breaking
MARGO
PRICE
By Roman Gokhman
Photo by Angela Castillo
“People need a lit tle sang in the choir at school and church,
c h a r a c t e r - b u i l d i n g and performed the national anthem at
sometimes,” Margo Price says, and semipro hockey games. She dropped out
her debut LP, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,
of Northern Illinois University when she
is suffused with it. It’s something of a
was twenty to pursue music full time.
concept album based on Price’s own
life: her family loses their rural Illinois
songwriting lineage. Her great uncle,
farm after suffering through financial
eighty-year-old Bobby Fischer, wrote
hardships,
by
for Conway Twitty, Reba McEntire,
managers, she loses one of her twin sons
George Jones, and other Nashville
shortly after birth, she drinks too much
singers throughout the latter twentieth
and then goes into a deep depression
century. When Price first wrote with
that eventually lands her in trouble.
Fischer, he didn’t sugarcoat how
“There was a dark period where
hard she would have to work to be
nothing was helping and nothing was
successful. She moved to Nashville
making me feel better,” she says. “I hit
in 2003, met Ivey, and started several
a breaking point and part of me was
bands, one of which briefly included
thinking that maybe I needed to check
singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson.
myself into a mental institution. I was
The songs on Midwest Farmer’s
feeling so depressed and so terrible. And
Daughter were written within the
then I ended up in jail instead.”
past three years, and the album was
But when she delivers lines like
recorded largely over three late nights
“I was fifty-seven dollars from being
in February 2015 at Memphis’ famed
broke,” or “All I wanna do is make a little
Sun Studio without the support of a
cash, ’cause I’ve worked all the bad jobs,
record label. To cover the costs, Price
busting my ass,” Price is not seeking
pawned her wedding ring and sold
pity. She’s stating her intentions—“I
gear, clothes, and a car. “We were doing
wanna buy back the farm, and bring my