What’s your favorite Dylan era? ‘66 amphetamine Dylan. Blonde on Blonde. It’s hard to pick. I’ve dressed up as two different Dylans. It wasn’t even Halloween. I did some tributes and cross-dressed, so I did ’66 Dylan with the polka dot shirt and I had a wig and the sunglasses and everything. I also did the white face paint Desire -era Dylan. I’ve played a show with him. I was on the same bill, so I have a poster with my name underneath Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. It’s insane.

I hope that’s framed in your house somewhere. It is.

You (along with Annie D’Angelo) recently became the first female directors on the board of Farm Aid . There’s going to be a time where the older directors will no longer be with us. Do you see yourself taking that forward and carrying it into the future? Farm Aid was ahead of its time, and we need it now more than ever. They’re helping shed a light on a lot of the disparities that farmers of color face. They just don’t get grants and loans as much as white farmers. And we’re really coming into a crucial time with the climate, the environment. I 100 percent plan to recruit more people on the board as time goes on that I know are equally as passionate about the cause.

You kick off your new album with a bold line: “I got nothin’ to prove, I got nothin’ to sell/I’m not buying what you got, I ain’t ringing no bells.” As we recorded it, I started thinking, “This is a great mission statement.” I wanted to separate myself from what everybody thinks I’m supposed to be, getting lumped in as just a country singer. I want people to take me seriously as a writer. Women, we have to work so much fucking harder to prove it.

You’ve been labeled as too rock for country and too country for rock. Do you feel that times are different now? Are you more confident about being able to paint your brush in everything? I see comments from fans sometimes that are like, “Oh, I wish you would stay country.” I’ve even had some really good friends be like, “I love when you sing rock. But I just feel like you need to be making country records, because you do it so well.” But I don’t want to be boxed in. Obviously, I’m still singing Loretta [Lynn] songs. I just covered a Billy Joe Shaver song. I like to do both, and I will continue to straddle the line. And luckily I’ve had architects like Lucinda Williams that could do that. And Bob Dylan. And fucking Jack White. Jack makes country music [and] he makes rock & roll, but it’s all just good songs, and that’s where I want to sit.

And actually, Benmont was just at [producer] Jonathan Wilson’s studio the week before us, so his grand piano and the Heartbreakers’ organ was in there. Micah Hulscher, my keyboardist, got to play them. It’s like, “Oh, that’s the Heartbreakers’ organ. No other organ sounds like that.” It was cool that we got to have those vibes on there.

Sharon Van Etten appears on “Radio.” How did she come into the fold? Sharon is one of the greatest songwriters of our generation. I see so many people trying to be her. It’s really cool to see how far her influence has spanned, and she’s not even old. I met her at Newport Folk Festival and she watched my set and came up to me and introduced herself. We exchanged phone numbers and then we started [being] virtual pen pals during the pandemic. We were sharing songs. I got to hear her album [ We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong ] before it was out. We were connecting as musicians and as mothers.

I wrote that song when I was walking in the woods, and I sent it to her. She helped polish up the lines, and she sent me back all those beautiful harmonies. I listened to it in my car with tears running down my face because she means so much to me. It’s been such a natural, needed friendship. I often feel alone in the scene, and having her camaraderie has been big.

Why do you feel alone? There’s the really straightforward pop-country thing that goes on, and there’s even people that double dip in those worlds and get to do all the awards shows. I’ve been ousted from a lot of the Nashville establishments because my first album [2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter ] was talking about how the scene here could be sleazy at times. And then my second album [2017’s All American Made ] had controversial songs on it. People never know what I’m going to say or what I’m going to do. It’s fine with me, though. I would say something out of line [ laughs ]. There are people who champion me and make me feel really welcome, but I think sometimes it’s a little more competitive than people know.

You’ve said you’re at a point in your life where you aren’t focusing on large crowds or accolades. What do you mean by that? I have to work very hard at not getting lost in the pageantry and getting dollar signs in your eyes. A lot of this business is high highs and sub-zero lows, where it’s a dopamine hit when you go on stage and when you get press. And when you don’t, it works in the opposite way. I’ve really been trying not to get lost in it, because it’s a mess out there. What social media has done not just to the music world, but everybody. You have to live in it all the time. When I start feeling poisoned by all of it, I just shut it all down and remember exactly why I picked up a guitar in the first place.

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Keep singing your songs and keep dreaming your dreams, because it’s not what it’s about. It’s not about having Grammys on the shelf. That’s all the fake shit. Singing to fans every night, that was my lifelong goal. I’ve already achieved it. It’s awesome.

Sorry, I haven’t had therapy in a couple weeks. I’m on a tear with you.

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Margo Price Announces 2022-2023 ‘Till The Wheels Fall Off Tour Dates and New Album Strays for Jan 2023 Release

Cait Stoddard

[READ FULL BIO]

• International edition
• Australia edition
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Country star Margo Price on her memoir: ‘My editor said whiskey is basically a character’

Price survived alcoholism, hardship and tragedy to become a star, as she recounts in her brutally honest new book. ‘I had panic attacks, thinking about all of this being out there,’ she says

M argo Price was 19 years old when she decided to drop out of college and make music instead. She had taken some mushrooms and had a psychedelic epiphany about her future that she likens to “a conversation with God”. Full of optimism, she packed up her belongings and moved from small-town Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee, where she set about building her career – but things didn’t quite go to plan. It would take a further 14 years for Price to land a record deal. In that time, she busked, worked as a waitress and taught dance classes to children. She endured grinding poverty, often subsisting on a single meal a day, and at one point slept in a tent. So what kept her going?

