Margo Price Won't Back Down

After a heartbreaking debut LP, she’s blasting Trump and her country peers, and drawing her biggest crowds yet

- Marissa R. Moss

A FEW DAYS AGO, MARGO PRICE’S husband, Jeremy, and her seven-year-old son, Judah, discovered a moonshine barrel on a hill behind their brand-new home, located 20 minutes from downtown Nashville. “I went, ‘I gotta see this. I can’t be left out,’ ” Price says, milling around her retro wooden kitchen in jeans, a white tank top and a denim shirt. She climbed up a steep, stony incline and found it. “Then I saw eight more, just built into the ground,” she says. “It was really surreal.” Price’s area, she learned, was once heavy bootlegger territory. She jokes about bringing the barrels out of retirement for a little home brewing.

It makes perfect sense that this discovery would excite Price, whose songs routinely find beauty in scenes of decaying America: dried-up farmland, burned-out factory towns and the people who never escaped. After more than a decade of struggling in Nashville, Price, 34, broke through with 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, which chronicled her blue-collar upbringing in rural Illinois as the daughter of a prison guard, and her later struggle to reclaim her life after years of personal devastation, including the death of her infant son Ezra. The album was a critical hit, earning her a spot on Saturday Night Live and duets with her heroes Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. Price has emerged as a rare liberal voice in Nashville, blasting Trump, the FCC and the country stars who stayed silent on the issue of gun control after the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting in Vegas. Price felt she had to speak up on that issue— her dad would frequently bring home food he’d hunted. “There’s something beautiful about that,” she says. “But we didn’t have high-powered machine guns when this all started.”