MARGO PRICE – HARD HEADED WOMAN: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- Aug 28
- 3 min read
MARGO PRICE
Hard Headed Woman (Loma Vista)
THERE’S ALWAYS A DANGER with successful women that attachments are made by we in the media: the husband or co-writer, the producer or sideman guitarist, the manager or label head. The implication, or outright statement with the attachments is success came in good part because of these others who lifted the woman up.
Jessi Colter would know that better than most having had decades now of her name being preceded or succeeded by “married to Waylon Jennings” even though she was a ‘70s pioneer in a scene that seemed none-more-bloke-centric, outlaw country. But I think Colter won’t mind me saying that she should probably take some credit for this album, the fifth from Margo Price.
She didn’t produce it, is not one of the guest vocalists on it (that would be Jesse Wells and Tyler Childers) or one of the songwriters involved alongside the Price originals usually with husband Jeremy Ivey (that would be Jennings and George Jones being covered, and a Rodney Crowell co-write) so it’s not obvious. But you can’t help but think that Colter’s Price-produced return to the studio, 2023’s Edge Of Forever – featuring some songs Colter had written with Jennings back in the ‘70s and some co-writes with Price – and particularly its strong roots in robust country that would not have been out of place 50 years ago, was part of the push that has brought Price back to straight out country.
And that is no bad thing, as much as I enjoyed the alternative route she took in recent albums, such as 2023’s Strays, where immersion in magic mushrooms – for medicinal purposes, of course – coincided with the infiltration of some fine psychedelic rock and high conceptualising.
Hard Headed Woman is a record of outlaw attitude married with energy, played as if it is being delivered in a packed bar – Red Eye Flight would fill the dance floor in seconds – dotted with songs to have you crying into your half-empty glass, and always drawing deeply from Price’s own life and perspective, no matter who did it originally. For example, I Just Don’t Give A Damn is a strutting piece of brassy groove that puts itself forward with a fuck-em attitude, unlike the sad-eyed, whiskey-soaked, worn down but clinging to defiance version recorded by Jones in 1975. No one’s going to be mistaking her for sad and sorry, or sad or sorry.
Kissing You Goodbye, the Waylon song, has electric chasing steel guitar around the room like they are kicking up their skirts, all while saying I ain’t taking this shit anymore (“So get your tongue out of my mouth, I’m kissing you goodbye”), and the south of the border quickstep of Wild At Heart gets both romantic and hectic fiddle.
It’s not like the women-fearing/women-hating country establishment ever welcomed her, but the Price who details the emotional and financial potholes that litter the industry in several songs here, long ago stopped looking for their approval or forgiveness. And she doesn’t need their interest. Driven by a chugging guitar that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Waylon song, the industry-baiting Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down (not coincidentally what another original country outlaw, Kris Kristofferson, said to Sinead O’Connor as she faced a hostile audience in the 1980s), pricks the pricks in the verses and then springs forward each chorus like a hurdler effortlessly clearing the barrier and not breaking stride.
Hardheaded? Sure. But you don’t mistake Price for invulnerable. Far from it, whether it is the survivor tale of Losing Streak (“I woke up in the back seat of a ‘91 Explorer/Sleeping off a three day party I barely could recall,” it begins, and only gets gnarlier from there) or Nowhere Is Where, a gorgeous lament of rough times and barely making it through, whose male/female vocal layers bring to mind Brandi Carlisle and the Hanseroth twins. She feels it all, she just doesn’t stop there.
Love Me Like You Used To Do, her duet with Childers, has the familiar moment of two weary lovers at the crossroads, seeking one last chance to be what they used to be,. And maybe they do pull it off against all sense and odds. Or maybe they peter out, having barely warmed up with embers and the remnants of film lines they half remember. But that doesn’t matter as much as the openness each offers in that desperation, the truth-telling that is the real power, as Price knows.
To paraphrase from a Jessi Colter track back in ‘75, “I hear a song, I hear a singer/it is a singer who sang her own song”.
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