“I was pretty stubborn,” the alt-country star remembers. “I had this thing of: ‘I’m gonna make this happen, I’m not gonna stop, even if I know it’s unhealthy.’ Sometimes it felt like an addiction in itself.”

Price, now 39, has documented her years trying to make it in a vivid and poignant memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It. She was inspired, in part, by Patti Smith’s book Just Kids, in which Smith looks back on her early years as an artist in New York. “I just loved how her book took place in those years that she was struggling,” says Price. “And I thought: ‘If I don’t write about this now, I’m going to forget all the details.’”

Price is talking from her home in Tennessee where she lives with her husband and musical partner Jeremy Ivey, and their two children, Judah and Ramona. The family recently moved out to the countryside in Whites Creek, 20 minutes out of Nashville. “We’ve got about six acres out here so I can be totally naked in my backyard,” Price grins, pointing to the leafy scene out of the window behind her. “I just got back from a hike with my dogs. I go about three miles every morning. I try to get lost out there every day, although my children go to school in east Nashville so I still get my fill of bougie coffee.”

Price found the process of writing cathartic and painful. The book dwells on some of her lowest points, most notably the death of Ezra, her son Judah’s twin brother, 10 days after he was born, due to a heart defect. It also traces her long and problematic relationship with alcohol, which began when she was 12 – “Jesus couldn’t be wrong,” she writes, observing communion rites at church – and reached its nadir in the months following Ezra’s death. One night, after a long evening of drinking, she got into her car and crashed into a telegraph pole, resulting in a weekend in prison.

Price notes she was still drinking when she wrote the first draft of the book. It wasn’t until her editor said to her: “You do know that whiskey is basically a character in this book, don’t you?” that she found the impetus to quit. “I was finally at the end of so much cognitive dissonance with my drinking, and how it was making me feel,” she says. “I had a really bad time when we lost the baby, and then, when my career took off, a lot of that drinking and partying was fun. Then the pandemic hit, and I was just not doing well with it. [Alcohol] was making me feel so much depression and anxiety.”

In preparation for the release of Maybe We’ll Make It, Price has been having therapy – “Because I was having panic attacks, thinking about all of this being out there,” she explains. “I know what people do on the internet, and I was imagining the names they were gonna call me. They’re gonna say I’m a horrible mother, that I’m a drunk. But I also [hope] that people are going to appreciate my vulnerability.”

She recalls sitting at home one night with Ivey and bursting into tears about what her parents and siblings would think. “I said: ‘What if I burn all my bridges? What if they won’t let me come back home?’ He just looked at me and said: ‘You belong to no one.’” Price smiles and holds up an arm to the camera. “What he said meant so much, I went and got it tattooed on my arm.”

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She is currently putting the final touches to an album, Strays, that is due for release in the new year; a few days after our chat, its first single, Been to the Mountain, is released. It’s a song that sardonically references her change in fortunes – “Used to be a waitress but now I’m a consumer” – and blends old-time country with 70s rock’n’roll. In the book, Price bemoans the Nashville scene that saw her and her first band, Buffalo Clover, as “too country for the rock scene and too rock for the country scene”. Now, as a solo artist, she has found acceptance and an audience away from the mainstream tastes of Music Row. “I don’t put any limits on what genres I draw on and what I put on my paintbrush,” she says.

Her early brushes with music industry figures were frequently grim. One would-be manager lured her to his house and then spiked her drink; she escaped by locking herself in the bathroom and calling Ivey to come to get her. She also recalls a label rep who told her they already had two women on their roster, so couldn’t take on a third. Success finally came when she was signed by Jack White’s Third Man Records on the strength of her first solo LP, 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter . That album was widely portrayed as her last roll of the dice, having pawned her engagement ring to pay for recording sessions (Ivey subsequently sold his car and bought the ring back). When I ask if she has seen a better side to the industry since she began making a living from it, she lets out a hollow laugh. “I feel it’s just like a web that is set up to eat artists. I know so many other talented friends that are still working at grocery stores, as their careers are not in a place where they can support themselves. And then when you do get there, you have so many people siphoning things off you. I don’t want to sound too dour, but the way that we have taken the power away from the people who write songs is so frustrating. And there’s the fact that they just try to beat the individuality out of everyone.”

Still, Price revels in the high moments, such as her 2018 Grammy nomination for best new artist. “All those things are not lost on me because I spent so much time being the loser,” she says. “Although when you’re a musician you have these really high highs, and then you have the comedown, the lull. When I come out of the studio, or off a long tour, it’s like I used all my dopamine. I know I’m going to feel a bit shitty for a bit, even though I’ve got all the things that I wanted.”

Despite the years of hardship, there are elements of her old life she misses. In her book, she recalls how she and Ivey would fitfully sell their belongings and hit the road. On one occasion they lived out of a car in the forests of Colorado with their dog, Creedence, and, on another, embarked on a lengthy cross-country tour in a battered RV, playing impromptu gigs and selling home-made CDs to cover costs.

“Sometimes I dream of doing what Bobbie Gentry did: just, like, making a bunch of records and then completely disappearing for a while,” she says, wistfully. “That does feel very romantic to me – like, when the kids graduate from school, just heading off. I look at our photos from the days of living in the RV. Those days were tough but, still, I think: ‘I’m so glad we did that.’”

Maybe We’ll Make It by Margo Price will be published on 4 October (Texas , £20.99); the album Strays will be released on 13 January.

