Margo Price’s memoir is as harrowing as her songwriting. As a songwriter, Price makes sharp critiques of the music industry by balancing her struggles with harassment against musicians’ systemic issues with fair pay and economic precarity. As a memoirist, Price details the desperate decade she spent living in poverty while trying to make a living as a musician in Nashville and getting turned down by every record label in town before she signed with Jack White’s Third Man Records. She also examines the challenges of reconciling mainstream country’s rigid boundaries with her own desire for genre hybridity. She recounts trying to come up in the East Nashville scene by playing rock but failing to break through or make ends meet.
Price succeeded by offering her take on traditional country. To underscore the specific challenges of her attempts to negotiate genre conventions, she explains that she decided to record her hit...
University of California Press