Austin City Limits is excited to announce that we will be live streaming our debut taping of Season 49 with iconoclastic singer/songwriter/author Margo Price on March 19. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this highly-anticipated taping here in its entirety on our ACLTV YouTube Channel.
Margo Price returns to the ACL stage with Strays, her “strongest, most cohesive record yet” (Rolling Stone). Featuring “volcanic vocal performances and sharp character studies” (Vulture), as well as Sharon Van Etten, Lucius, and The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell, the record “struts through big-hearted indie country, honky-tonk stomp and ’70s guitar-explosion psychedelia” (The New York Times). The new album serves as a resilient proclamation of freedom for Price, who surmounts a lifetime of loss, lies, trauma and substance abuse (as chronicled in her best-selling memoir Maybe We’ll Make It, hailed as one of the best books of 2022) with ten new songs that prove her place as an independent artist, singular storyteller and endlessly experimental explorer, with so much to say but nothing to prove.
While much of Strays was written in a South Carolina cottage – during six days that the Nashville-based Price spent eating psychedelic mushrooms with her husband and musical partner Jeremy Ivey – the album was primarily recorded in California’s Topanga Canyon. There at producer Jonathan Wilson’s studio in the summer of 2021, Price and her longtime band of Pricetags channeled their telepathic abilities into their best recording sessions and most ambitious array of sounds, styles and arrangements to date. Having been together since the days before Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, her breakthrough 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. Price sings unabashedly about self-worth, bodily autonomy and a woman’s right to choose. Across the rest of the LP, she writes about losing herself in sex, overcoming marital conflict, tuning out haters, the aftermath of quitting drinking and more, as “Strays bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic pearls of wisdom” (Pitchfork).
“I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” says Price. “Maybe it’s getting older, or the years the pandemic stole from us all. 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.”
Join us here March 19 at 8 p.m. CT for Margo Price; the broadcast episode will air on PBS as part of our Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.