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Margo Price 'owns her truth' in new book 'Maybe We'll Make It'

Margo Price 's long-awaited memoir, "Maybe We'll Make It," arrived on October 4. It chronicles much of her two decades spent in Music City since arriving in town as a 19-year-old college dropout working odd jobs at hotels and shopping malls to now living on six acres of land in the Nashville suburb of Whites Creek.

It's an astonishing tale of an incredible journey.

"This book is me taking control of my destiny," says the 39-year-old two-time Americana Music Honors & Awards award-winner who will release "Strays," her fourth album, in January 2023.

"By giving people a glimpse into my career's 'good ole bad old days,' I'm [actually] owning my truth."

Of its many notable successes, the book efficiently and effectively seals the chapter on popular, mainstream country music's divorce from its diverse, rustic roots. Plus, Price's tales highlight that split's honest, near-destructive impact on the genre's metaphorical orphaned children. Even deeper, these artists energizing themselves and their careers via digital-era globalization and DIY bootstrapping -- amid East Nashville-residing marginalization from country music's mainstream industry -- reads like the most authentic and timeless outlaw tale combining elements of punk rock and country's crossover into 70s-era rock and roll.

Reliving painful struggles and dark times

Price recalls being pregnant with her three-year-old daughter Ramona in 2019 as a moment wherein keeping herself "spiritually fed" by writing a memoir superseded final preparations for the release of her 2020 album "That's How Rumors Get Started."

"Writing about really getting my career off the ground before I [forgot] all the details was important," she says. "I could've written a book filled with dropped names and cool things I've done, but I think it's more interesting to write about the struggles and darker stuff that I had kept buried," she adds, recalling that at other times in her life, she had wanted to write what became "Maybe We'll Make It" as a selection of short stories. However, her computer crashed at various points, and she felt she had "lost the will to do it."

Price recalls a daily "flooding, obsessive stream of consciousness" process of first taking a daily run in the woods (accompanied by frequent stops to make quick voice notes related to memories she needed to write as stories for the book) followed by a writing session at the former The Post East (now Frothy Monkey) coffee shop in East Nashville.

"This book was eating me up in an unhealthy way as I was writing it, and I think my husband [musician Jeremy Ivey] could've killed me by the time it was done," Price continues. "It had to be perfect, though. It represents a complete immersion back into [my history], and my state of mind at that time."

Within the book, she describes the pain of a life guided by a hard-drinking, partying and touring lifestyle ("we were broke, starving and abusing too many substances") crashed into her and Ivey's attempts at creating a semi-stable home life, merging those conditions with the onset of childbirth. These included selling her wedding ring and car to jumpstart her career, once crashing her vehicle into a telephone pole, plus a wild bender that landed Price in Davidson County jail for three days.

Couch this within Price's emergence as a leader in the 21st-century commercial and social growth of the Americana genre via her hybrid combination of blues, country, folk, soul and rock via songs like 2015's "Hurtin' On The Bottle" and 2016's "Hands of Time." Songs that celebrated "enduring humility" amid "life's cruel twists and unjust turns," as noted in a 2015 review in the Nashville Scene, led Price to become "a singular and vital part of this scene, as a thing unto herself," noted producer, singer and songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan.

In a 2018 People interview, Price noted that she was "[amazed] that [her] marriage lasted after [those issues] because the statistics are not in our favor." As the title highlights, "Maybe We'll Make It" dives deeper into these concerns.

New album: Margo Price announces new album, 'Strays,' plus headlining tour

'Runaway Horses': Margo Price debuts new podcast, drops latest single 'Been To The Mountain'

The book's "therapeutic" benefits for Price's life and marriage arrived via a rule between Ivey and Price that they both have free reign to write about anything they wanted -- even about each other -- and that neither partner was allowed to be upset by it. It started as a necessity driven by the potential for cryptic songwriting ("was that lyric about me or your ex-wife," Price says she often questioned).

Price adds, however, that she "couldn't blame [her] mind" for wanting to connect with the level of deep feelings exposed via the book. Thus, getting Ivey's blessings for diving into the "very private" minutiae of diving into the 2010 death, two weeks after birth, of her son Judah's twin brother Ezra.

"We're all gonna die someday," she says Ivey noted regarding the scope and reach of Price's strong narrative voice throughout the book. "He doesn't care what other people think of us and our lives," she adds.

"[Writing the book allowed me to] give myself a lot of empathy, forgiveness and grace," says Price. "Making mistakes as a human and parent happens, but I -- like so many people -- have spent my whole life being my worst critic. This book gives me the ability to have compassion for my younger self. I was just a kid who gratefully made it out alive."

The allusion to "Just Kids" is notable as Price cites singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author and New York City punk rock progenitor Patti Smith's 2010 memoir "Just Kids" as a key inspiration for her new book. The parallels are significant. Smith's book chronicles her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe cast against being two -- of many disillusioned Greenwich Village bohemians distilling what The New York Times referred to as "wild, feral energy" into deconstructed takes on Brill Building-styled and pop-aimed west coast rock and roll.

Being a "singular" voice transporting readers back to a time and place where people "survived" an era dominated by creatives who would become "incredible" artists empowered Price's connection to Smith. "Just like [Patti], encapsulating the era where I struggled to find myself before I 'made it,' matters," she says.

In the book, Price recalls an "untethered" Midwestern "train-hopper" named Riley who awoke in her East Nashville home. Hungry but realizing that the refrigerators and cupboards were too bare to feed what seemed to be a hippie-era commune level of visitors strewn about on pallets on the floor and crashed outside in an unkept backyard, he visited the former Piggly Wiggly on the 900 block of Dickerson Pike. There, he purchased tins of pork brains which he mixed with scrambled eggs to create an inexpensive but filling breakfast.

