Margo Price began writing for Strays in the summer of 2020, not long after the arrival of her enthusiastically reviewed That’s How Rumors Get Started. She wanted to go deeper into rock n’ roll, and dive guitar-first into psychedelia. “I wanted the album to feel like a lifetime,” she says, “or a 10-hour hallucination where you remember everything again.” She and her husband—songwriter and frequent collaborator Jeremy Ivey—holed up in a rental house in South Carolina to find the swirling sounds rattling around in her head. They ate a bunch of mushrooms and sat outside, albums from Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, and Bruce Springsteen playing in the background, writing as inspiration struck. Six days passed and the songs piled up.
The stack only grew once back home in Nashville. Even after a blissful week in Topanga Canyon, California, recording at producer Jonathan Wilson’s Fivestar Studio a year later, more still came. “I feel this urgency,” Price says of this moment in her creative path. “I need to keep moving, keep creating.” Maybe it’s age, or the years the pandemic stole from us all. It’s thrilling—and downright terrifying. “It’s scary to not make the same record over and over,” she explains. She has yet to. Moving from the sparse folk of her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, into the rollicking roots of its follow up, All American Made, the following year, and, in 2020, into classic rock with Rumors, Price has established herself as a sonic explorer of the finest ilk. Still, she says, “This could be too out-there for people. But I just have this morality where I feel like, it has to be this.”
