Margo Price - That's How Rumors Get Started review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 80

(Loma Vista)
Having lived through death, prison, homelessness and drug epiphanies, Margo Price is well equipped with country music’s subject matter – but treats it without sentimentality

Earlier this year, in a round of interviews to promote her third album – its release ultimately delayed by the coronavirus pandemic – Margo Price announced her intention to publish a memoir. On the face of it, that seems a little presumptuous. It is, after all, just four years since her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, which unexpectedly crash-landed in the US country Top 10. She garnered comparisons to Bobbie Gentry and Loretta Lynn, and was placed in what’s been dubbed the “outlaw country renaissance”. The latter is a loose collection of artists reanimating the unbiddable spirit of 70s albums by Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, which numbers Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell among its participants, a position further cemented for Price by a duet with original outlaw Willie Nelson.

But by the time she became a celebrated figure, Price had already lived enough to fill a book. Her parents lost their farm when she was a toddler in the mid-80s downturn that provoked the Farm Aid benefit gigs. Her musical career was jump-started by a psilocybin-fuelled psychedelic epiphany. Her hardscrabble years on the Nashville sidelines saw her reduced to petty theft in order to survive, involved a period sleeping in a tent, and the death of her infant son, the latter precipitating a descent into whiskey-fuelled chaos that culminated in a car crash and a brief stay in prison. Self-funded, the recording of Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was a last roll of the dice that Price pawned her wedding ring for.