Positive changes amid a diverse Americana movement

In January 2021, records showed that a plot of land on the 900 block of Dickerson Pike was valued at roughly $400,000. By December 2021, that same land sold for just north of $4 million .

Margo Price's East Nashville has gone from serving pig brains to devouring the whole hog.

"This city has really transformed since I've been here. But, so many people and places have slipped through the cracks. Entire neighborhoods have been [racially and socially] gentrified and segregated. Yes, the city is growing, but party buses and giant condominiums with no personality break my heart. Greed winning out over preserving the [blue-collar musical community, and its needs that] originally made [Nashville] unique is sad."

"It's easy to -- and the book does -- look at all the bad things that happened. However, so much has positively occurred since I arrived in Nashville," says Price, alluding to the Americana subgenre's growth and sustainability in the past 20 years.

"It's beautiful to witness a genre that embraces [sonic and social] diversity," she offers with a bright tone in her voice. She then chides country music traditionalists like John Rich, who have doubled down on a type of assumed protectionism that venerates a white, male and cis-gendered-slanted view of country music and related genres. This view presumably thumbs its nose at Price's idea of what Americana encompasses in greater measure.

Price describes herself as being at a point now where her work comes much more from a position of being "a labor of love" than ever before. She's now a "refreshed, inspired and detail-oriented perfectionist" waiting to expend her time and energy to create work that reflects her wanting to use her authentic best self to assume the role of strong, vulnerable leadership in what Nashville and the world see as her excellence representing the best of what's next as Music City's classic creative core reemerges on the worldwide stage.

"I've finally come of age, and now I'm joined by artists like Adia Victoria, Allison Russell, Brittany Howard and Sierra Ferrell alongside me making exciting music and leading a community of lyrical, poetic, rootsy and individually-minded creatives. Hopefully, some of the many stories I have in my book will keep [the momentum behind] this exciting moment."

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The Unstoppable, Unsinkable, Uninhibited Margo Price

Country songs are often filled with tragedy and hard times. Price has detailed her own catalog of traumas in a memoir and her music, but also turns her lens outward on a new LP, “Strays.”

By Melena Ryzik

NASHVILLE — The alt-country musician Margo Price has a contrarian streak, and a wild one. When she was preparing to write her fourth album, “Strays,” in 2020, she and her husband and musical partner, Jeremy Ivey, decamped from their cozy family home in the suburbs here, and rented an Airbnb in Charleston, S.C. They brought guitars and notebooks, and a pile of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Tripping together in the backyard at a Live-Laugh-Love kind of cottage, listening to Tom Petty, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan, the couple reconnected and tried to “generate new sounds, new rhythms, new styles,” Price said, after a tumultuous period when her husband was gravely ill with the coronavirus. “It was, you know, big emotions and laughing hysterically in the kitchen, and then the next moment, I’m like, ‘I love you so much, don’t ever die,’” she said in an interview at her neo-Tudor home near Nashville.

They wrote 20 songs, including the first two singles on “Strays,” which is out Jan. 13 and struts through big-hearted indie country, honky-tonk stomp and ’70s guitar-explosion psychedelia. “A lot of times, with the country world, they’re like, ‘Get in this box, and stay here,’” Price said. “So it was good to be able to paint outside of the lines. The mushrooms definitely helped.”

Since her breakthrough studio debut, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” in 2016, Price, 39, has tunneled her own path through the music industry, sometimes indignantly. She has always had ambition to spare and faith in herself as an artist, even in the face of repeated rejections, as she describes in her memoir, “ Maybe We’ll Make It, ” out last October.

“I admire Margo tremendously for her fierceness,” said her friend Brittany Howard , the guitarist and singer. “She doesn’t back down and she won’t become the kind of artist that the industry wants her to be. She is the kind of artist that cannot be manufactured.”

Despite the friendship and cheerleading of legends like Willie Nelson, who duetted with her on her second album, Price has never felt welcome in the country establishment, she said. (She has yet to be invited to the genre’s flagship honors, the Country Music Awards.) Even a Grammy nomination for best new artist at the 2019 ceremony left her feeling like an outsider, when she wasn’t invited to perform or present (she was also pregnant at the time).

She fretted about seeming irrelevant and losing the career momentum that she had worked to accrue over decades in Nashville if she stayed home with her daughter, Ramona, who was born in 2019.

“I think it was actually only four and a half weeks after my C-section that I had opening dates with Chris Stapleton,” she said. So she got back on the tour bus. “Just put the Spanx on, and had my breast pump out, just rolling down the road with a baby and a 9-year-old” — her son Judah — “and a crew, and a band.”

The pandemic stopped that trajectory. But Price found another outlet in writing her memoir, which chronicles her hardscrabble, super-broke but resolute early years in Nashville; meeting Ivey, who is her co-songwriter and guitarist; getting pregnant as newlyweds while living under the poverty line; and the devastating loss of their child. Judah’s twin brother, Ezra, died two weeks after their birth in 2010, following surgery for a genetic heart condition. She had only been able to hold him once.

His death sent her into an emotional spiral — for three years, she had a recurring nightmare about not being able to save a drowning infant. She was unfaithful to her husband, and he followed suit, as she writes in the book, and she descended further into alcohol abuse. And then there was “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” a deeply autobiographical album about her family (she was born and raised in tiny Aledo, Ill.) and her flaws. “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle),” a barroom wallop, became one of her signature tunes.

