by Keegan Pierce
Margo Price is a singer/songwriter out of Nashville. That’s the short description I gave people when they asked me who I saw play at White Oak Music Hall on February 2nd. It’s true that Margo Price has recorded at the Grand Ole Opry, but her sound is too wide-ranging for the Music City label to convey.
So here’s the long-form description.
I saw Margo Price touring behind her most recent album, “Strays,” the product of a mushroom trip and collaborations with songstress Sharon Van Etten, indie pop group Lucius, and Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell. A formula that hints at the album’s expansive sound: there’s a grandness to the textures and themes that will even catch the ear of listeners who “hate country music.”
The sound was big live, too. Her backing band, The Pricetags, kept their sound guy busy mixing and tuning a whole host of guitars in between songs. There were five guitars on stage at times: a bass and a combination of acoustics and electrics. All this shredding didn’t drown out Price in the least; it just set the scene at a necessary scale for her singing. Her voice was majestic, despairing, wistful, or spiteful as the song or line or word demanded. It all swirled together for a tempest of a show ranging from wet-eyed ballads to thunderous rockers.
This nuance is lost in classifying the show as country. It doesn’t work to say she’s a country artist gone rock, either. The crowd had more cowboy boots than Doc Martens. Even beyond the lines about Tennessee, tequila, and farms, Margo Price works with the same core themes as other country artists. Margo Price drives the lonesome, ornery, and mean country highways but with a rockin’ restlessness and a sexiness.
You could probably call it cosmic American music or some other made-up word, but I’ll end by saying that she’s a country artist who can (and if you’re as lucky as me, will) hop on the drums for a cover of Elvis Costello’s pump it up at the end of the set.
