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There’s a lot of leaving in Margo Price’s music. Two songs into her set at Koko, she was taking the part of a smalltown teenager left behind by a friend or boyfriend who skips out for a new life. Then came a song in which she did the leaving, as a wife whose stoicism snaps after four dismal years of marriage. The Nashville-based Price delivered both with a smile on her face and pipes powerful enough to light up dark times.
Her ebullient performance at the London venue illustrated an axiom. You don’t have to be irrepressible to be a country singer, but it helps. No matter how bleak things get – and that’s very bleak indeed in the case of the track beginning, “Being born is a curse, dying young is worse” – nothing can be so bad that a good song can’t set it right.
Price has amassed a decent haul of those over the course of five albums. Now 40, she has lived in Nashville since moving from Illinois with a car and not much else as a university dropout. The car was soon totalled. Meanwhile, her fledgling music career stalled. The city’s record labels showed her the door. An indie interloper took a punt on her, Jack White’s Third Man Records, a rock outpost in Nashville. Price’s 2016 debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was the label’s first country record. It won comparisons to greats such as Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette.
You could see why at Koko: her flowing turquoise dress had a stylish 1970s Nashville look to it. You could also hear why. Accompanied by a punchy, versatile five-piece band, and aided by a no less punchy sound system, Price went at her songs with gusto, sometimes anchored to the microphone stand as she played acoustic guitar, other times roaming free with mike in hand.
Phrases were underlined in the style of a storyteller. A forceful vibrato gave mock-operatic intensity to emotions. “Tennessee Song” began with a cry of “Let’s go back to Tennessee!”, belted with such irresistible exuberance that her otherwise rather reserved London audience erupted into whoops and yee-haws. She then turned on a dime for the next song, “Loner”, a crying-into-your-whiskey ballad sung with a winning blend of tenderness and indomitability.
This was the number with the bleak opening couplet. It was written by her musical collaborator and husband Jeremy Ivey, who played rhythm guitar and harmonica. He sported the hangdog look of a man who had just received the latest rejection letter. Meanwhile, lead guitarist Jaime Davis showed how far Price has travelled since the early days of slammed doors.
Like the departures in her songs, Price has left country music – or more accurately taken it with her as she skips town for classic rock. Songs from last year’s albums Strays and Strays II and 2022’s That’s How Rumors Get Started, saw Davis switch from twangy chords to wah-wah pedalled riffs and psych-rock solos. On two occasions during the set Price joined her drummer Dillion Napier at a separate drumkit, hammering a gleeful message of freedom.
Having changed costume into a minuscule sparkly affair, she ended the evening in style. Roses were hurled into the audience, then she returned to the stage to accept a prize for best international song of the year from the UK Americana Awards. After playing the song, the soft-rock anthem “Radio”, she vaulted off stage to lead a singalong of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz”. Irrepressibility is a Nashville trait, but this was the exit of a show-woman: leave ’em wanting more.
★★★★☆