To help pay for the recording, at Sun Studios in Memphis, Price pawned her engagement ring. Ivey got it back, but sold their car instead. “It was the most romantic thing he had ever done for me,” she wrote.

On her book tour last fall, Price met fans and heard other stories of profound loss, doling out hugs and speaking to audience members for sometimes two hours after a reading.

“As a musician and a writer, you think, ‘I’m doing this because it brings me joy,’” she said. “But when somebody else is like, hey, you got me through my divorce; you got me through this really tough time — I lost my mom to cancer, and I just listened to your record a lot. I’m like, yes, tell me about that, I need to hear that.”

She started therapy only after she finished writing the book. When she turned in the final draft, “I started having all these, almost like panic attacks,” she said. “I was worried about people judging me.” She also quit drinking ; her book editor had observed that “whiskey was like a character” in the pages, she said. (She still smokes weed and savors her mushroom trips, both substances she feels help clarify her vision — though even that, she worried, might make her seem like a bad mother. Do musician fathers get that rap?).

Sitting cross-legged on a black leather couch in an airy living room furnished with vintage furniture and musical mementos, Price reflected on a life that would buckle many people.

“When I wrote ‘Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,’ and when I put that album out, I was tortured,” she said. Her two dogs slept with their heads on her lap, and her two cats prowled inside and out (the Price-Ivey home covers six acres, leading up to woods and surrounded by moonshine stills).

That songwriting was also “my first practice of being vulnerable,” she continued, adding that until that point, she had focused on being “tough” to avoid revealing her weaknesses.

“But as the book and everything has evolved, I think that has grown as one of my strengths, and I’ve learned not to be embarrassed by it.”

Especially now that she’s (mostly) sober, “I feel really creatively in a good place,” she said. “I’m feeling my emotions more deeply than I have in a really long time, even though I thought, back then, that there was some kind of magic to feeling like garbage.”

As Ivey went to pick up Judah, now 12, Price gave me a tour of their home — the wood-paneled studio, with her drum kit and a prized guitar autographed by the likes of Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris; her custom closet, with a neat rainbow of cowboy boots and a typewriter she often used for developing songs. “Jeremy can create in front of all sorts of people,” she said of her husband, also a solo artist . “But I feel exposed, like I don’t want anyone to hear all the bad notes and dumb ideas. So, I come hide in here.”

Howard met her a decade ago, singing background vocals together in Nashville, she said. Their friendship came naturally: “She is so welcoming, genuine and fun to be around,” Howard wrote in an email. “We’d stay out all night laughing and sharing music and philosophy and just encouraging each other that we were on the right track.”

She often ended the night crashing on Price and Ivey’s couch. These days, the women like to go fishing together — catching bass and feasting on Howard’s peanut butter and raw garlic sandwiches. “She’s just like, don’t knock it until you try it,” Price said.

They were bonded by their perseverance, Howard said. “I was told ‘no’ a lot very early on in my life. Mostly because of the way I looked,” she said. “When people don’t give you the space, you have to absolutely carve it out for yourself.”

“That practice creates a resilience inside of us,” she added. “It’s a great power to be able to fall to pieces and put yourself back together bigger, better and stronger”

Part of Price’s stability comes from Ivey, to whom she’s been married 14 years, and writing and touring with even longer. Songwriting “definitely draws us together when other things are pushing us apart,” she said.

They’ve earned their industry savvy, too: In her early years, as she writes in the book, she invented a manager, “John Sirota” — complete with a fake Myspace page and booking site — to give her more cred and send cajoling (or demanding) messages to club owners and bookers. (It worked — the band got more gigs with John running the show than when Price signed the emails herself.)

Recently, when her label, Loma Vista, wanted her to bring in collaborators, “I tricked them into thinking that I was writing with one of Taylor Swift’s co-writers,” she said. Using an industry pal’s connection, she sent over some demos — “‘Check them out, see if you like these more than the ones that me and Jeremy wrote.’ Well, meanwhile, it was just a song that I wrote.” The track, the boppy “Radio,” made the album, with Sharon Van Etten filling it out.

They are “mother musician friends,” Price said — a rare breed that make it seem possible, if still enormously complicated, to tour while being a mom. (To make Price’s two-musician-parent household work, her mother lives with them.) Along with Mimi Parker from Low , Price “was one of the first moms I talked to, that I look up to,” Van Etten said. “They always just said, ‘you figure it out.’”

“Radio” could be the lament of a working mother during the pandemic, with lines about being exhausted and pleading to be left alone. But Van Etten said the magic of Price’s songwriting was that anybody can find themselves reflected in it. “Radio” is “how we feel as moms trying to find our own space,” she said. “But it can be anyone trying to have a moment, and that feeling of when you’re listening to a song, that’s all you can hear.”

Van Etten said Price’s skill at using the vernacular of traditional country — “the double-entendres and the turnarounds” — to talk about issues like the gender wage gap , offered a blueprint for other left-of-center artists. Especially watching her in an early, career turning-point performance on “Saturday Night Live” in 2016 , she said, “I just felt like she was a role model that actually had something to say.”

“Of course her range is insane,” she added. “As much as her delivery — she can be sweet as much as sassy. She has an edge to her vocals that you don’t hear much in country music right now.” (In her memoir, Price writes about how self-doubt had her up partying all night before the “S.N.L.” performance; she was also diagnosed with strep throat hours beforehand.)

