Album Review: Margo Price - Strays

Album Review

Margo Price - Strays

 A major reason in the decline in music related content here over the past decade is my relationship with my partner- Amy works in the music industry as a manager.  She worked for the producer Danger Mouse for years now she manages Margo Price among others.  Margo Price is quite a story- and has been she broke out back in 2016 her break-out from the East Nashville indie scene to national prominence is one of THE most interesting phenomenon in indie music over the past couple decades.  The number of indie artists who "make it" after several years in a local music scene is pretty minimal- those types of artist tend to emerge quickly, get snapped up by the music industry proper and disappear out of said local scene.

 Amy's been working largely from home for the past three years, so I've had a ringside seat to the making-of this record, and man, it has been a journey.  Margo is not on a major label per se, but Loma Vista is part of the Concord Music Group (now it's just "Concord") which is a titan in the music industry beyond the record label part because of their publishing catalog.   Margo also wrote a book last year which got released by the University of Texas press and a lot of the planning involved the sequence of book and record, which went first, how long between the two etc. 

  The thing about Margo- who I consider a friend at this point based on the amount of time I've spent around her and her family, is that she is both authentic and ambitious and her struggle is an illustration of how the music industry necessarily creates a conflict between the authenticity and ambition of an artist.  In other words, it is pretty easy to be one or the other- authentic OR ambitious, it is less easy to be successfully be either:  You can think of the authentic musician who works as a sound guy in a local music venue in his 50's or an ambitious musician who sends out a million demos and never finds any interest.  It is most difficult to successfully be authentic and ambitious.  

   And the problem that Margo has faced is that of truly world class expectations.  To express it in terms of orders of magnitude,  Margo Price generally resides in the 100,000's category with dips down 10,000's or up to 1,000,000 depending on the metrics.  The Artists she emulates/respects are those in 1,000,000/10,000,000 world, for the most part- she doesn't live in the world of 100,000,000 let alone a billion, which represents the upper stratosphere of the metrics for the biggest Artists on the planet.

  Like other Artists I've known Margo's profile among certain elements of her Audience: Other award winning musicians working the same area, journalists, people who book festival music acts in the United States has run ahead of her actual metrics with the larger elements of the Audience:  people who listen to music, people who buy tickets to concerts, people who buy albums.   The fact that there is a discrepancy has given grist to those who might be called "haters"- people who doubt her appeal and those who claim that she is a manufactured phenomenon.  It is that later argument that is the most absurd.  Can you imagine someone telling Willie Nelson or Chris Stapleton that Margo Price is a phony, media constructed mirage? 

    A variation in acceptance by different elements of her audience- critics and writers love her, but she hasn't had a number one record, to create it in a pithy formula; is an observation that could equally be ignored (really, it doesn't matter) or embraced, with the only answer being a number one record.  Is Strays that record, then, is the only question that needs to be answered.

     I believe the answer is yes, Strays is the album Margo Price needed to make to both maintain her authenticity and widen her scope of appeal.   It is easy to find metrics that support the conclusion that she is poised to jump one or even two orders of magnitude.  Take her streaming figures on Spotify, the most transparent data point that has ever existed within the culture industry for measuring audience size for a particular artist.   One year ago at this time she had 300,000 monthly listeners. This number had been steady since the release of her last record in 2020.  As I write this today, her number of monthly listeners is up to 1.5 million, five times what it was a year ago.