Margo Price revealed that she wrote her newest album, Strays, while on mushrooms in an interview with Sarah Silverman on The Daily Show. The country singer-songwriter shared that she wanted to “shake things up” with the new project, which had a follow-up in August with, Strays II.
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“I got my start with this old-school country album, it was called Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, and Jack White put it out, and things finally turned around for me,” she began. “[But] with this album I wanted to be able to go out there and not be pigeonholed.”
Of the whole writing on mushrooms thing, Price said, “It’s been pretty transformative for me. The first time I had a psychedelic trip I was 20 years old and I dropped out of college and moved to Nashville.” She continued, “The next time I took it, I wrote this album. And then the third time I took it I decided to quit drinking alcohol, which had really been a challenge for me.”
[RELATED: Review: Margo Price Expands Her Mind and Sound with ‘Strays II’]
Price also put out a memoir called Maybe We’ll Make It in 2022, and she spoke a bit about her process while approaching the project. “Laying it all out there,” she began, “I started writing it when I found myself pregnant with my daughter Ramona. And I was just at home, and I couldn’t tour. And through the process, it was also when I decided to give up drinking because I was reading everything from this different place. I was able to give myself a little bit more compassion as I was reading things back.
“But it was scary to put it all out there,” she continued. “It’s everybody I’ve ever slept with, all the drugs I’ve ever done, so, sorry grandma,” she laughed.
For her performance on The Daily Show, Price played her song “Lydia,” which she wrote years before her album Strays came out in January. But, as she said in a statement around the time of the album release, the song feels like a haunting look into the future.
“The song feels like a premonition now, with women’s rights being stripped and all the abortion bans happening,” she said earlier this year. “When I listen back, I hear what might go through a woman’s mind when she has a difficult decision to make about her body, her choices and her future.”
She spoke about the song prior to her performance on The Daily Show, explaining the origin of the emotional track. “I was walking around in this town in Canada,” she began, “[and] there were just a lot of methadone clinics, a lot of people were really struggling. And so I initially wrote it then, and I was scared of the song. I played it for a couple of my friends, and one of them said, ‘man, that song just really sucks the air out of the room.’ And it doesn’t rhyme, and it’s like six minutes,” she laughed, “so I knew [The Daily Show] was the perfect place to come do a song about a hooker contemplating an abortion.”
Photo by: Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily Show