Lately, Price has made her songwriting more narrative and less personal. The single “Lydia,” on “Strays,” tells the story of an unsettled woman in an abortion clinic. It’s conversational and spare, with Price on acoustic guitar. Her producer, Jonathan Wilson, had the idea to juxtapose her live take “with some really weird, atonal strings,” he said. Written before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the six-minute track was well-received and hailed as prescient .

Price is thrilled about any accolades, of course. But where once she was anxious about achieving them, now she wants to let all that go. “I’m trying to just be really happy with all that I’ve accomplished,” she said.

That doesn’t mean she’s lifted her boot off the gas. “I have actually been writing more songs than I have in a very long time,” she noted. She hikes around her property, she listens to the birds; inspiration strikes. “I wake up feeling good every day,” she said, adding: “I just feel this urgency. I want to create.”

Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. She covered Oscar season for five years, and has also been a national correspondent in San Francisco and the mid-Atlantic states. More about Melena Ryzik

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Margo Price on Musical Transitions, Her Memoir, Mushrooms, Marriage and a Career-Best New Album, ‘Strays’

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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But there’s no second book immediately on the horizon — Price has a Jonathan Wilso-coproduced new album, “Strays,” her fourth and possibly best, along with her first headlining tour since 2018, to keep her out of literary trouble for a while. Variety sat down with Price in Nashville and again in Los Angeles to talk about the overlapping themes of the album and memoir; how she’s taken a big detour from country to rock ‘n’ roll, and whether she might ever go back to it; how alcohol and mushrooms have been the devil and angel, respectively, sitting on her shoulders as she’s done a reset on her life these past few years; and how she and band member/husband Jeremy Ivey support each other, even in writing truthful songs about the ups and downs of their marriage. A career in which she’s a model for integrity in music, and forward movement? Maybe she’s made it.

You’re putting out a new album just a couple of months after putting out your first book. How did that overlap work out, and did you feel like the two forms of writing involve a lot of the same skillsets?

But I’ve got a lot of respect for people who make their living writing (for the page), because it takes a lot of dedication. Sometimes a song can just happen: I wrote “Lydia” for this album in about eight minutes. It happened like lightning; it was just like I blacked out and the song appeared. But the writing and the editing process — whew, it takes a lot more focus and commitment. You can’t just be all stoned andtrying to write a book, you know. [Laughs.]

Did you finish the book well before the album?

It was going on in tandem. This is the longest I’ve ever worked on an album. During the pandemic I had a lot of time on my hands, so I spent four and a half years writing the book and maybe two years working on the album. They mirror each other, and there’s a couple of chapter titles that are song titles. As the songs were coming together and I had no chapter titles, I was like, “Oh, I’ve got this song, and it’s kind of about this time in my life.” So I have a song called “Hell in the Heartland,” and then there’s a chapter that’s named that. It was interesting to work on ’em at the same time, because I found the themes of burning the past and processing emotions and where I’m trying to go and evolve to. It was weird to do it together, but it was helpful because they feel like companion pieces.

You recorded a lot of the “Strays” album in Topanga Canyon, at producer Jonathan Wilson ’s place. Did you feel the Southern California-ness of it all affecting you?

Oh, yeah. A lot of times when you’re in a studio, you’re n this windowless building in a city and you walk outside and you’re just on the street. Jonathan’s studio is at his house in Topanga, so it’s just surrounded by nature. I would go hike up the mountain behind his place, and there’d be rattlesnakes and hawks, and I saw a bald eagle, just all sorts of incredible nature that we saw. And then David Briggs’ old place is across the street, where Neil Young used to hang. So, yeah, we leaned into the canyon life. We also spent a lot of time in Malibu at (Heartbreakers guitarist) Mike Campbell ‘s house writing some songs and hanging out with him — doing research for the record. [Laughs.]

We did listen to Tom Petty. When we went out to South Carolina [to first start writing for the album], Jeremy and I took an ungodly amount of mushrooms; we were drinking too, back in those days when we started writing this, and we were partying pretty hard. But we listened to a bunch of albums and we were talking about, “What kind of album do we wanna make?” (We thought of) “Hypnotic Eye” — that album, I feel, isseverely overlooked… And then the next day we woke up and we wrote “Been to the Mountain” [the opening track on the record].

But when we went over to Mike’s house, we had the work tape demos for “Been to the Mountain” and “Light Me Up” and he’s like, “That’s an album right there. You don’t even need to re-record that.” And it was cool to hear him be enthusiastic about those songs and let us know that we were sniffing in the right direction. Mike played on “Light Me Up,” and he laid down that solo in one take. He was in such a great mood, laughing and cracking jokes and giving everybody nicknames, and his energy was contagious in the studio.

And we pull so much from the Heartbreakers. Another cool thing about being in Jonathan’s studio is that Benmont Tench had been in his studio recording his solo album, and he left his grand piano and left his organ in there, the Heartbreakers’ organ. So that’s all on my album. We’ve got the ghost of the Heartbreakers in there.

There are other influences apparent in there …

With “County Road,” my band really took the tempo in a way that I feel has War on Drugs vibes. We all went as a band and sat in the crowd at the Ryman and watched the whole War on Drugs show together. … There’s Zeppelin vibes, or some Grateful Dead influence in there, for sure. It’s such a melting pot of so many things. A lot of times I think, especially because I’m a woman, that if I’m pulling from Velvet Underground or something, people aren’t gonna maybe think that, because it’s delivered in in my voice.

