Margo Price – Strays (LomaVista) Album Review

Margo Price has just released her new album, titled Strays. The 13th Floor’s Robin Kearns has spent some time with it and now, here is his review.

In one of his Red Hand Files distributed this week, Nick Cave wrote that the essence of strong song writing is “breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery…. where the listener recognises in the inner workings of the song in their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering”.

Cave’s insightful assessment was perfectly synchronous with the arrival of Strays, the fourth album from Margo Price. Its varied songs stray off-road into turbulent terrain and offer a rich soundscape that is at once both fraught and uplifting.

Price is based in Nashville, that pumping aorta of Americana. On Strays she casts her sights outwards – beyond the rolling hills of Tennessee into harsher terrain. The cover image speaks volumes: parched earth, a lone figure, a mysterious journey. As Cave says, strong songs like these are at once inward and outward looking; they engage with the personal but speak to the universal.

The growling beginning to the opener Been to the Mountain segues into a driving beat “I’ve got nothing to prove/I’ve got nothing to sell”. This is Price having arrived, the prophet in the desert even. “I’ve been a number/ I’ve been under attack/I have been to the mountain and back”. This is a songwriter on fire, someone who’s been under fire, one who in the fire of suffering and is now alloyed into sterner stuff.

Either stand back or step into the fire. But if you’ve been there, you’ll know what to do. The opening song invites. The following nine songs complete the welcome. They are therapeutic if you let them.

The instant classic track for me is County Road, dealing with memories of a friend lost in a car crash. Who among us doesn’t have a county road in our journey? I do: Quitman County, Mississippi. So suddenly the spare piano opening to Price’s song transports me into my own grief 45 years ago. The personal is written into the universal in invisible ink. In Nick Cave’s words, I recognise in the song my own blood, struggle, suffering. Song writing at its best.

Throughout, the instrumentation is exquisite as is Price’s voice. At times one can almost hear other well-seasoned travellers of those gravel backroads that criss-cross America: Jason Isbell, Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty. But this is Prices’ journey. And its paradoxically priceless in the sense of the songs suggesting invaluable durability. They assiduously avoid the maudlin introspection that ‘tragi-country’ can wallow in. Here the suffering soars (“I’ve had a change of heart” she sings on another track).

Yet in a sense it’s a community effort, as most albums are. Petty’s legacy lives on with the collaboration on Light me up with Mike Campbell.  Radio, the collaboration with Sharon van Etten is especially engaging; a meeting of extraordinary voices and songwriters.

The song cycle that is Strays ends with Landfill, a gentler topographic bookend to the roaring mountainous opener. Its almost as if sending the songs out into the ears of listeners has been cathartic and now it’s time stretch out into a mix of exhaustion and post-passion delight. “I could build a landfill of dreams I deserted….They say it takes time to become timeless….I made love and love made me…But only love can tear you apart”. In this last line’s homage to Neil Young, Price appears to acknowledge the cost of song writing, the price she perhaps pays for not just laying bare her universalising lyrical soul, but also of daring to speak to the essential nakedness of the human condition. We are, after al at some time or another, strays in the dry mountains of longing.

This is a beautiful, deep and profound album. On my list of the best of 2023 and it’s only the year’s third week.

Robin Kearns