Margo Price Sure Can Sing. She’s at the Bluebird tonight.

Back In Boulder
Margo Price Weakness
“Sometimes my weakness,” Margo Price sings, “is stronger than me.”

Margo Price was in Boulder last night, bringing down the house at the Fox Theatre. About a third of the way through the set, she told a story about her busking days on Pearl Street. She’d just about given up recording music, moving out of Nashville with her soon-to-be husband and current bandmate Jeremy Ivey.

They needed money, and fast, so they asked for a wedding ring. They weren’t married yet. “It was a big lie,” she told the Fox crowd.

Margo Price is now a ubiquitous “new-Outlaw”, following the inroads made by her heroes like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. To hear her tell it, she almost didn’t make it, barely getting by for years.

What doesn’t kill us, right? Is there a singer more street smart and with as much musical acumen as our lady from Nashville? (Yes, she’s moved back.)

In an interview on Fresh Air from 2017, she reveals a lot about her life, her up, her downs, her inspirations. She talks about losing a child, whom she mourns in song on 2016’s “Hands of Time”. She discusses wanting to buy her mom a gallon of wine, and her desire to buy back the farm her family lost.

 

We Just Do What We Can

These aren’t just tropes. This is the music culled from real life experience. Margo Price’s music reminds us not to forget where we come from. In “Heart Of America”, a stand out from All American Made, she sings across divides – a song you’d hear at the most rural truck stop in Illinois or the hippest bar in Brooklyn. She sings:

“You can pray to anybody’s Jesus
And be a hardworking man
But at the end of the day, if the rain it don’t rain
We just do what we can”

Margo Price sure can sing. And play the blues, twang, gospel, and country.

She’ll be playing a sold out show at the Bluebird tonight. If you don’t have a ticket, she’ll be back. See her live. It’s good medicine. Taking a cue from the singer-songwriter, a little pain never hurt no one.