There’s not much that anyone would call overtly country on this album — and really, there hasn’t been on the last couple of albums. Do you feel like people understand at this point that that’s not what you’re doing so much right now? Even this far into a career, it’s easy for people to get attached to the first point of impact.

I think had we been able to tour on “That’s How Rumors Get Started” [released in early 2020], I think that would have blown the door wide open and could’ve been really big. I think it could’ve allowed people to hear where we were growing as a band. So I hope after I get this album out that I can not be pigeonholed and, yeah, that I can just break down a few more doors. Because it’s easy to, like you said, get classified as the first thing you came in on.

I ain’t gonna say no. But I mean, I’m gonna make country records again, too. It’s just about where I’m at right now. During the pandemic, I kept thinking about Tina Turner, how she had her comeback after Ike & Tina… And I look at musicians like Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones, Jack White, Mavis Staples— they’ve straddled the line of country, rock and blues, and all of that to me is good music.So I’ll be making all kinds of records. You’re bound to like one of ‘em.[Laughs.]

It’s been a while since some of us got to see you live, but the last times you were out there headlining, your sets really reflected the different places you’ve gone stylsticially in the last couple albums. But then, toward the end of the set, you’re not gonna deny people “Hurtin’ on the Bottle” [the traditional-country-sounding signature song from her debut album, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter”].

Sometimes I do, though. It was funny because we put that song away for a long time and then I played it again, at Red Rocks with Tyler Childers. I was like, “I’m gonna play the ‘Hurtin’’ medley,” where we throw in some “Whiskey River” (by Willie Nelson) and “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” (by Merle Haggard). But sometimes you have to put songs away for a while. But then it kind of even felt more pertinent. Jeremy was like, “You’re gonna do a drinking song? You don’t even drink anymore.” I’m like, “I have more license to do it now than ever.”

Obviously quitting drinking is not going to turn you into any kind of puritan.

Right. I haven’t gone full nun.

So you’re probably not worried: “Oh, I’m sending a mixed message if I talk about abstaining but bring back ‘Hurtin’ on the Bottle’.”

No, I lived it for so long. I mean, I drank for almost three decades, and it’s a piece of who I am and it’s been something that I’ve grappled with. And, you know, luckily we live in such an alcohol-obsessed culture, I’m still surrounded by drunk people half the time. [Laughs.] So for me, it doesn’t feel weird to think about or even still write about it because it’s never that far away, you know? It’s always there.

You’ve made no secret of the fact that mushrooms are an important part of your life — and that to you, that is very, very different from alcohol.

And then it was while I was taking this big mushroom trip (a couple of years back) that I decided to quit drinking. It was like: Nobody’s going to dislike me or judge me if I quit drinking. And if they do, that’s on them. But I absolutely had been worried about being different, worried about people thinking like, “Oh, I didn’t know she had a problem.” As I’m going back through it, I feel so lucky that the way that (mushrooms) kind of rewired my brain, I have no yearning for alcohol. And that was why it was always so hard to quit before, because I would quit but be like, “Wow, I just wish I could drink.” Now, I don’t even have the want. It’s really weird and very interesting how the brain works, and I’ve been reading about what mushrooms do to your brain and body.

I’ve been very into Michael Pollan’s work and his book “How to Change Your Mind.” I think that if more people opened their minds, we could have a revolution. But instead, everybody’s just numbing themselves with alcohol, and they don’t even know that just three drinks a week increases your risk for breast cancer by 50%, for women. I just think that over the next 20 years a lot of light is gonna be shed on the alcohol business for what it is, for advertising to children, getting people hooked young. And I just feel really lucky that I got out of that trap, thinking that I had to do it.

Thinking you had to drink for personal reasons, or social?

I think a lot of it was social. Last night, after I had a book event, I went across the street to a Mexican restaurant to get some food and hang out with my sister and my best friend. At first I asked for a Topo Chico, and the waiter didn’t have that. So I was like, “Could I get a soda and bitters?” But then he just kept coming back over, asking, “Are you sure you don’t wanna have a drink? Are you sure?” I’m like, “Man, I’m driving.” But also, I’m ordering food — can I just not have a margarita with 500 calories of sugar? [Laughs.] It’s just funny how it’s framed and how it’s the only drug that we have to explain ourselves for not taking. I feel like I’ve been brainwashed myself. I mean, the amount that the alcohol conglomerates spend on advertising is more than anything else, and when you stop it, you really start to notice. Because it was always there before, it was always kind of something I thought I had to do, and now I don’t even think about it. I’m getting a coffee right now, though, speaking of mind-altering substances. [Laughs.]

And I’m still eating weed mints, and been experimenting with the microdosing. That’s been incredible for my depression. The mushrooms have really helped me with dealing with my insecurities and body dysmorphia and eating disorders that I’ve struggled with for years. I worry about people judging me for being open about this, but people have to be talking about it. Had it not been for that mushroom trip, I really don’t know that I would have actually been able to quit drinking. I know that sounds weird, but it was a combination of reading all these books, getting this knowledge and, because I’d tried a million times, I thought about checking myself into rehab because I thought something was wrong with me, like maybe I had severe depression or bipolar disorder. You know, whatever it was, it was not being helped by pouring something down my throat, that’s for sure.

I know it does. Right? Where I’m like, “I took another drug to quit this drug.” But mushrooms aren’t something that you want to do every day. They’re not addictive. With drinking, it just was such a pattern. And it was helpful with insomnia. Being able to fall asleep at night after a big show — I get why people do it. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get down after the shows, but now I’m like, I’m gonna have a gummy melatonin and a weed mint.

