Margo Price has lived in Nashville for more than 20 years, but she’s never recorded a full album there, despite its abundant supply of legendary studios. For her fifth LP, Hard Headed Woman, she decided to change that.
“It was just because I always felt like such an outsider in Nashville,” Price, 42, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I wanted to do things outside of the box. I didn’t want anyone to try to make me sound too country-politan or too produced. But now I really feel like all of the narrative and everything is in my hands, and so it made sense to finally record here, because Nashville is a part of my DNA, for better or worse.”
Price, however, didn’t choose just any old studio for Hard Headed Woman. She and her band went to Nashville’s iconic RCA Studio A, a national historic landmark whose hallowed halls have hosted the likes of Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Nancy Sinatra, Charley Pride and Loretta Lynn. It was the perfect place for Price to make a return to her original, country-forward sound after veering toward rock and psychedelia on 2023’s Strays.
“I get chills on the back of my neck just even thinking about Dolly being in there,” Price told Us. “History was made in that studio, and to be able to carry on and be a part of that history is just so special.”
Hard Headed Woman is a new album, obviously, but there are nods to the history of country music all over it. Price puts a new spin on the George Jones classic “I Just Don’t Give a Damn,” and the closer, “Kissing You Goodbye,” is a Waylon Jennings cover that his wife, Jessi Colter, suggested she sing. (Price produced Colter’s 2023 album, Edge of Forever.) Several tracks were cowritten with Rodney Crowell, and “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down” was directly inspired by the words Kris Kristofferson once said to Sinéad O’Connor when she was facing backlash for comments she’d made about the pope.
“That song was written a couple years ago, back before things kind of felt like they had reached this complete boiling point,” Price explained of the latter track. “But it was really like a mantra for me, in a way, to be able to let things roll off my back and keep on my path — musically, personally, everything, and not be worried about what critics or Joe Schmo on the internet with his private profile and hidden avatar [has to say]. … Any time you try to step outside of the box and do something different, people are going to have opinions about that. And really, the way I look at it is, if you have haters, you’re doing something right, because you’re getting people’s attention.”
Price has faced down her share of haters over the years, refusing to stay silent about politics in a genre where the most radio-friendly artists seem to adopt a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward anything potentially controversial. She’s also been outspoken about the issues she’s faced in the music industry itself, having previously sung about a former manager “old enough he could have been my dad” who spiked her drinks (“This Town Gets Around” from her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter).
“[With] Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, I was writing about my frustrations in the music business, but I hadn’t even tapped into it yet,” she said. “Now I’m really getting to see the insides of it, and it can be very ugly. And so [“Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down”] was just a really cathartic song to write.”
While Price is beloved among fans of “alternative” country artists like Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers (the latter of whom appears on the heartbreaking Hard Headed Woman duet “Love Me Like You Used to Do”), she believes her outspokenness has probably lost her some career opportunities — but she wouldn’t do anything differently.
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“It’s important for other little girls to see someone saying, ‘I am a woman. I am completely in my own body, in my own mind. And I don’t have to try to appear to be younger than I am,’” she told Us. “I wanted [this album] title because I am hard-headed. Everything I’ve done has been sometimes one left turn after another, like changing genres, like speaking my mind about social causes and trying to be a cultural worker. It’s cost me, but I’m very proud of the career that I’ve built, and so that’s why I wanted that title. And also, just because of the way that the world is right now. We’re taking away women’s rights. We’re trying to paint trans people as a threat or a problem, and I really just want to very proudly say, ‘I’m a woman, and we deserve to have our rights too.’ And it’d be nice if some guys would stand up and shout that along with us.”
Last year, Price caught heat for something a little less dire than her political opinions: her nose job. In July 2024, she revealed that she underwent rhinoplasty and septoplasty surgeries the year prior after having breathing problems from having broken her nose more than once. But also, she just didn’t like how it looked, and that was simply too much for some critics who wanted to tell her feminists can’t be unhappy about their appearance.
“It’s very painful to feel like you’re not good enough and you’ll never be good enough because of the way you look,” she wrote in an eloquent Substack post at the time. “But no makeup, no clothing and no hairstyle would ever make me good enough because my problem was smack dab in the middle of my face.”
Now, Price says she feels “lighter” since speaking out about the procedure. “I feel like I freed up so much mental space to not be concerned about it anymore,” she explained. “It was like I was always hiding behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and I wouldn’t smile in photos because I didn’t like how my face looked. I would tell the lighting people, ‘I want the lights really low, I don’t want bright lights on me.’ It was really an issue.”
It might seem quaint just a year later now that celebrities like Kylie Jenner are sharing their exact breast augmentation specs on Instagram, but plastic surgery transparency isn’t quite so popular in the country world (with the exception of course being Parton).
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“I just wanted people to know everybody is doing stuff. Even if [they say] they’re not doing stuff … they are, and I’m so glad that I came out with it,” Price said. “I definitely had a couple haters that said negative things about it. And that’s fine too. People are allowed to dislike whatever they want.”
In recent years, Price has also been vocal about quitting drinking (but still using mushrooms). That too was difficult in the country world, where whiskey is as popular a song subject as heartbreak. Her 2015 breakout single, in fact, is called “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle).”
“It’s a completely different way to step into being present,” Price said of giving up alcohol. “I would write things down when I was drunk, and then look up the next day and be like, ‘What the hell was I talking about?’ At the same time, I wrote ‘Hurtin’ (On the Bottle)’ when I was blackout drunk with friends, and that’s probably still my most well-known song. But … my day-to-day habits have changed so much that I feel much more present than I was back in my late 20s and early 30s when I was just kind of going through the motions.”
But while Price is no longer hitting the bottle herself, she has no plans to take her drinking songs out of the rotation.
“I’ve earned the right to sing about it,” she said. “Because I truly have lived it. And I was living it at the time when I was writing it.”
Hard Headed Woman is out Friday, August 29. Price’s Wild at Heart tour kicks off October 23 in St. Louis. Tickets are available here.
