Margo Price Revisits Country Roots on ‘Hard Headed Woman’: ‘It’s a Return to What I Was Doing, But Also a Step Forward’

When Margo Price stepped onstage at the Grand Ole Opry on Friday night (Aug. 29) to present songs from her new album Hard Headed Woman (which released the same day), she donned a piece of country music history, the same green chiffon gown that Loretta Lynn wore the night she became the first woman to win the Country Music Association’s top honor, entertainer of the year, in 1972.

Since her debut 2016 album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, Price has proven herself a student and inheritor of Lynn’s bold, uninhibited brand of storytelling, as Price has forged her own reputation as an artist unafraid of expressing frank truths, championing equality, and speaking out against societal and political injustices ranging from income disparities (“Pay Gap”) to gender inequality (“Wild Women”).

Price visited the late Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter museum, located in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, to try on potential outfits for the Opry performance.

“Just getting to try on so many of her iconic pieces, there were probably 10 dresses that we pulled, and we must’ve been the same exact size because each one I put on, it was like, ‘I have to wear this one,’” Price tells Billboard. “I’m so grateful to the family for letting me borrow it. Loretta was so supportive of me. I was in tears multiple times, just thinking about how lucky I am to get to carry on this tradition of songwriting and storytelling, just being a bold woman in country music, like Loretta was.”

Whereas Price’s 2023 projects Strays and Strays II tilted into psychedelic-inspired sounds, Hard Headed Woman reconnects Price to her country roots. The project also marks Price’s first Nashville-recorded album, created at the historic RCA Studio A, after previously recording her albums in Memphis and Los Angeles. “I wanted to be able to embrace the things I love about Nashville and use the studios and incredible players,” Price says.

Though she had previously recorded a handful of songs in Nashville, it was the 2024 collaboration she recorded at RCA Studio A with Billy Strings, “Too Stoned to Cry,” that inspired her to make the album in that historic space.

“This audio space was at the peak of, in my opinion, audio engineering and recording,” she was explains. “I was like, ‘I’ve got to get back here to do an album.’ It’s not cheap but for me, it was worth it to be able to work in that space. You can just hear the room all over the album. It’s a return to what I was doing, but also a step forward. I’m coming back to all this with so much more knowledge.”

She reunited with producer Matt Ross-Spang, who produced Midwest Farmer’s Daughter.

“We would be in the studio for hours, sometimes 12-14 hour days, just getting lost in mixing songs, recording, hanging out late and ordering sushi at 10 o’clock at night,” Price recalls.

The album’s first single, “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” feels like classic Price, offering a stinging rebuke to exploitative music industry types and other “tone deaf sons a b–ches” that attempt to hinder creatives’ career potential. Written by Price, her husband, musician Jeremy Ivey, and Rodney Crowell, the song also credits Kris Kristofferson, as the song was inspired in part by Kristofferson’s public support for Sinead O’Connor.

During O’Connor’s October 1992 performance at Madison Square Garden as part of a Bob Dylan tribute event, the audience nearly drowned out O’Connor’s performance (O’Connor was in the midst of receiving backlash after she had a few weeks earlier torn up a photo of Pope John Paul II in an act of protest against sexual abuse within the Catholic church). After Kristofferson was asked by event organizers to escort her offstage, the revered singer-songwriter instead joined O’Connor onstage and encouraged her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

“My husband [Jeremy] and I started writing it several years ago. We wanted to get back to the lyrical storytelling and we were writing for a movie at the time that somebody had written, this script [that] was loosely based on my life,” Price says. “The movie never happened and then we had this song. It was strange all the things that kind of brought me around full circle. We wanted to brush the song up a bit, and we took it to Rodney Crowell, and just continued to dial it all in. It’s been so cathartic to sing that one live and it feels like it’s taken on a life of its own, the way the world is going.”

Guests on the set include Jesse Welles and Tyler Childers, both known for their nuanced perspectives on political and social issues. Welles joins on “Don’t Wake Me Up,” with Childers featured on “Love Me Like You Used to Do.”

“I love Tyler’s voice so much and we go back nearly a decade as friends and peers and we got to grow up together in this business,” she says of Childers. “I met Jesse at Farm Aid and I’m such a fan of his writing. I felt like he could really deliver something great on the harmonies.”

The video for “Don’t Wake Me Up” features Price making her way through numerous settings mentioned in the dreamy song, from a cow pasture to a strip club, with Price at one point leading a group of dancers. “My sister did the choreography for it,” Price says. “Just being on a shoot like that, where it’s like every single person was non-binary, or queer or a woman, it was like we were all just in it together.”

She covers the George Jones/Jimmy Peppers song “I Just Don’t Give a Damn,” and with the blessing of Waylon Jennings’ widow Jessi Colter, also includes a version of the Jennings-written “Kissing You Goodbye,” a song Price performed at Farm Aid 2024 (she joined the organization’s board in 2021).

“Jessi told me about that song about seven years ago, when I was producing her [2023] record Edge of Forever,” she recalls. “We were in the studio and going through Waylon’s old suitcase and listening to all these demos she’d pulled. It was fun just listening to things that Waylon had written. When I played it onstage, even [for audiences] never hearing it prior and the way it goes over, you’re like, ‘Okay, this is the song I have to record.’”

Though her new album marks a revisiting of sound, she’s made new moves in her career, parting ways with her band The Pricetags, and switching management companies, moving from Monotone to Red Light Management.

“I had been with the same band for a decade and I’m so grateful to all of them and love all of them so deeply. But I just felt to grow as a musician, I needed to play with other people,” she says. “I wanted to go less into the heavy psych-rock territory where we had two drum kits onstage and we would do these long jams. I wanted to strip everything back to the songwriting. I’ve done so much growing and changing, I wanted to step into my power and show up in a different way. I knew I needed that clean place.”

Throughout songs including “Losing Streak,” “Don’t Wake Me Up” and “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” she’s unflinching in depicting emotional scars and setbacks, while also weaving encouragement to keep fighting against social injustices.

“I was trying to keep my mental health up because I think a lot of people are feeling really disheartened. You can’t go into battle and make change if you’re feeling exhausted,” she says. “Unfortunately, it can feel like a simulation these days, like, ‘How are we trapped in this reality, where things just seem to be getting worse?’ I think the meditation I’ve started doing over the past few years has been transformative. I spend a lot of time in nature. Taking breaks from our phones and social media, other stuff, like micro dosing. Making music, reading, writing, those are the things that keep me somewhat grounded.”

Price adds of the album, “I just hope it can provide a little pain relief and maybe light the fire under some people’s asses to not give up the fight for truth.”