You have songs on “Strays” that are very much about you. But then you have a character song in “Lydia,” which comes partly out of your advocacy for reproductive rights, even though it’s a sketch of a pretty down-and-out character.

I think that there’s pieces of me in that character, but it is more of a fictional study. We’d played at this place in Vancouver and there was a needle exchange at a methadone clinic nearby. I was looking into the eyes of strangers I was passing, seeing people that were struggling with addiction and seeing women that were living out on the street, and that song came very quickly. Especially with everything that’s going on with women’s rights and reproductive rights right now… I think we don’t see what individual people are struggling with, when it comes to having health care, having all the people that we’ve lost to fentanyl, and all the homeless people. And then, on top of it, what must go through a woman’s head as she has a very difficult decision to make. … I just wanted to write songs that I didn’t think anybody else has been writing right now.

I think about Townes Van Zant and a song like “Marie.” I didn’t really have that in my head when I was writing “Lydia,” but Jeremy made the comparison to that later. And I was in that vein where it’s just me and an acoustic guitar and it’s just about the song.

You have a song on the album written solely by Jeremy, “Anytime You Call,” featuring Lucius. That one has a bit of an early ‘70s John Lennon vibe.

Definitely Brit-rock influenced. I think Jeremy was definitely pulling from Ray and Dave Davies, but always John Lennon. Jeremy wrote that song when we were having a real rough patch. He’s writing songs all the time; he shows me a song every other day. Well, when he played that one, I just had tears rolling down my face and I’m like, “I’ve got to record that for the record.”

It’s interesting to put a song on a record that’s exploring and going deep into your relationship — written by your partner, and not necessarily all positive.

I know — like “We’re not as stable as we seem / One small gust of wind could knock down every dream.” It was just all hitting me. He’s so good at writing things from my point of view, because he knows what I’m wrestling with.

Yep. It’s been 19 years together, and we’ve been through so much. And I think finally being transparent about everything we went through after losing a child… And we were in a band called Buffalo Clover, which I write about in the book. Like I say, it was Fleetwood Mac without the success. You know, I cheated on Jeremy, and I write about that in the book, and now it’s in the songs too, you know? And it always has been. If people were listening, I go back to even “Hands of Time” and I’m talking about a lot of those subjects. But now I’m finally talking about it in a completely transparent light. I remember Joni Mitchell talking about when she first did acid, and she’s like, “I just felt translucent, and I felt like I could see through everybody.” There’s been a lot of that where it’s like: I’m just going to own my truth and own what I’ve been through. And it’s definitely peppered in through the songs.

You feel like that’s magnified on this album? Because you’ve always felt like an honest writer…

Yeah, I don’t know, time, maturity, age… I really have nothing to hide. When I turned in the last draft of my memoir, though, I started having panic attacks. And I was worried about the album, too. “Maybe the album is gonna be too out there for people. Are people gonna accept it?” Or, “Are they gonna look at the book and say, “You’re a bad mother, you’re a bad wife…?” Me and Jeremy were sitting by the fire together, and I was crying, and he’s like, “What are you worried about? You have been working on both of these for years and years, and now suddenly you’re having all this trepidation.” I said, “I’m worried I’m gonna burn all my bridges and I’m not gonna be able to find my way home again.” I was being very dramatic. And he just looked at me and said, “You belong to no one. You don’t even belong to me. You can just do what you want. And that is why people love you.” And so I got that (“You belong to no one”) tattooed on my arm, and that’s in the album art, in a picture of me on the inside when you open it up.

In the first song on the album, you sing, “I just know who I’m not and man, that’s all right with me.” It’s interesting to partly define what you are by what you’re not.

Yeah, man, I’m not a sellout, I’m not a bigot, I’m not a racist. You know, I may be a lot of things — I may have been a reckless drunk, a cheating asshole, at times in my life — but I know what I’m not at this point. And that does feel incredibly empowering. I like that you pointed that out. I felt like that song needed to open the album, because I feel like everybody does have this thing where it’s like, “What are you selling?” You’ve got to build the brand . And I feel like, nah, I just wanna smoke some weed and donate the money to charity.

I don’t care about having a big mansion or a bunch of rewards. I just want to do good work and write good albums. And it took people a while to even recognize the brilliance and the greatness of Joni Mitchell. They finally gave her the Grammy years and years and years later for her stuff. And even now she’s getting this renaissance, and it’s beautiful to see that.

Do you have a sense of where you are in your career right now, and the esteem you enjoy? It may not translate to riches, but to a lot of people, you’re a heroine…

Actually, this guy came by my dressing room (at the Opry House, after the Loretta Lynn tribute concert in October) and he said, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I’ve been Loretta’s social media manager for the last 12 years, and I have this video I’m gonna send you. Loretta used to talk about you. She said, ‘You know, I got a lot of girl singers that cover my songs, but I think Margo does it the best. I have to tell myself when I’m listening to Margo, ‘That’s not you, Loretta, that’s Margo. But something about the way she does it, I just think she feels it the way I do.’” And it meant a lot. I was real nervous to do her song that night, because I wanted to do her proud, and I think that song (“The Pill”) is still hard for people to hear.

I’m just trying to do the work of people like John Lennon, when I go back and I look at his career, or I look at Joan Baez and see how she marched alongside Martin Luther King and how everybody called her crazy. Things that I’m doing today might seem radical, and they might have got me blacklisted from certain parties or awards shows, but I think that in the grand scheme of things, I’m gonna look back and say that I’m proud I did it the way that I did it.

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