Margo Price Talks About the Highs and Lows on WTF With Marc Maron

Photo: Daniel MeigsMargo Price has had a hell of a year.

Since signing with Third Man Records in September 2015 and releasing Midwestern Farmer's Daughter in March of this year, she's seen the record rocket up the charts and played its tunes on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show. She appeared on this here newspaper's cover ahead of this year's AmericanaFest and won Emerging Artist of the Year at the Americana Honors and Awards. She had the Best Country Album in this year's Best of Nashville issue last week. You're getting the picture here, right? 

Well, these days, a person on that kind of roll is just about obligated to stop by Marc Maron's garage for an appearance on WTF, the comedian's interview podcast where he's chatted up local favorites from Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson to Price's label boss Jack White and, more recently, John Prine. Yesterday's episode featured the aforementioned It Girl talking with Maron in as engaging and wide-ranging an interview as you're likely to hear with her. 

The two discuss Price's childhood in a small Illinois town, her stint as a cheerleader and the experience with mushrooms and The White Album broker her of that particular habit. But they also get into more serious personal topics, and the experiences that inspired many of the songs on Midwestern Farmer's Daughter. Among them is a weekend spent in the Davidson County jail Price sings about in "Weekender," her sentence for an incident one night after she, still reeling from the loss of one of her twin sons, had put a particular hurtin' on the bottle. 

"One night I went over to a friend's, she was a mother and a musician and she also was a wine dealer. We get all loaded on, like, really expensive wine and I'm playing drums and having fun. I'd started out kind of crying, but the drunker I got the more I forgot about things. And then the night start's getting really late and I thought 'I better get home, my husband's gonna kick my ass, I really need to go.' Call a cab, before like Uber and Lyft and all this. Cab doesn't come, sometime goes by. Drink some water, eat some crackers and cheese think 'I'm good to go.' Only a mile from my house, but was driving a very large Ford Explorer ... I hit a telephone pole in front of two cops. In front of two cops. And I was so close to my house and then I was thinking 'I'm going to jail maybe I can outrun the fuckers.' So I start speeding away thinking I'll just pull in someone's driveway, 'cause they were parked and I was going pretty fast ... So, finally pull over 'cause there's two cop cars, one's beside of me and one's behind me. It's pouring down rain, they make me walk the line, of course I fail horribly. They take me to jail. I was charged with public property damage, fleeing the scene of an accident. A whole list of things. Went to court, ended up getting reckless endangerment, which is a misdemeanor, which does not look very good. When you look at the definition it's like 'you went out trying to hurt other people.' I was only trying to hurt myself." 

Like all of Maron's best interviews, it's long enough to allow for a casual conversation with room for all the stuff that makes up a life and an album like Price's. You won't regret the time you spend

.