With just three remarkable solo albums, Margo Price has cemented herself as a force in American music and a generational talent. On her fourth full-length Strays, the singer/songwriter presents a clear-eyed mission statement delivered in blistering rock n’ roll.
Margo Price has been to the mountain and today the singer, songwriter, author, and Grammy-nominated generational talent releases her new album, Strays. From navigating her way through multiple lifetimes' worth of loss, lies, failure, and substance abuse, she has learned how to let go of trauma, pain, and addiction, and this collection of ten original songs serves as a celebration of freedom in its many, feral forms. Extracting herself from expectations, musical genre and the material desires that drive the world, Price tackles demons of self-image, self-worth, and more that came in the wake of her recent decision to quit drinking. She sings unabashedly about orgasms, love, and bodily autonomy, all over her most layered, sonically ambitious, and singular arrangements to date.
Produced by Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) and Margo Price, Strays was primarily recorded in the summer of 2021, during a week spent at Fivestar Studio in California's Topanga Canyon. While the songwriting began the summer prior, during a six-day, mushroom-filled trip that Price and her husband Jeremy Ivey took to South Carolina, it was amongst the hallucinatory hills of western Los Angeles that Price experienced the best recording sessions of her career. Instilled with a newfound confidence and comfortability to experiment and explore like never before, Margo Price and her longtime band of Pricetags channeled their telepathic abilities into songs that span rock n' roll, psychedelic country, rhythm & blues, and glistening, iridescent pop. Having been together since the days before Midwest Farmer's Daughter, her 2016 debut that Rolling Stone named one of the Greatest Country Albums of All Time, Price and her band tracked live in the same room, simultaneously expanding upon and completely exploding the notions of every other album they have made together. With additional vocals from Sharon Van Etten and Lucius, plus guitar from Mike Campbell, strings, synthesizers and a breadth of previously untapped sounds, Strays is also Price's most collaborative record yet.
"I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating," says Price. "You get stuck in the same patterns of thinking, the same loops of addiction. But there comes a point where you just have to say, 'I'm going to be here, I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm not going to put so much stock into checking the boxes for everyone else.' I feel more mature in the way that I write now, I'm on more than just a search for large crowds and accolades. I'm trying to find what my soul needs."
Strays marks Margo Price's first new album since 2020's acclaimed That's How Rumors Get Started, and during the two years in between, Price published her debut memoir Maybe We’ll Make It, launched her Sonos Radio podcast Runaway Horses with interviews from Emmylou Harris, Amythyst Kiah, Swamp Dogg, Bob Weir and more, became the first female artist elected to the Farm Aid Board of Directors. In addition, she’s released collaborations with the likes of Mavis Staples, Adia Victoria and Allison Russell, wrote music for Big Mouth, and shared stages with Bob Weir, Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton, Lucinda Williams, Nathaniel Rateliff and Tyler Childers, but she's not leaving the road anytime soon.