Walk into Margo Price’s Nashville home and you’ll likely end up in a warm, well-lived-in room with what she calls barnboard “wood panelling like your grandma’s house.” Once a mudroom, now a jam room, studio and band rehearsal space, it feels like stepping into an old saloon – and that’s by design.
The M1 in margo Price’s Nashville home
“Everything I do is of an era past,” Margo says, “I love the 60s and 70s.”
Guitars lean in corners, vinyl spines line custom wood shelves, and a Wrensilva console holds court with humble authority, looking like it was built to spec for the room. Visitors almost always assume it’s vintage.
The console isn’t just a conversation piece – it’s where Margo, one of country music’s most singular voices and “wildest truth-teller” (Rolling Stone), listens to music the way it was meant to be heard: without compromise, without the flattening compression of a phone speaker.
“I spend all this time in a professional studio. The music is on tape and warm. Then people listen on phones and on computers and it’s all compressed. You're missing so much sound and so many details listening that way,” she says.
That reverence for sound—for its imperfections and its humanity—runs through Margo’s life, her home, and her new record, Hard Headed Woman.
From Mudroom to Music Den
In 2020, during COVID lockdown, Margo teamed up with her woodworker friend Hugh Masterson and Price Tags bass player Kevin Black to transform the mudroom for a socially distanced video shoot for “Letting Me Down.”Hardwood floor and paneling, vintage wallpaper, signed guitars and concert posters share space with photographs of Willie Nelson, Rita Coolidge, Kris Kristofferson and Anthony Bourdain.
“He was a big inspiration for me,” Margo says of Bourdain. “Being on his show and getting to meet him is one of the coolest things I ever did. He was such an incredible spirit.”
A cow skull anchors the wabi-sabi wall display. Antlers, feathers, turtle shells, and bones find their way into the décor – a collection she shares with her son, who once dreamed of being an archaeologist. “He bleached a bobcat skull once,” she says. Her husband, however, enforces a household rule: “one dead thing per wall.”
Lucinda and Dolly
Five tracks into her new album, Hard Headed Woman, Margo sings, “rolled the windows down, singin’ to Lucinda” in “Close To You” – a line that tips a hat to Lucinda Williams. Pedal steel, a swaying bassline and hints of flamenco guitar add to the melancholy of Margo’s voice. She draws from Lucinda’s blend of grit and grace, that achingly human see-saw of toughness and vulnerability.
Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road has a permanent slot in Margo’s Wrensilva M1 console. “I’m a massive fan of Lucinda’s writing,” she says. “That album has stayed in the top of the console’s vinyl storage for a while. There’s not a bad song on it. The title track is killer and I really love ‘Joy.’ That song has everything. It’s a good pump-you-up song.” Hard Headed Woman, like Car Wheels, doesn’t shy away from life’s contradictions. Both records lay bare the sharp edges of reality while finding beauty in the cracks.
Margo credits Lucinda, along with Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, with shaping her musical DNA. “Dolly’s song selection on that album goes pretty deep,” she says. “And she recorded it at RCA Studio A, where I recorded Hard Headed Woman.” 9 to 5 tells stories of the working class, women’s empowerment and the battle for equality – all topics that still loom large in 2025 and resonate throughout Margo’s own writing.
“There’s no comparison. “You can hear the breath. The finger picking on a guitar. It’s like you’re in the room with whatever record you have on. You’re going to hear it in a much deeper way.”
RCA Studio A: Legends and Family-Style Lunch
The spirit of Dolly Parton and many other country music greats were present during the Hard Headed Woman sessions at RCA Studio A in Nashville. Though Margo had tracked there before, this time she went all in to record the full record with Matt Ross-Spang, who produced her first two albums Midwest Farmer’s Daughter and All American Made.“The room sounds incredible,” Margo says. “The walls have absorbed the music of everyone who’s worked there – from Loretta Lynn, Chet Atkins and Willie Nelson, to Waylon Jennings, and Charlie Pride.”
The history in the room is palpable and, sometimes between takes, legends showed up in the flesh. Billy Swan, bassist in Kris Kristofferson’s band, dropped by to swap stories about the morning that Kris wrote “Me and Bobby McGee.” Margo expands on Billy’s legacy, “He has a great song called ‘I Can Help’ and he did a version of ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ that intimidated Elvis. It was so good that Elvis got mad at him.”
Cut to the present day Hard Headed Woman recording sessions, and new memories were made when pedal steel icon Russ Pahl cracked the band up by requesting Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for lunch. The band indulged him, and soon they were all gathered around a communal table in the tracking room, eating steaks with plastic forks.
Real Music on Reel Machines
If there’s a manifesto behind Hard Headed Woman, it’s summed up in the phrase: “real music on real machines.”
“I’m a fan of anything recorded analog, from the 50s thru 70s,” Margo says. “My husband has a Tascam 388 that he records on. It sits next to the Wrensilva console.”
Her last couple of albums leaned more progressive, with polished production and modern textures. Working with Matt Ross-Spang brought her back to analog purity. “He has a really organic way of doing things,” she explains. “He likes the humanity in a vocal take - in something not being perfect.”
They recorded the band live in one room. No isolation booths. No obsessive overdubs. No click tracks.
When the test pressing came back, Margo immediately spun it on the Wrensilva. “There’s no comparison,” she says. “You can hear the breath. The finger picking on a guitar. It’s like you’re in the room with whatever record you have on. You’re going to hear it in a much deeper way.”
In a time when AI threatens to strip art of its humanity, Margo is emphatic: “It’s important to keep the poeticism and humanity in there,” she says.
Bonus Tracks, Bottlenecks, and Vinyl
The sessions produced so much material that it was hard to pare down, so Hard Headed Woman is available as a double album boxed set with bonus tracks.
Margo originally planned to release her Billy Strings collaboration, “Too Stoned to Cry,” as a 7” single, but vinyl manufacturing timelines complicated the plan. “I decided to include it on the album so people can hear it in its real format,” she says.
True to the promise of “real music on real machines,” Hard Headed Woman is available on 8-track tape, reel-to-reel and multiple vinyl variants.
“Records are like currency,” she says. “I tell my children: be careful with these records - it’s your inheritance!”
A Hard Headed Future
As the release of Hard Headed Woman rolls out, Wrensilva is hosting listening parties, inviting fans to hear the record the way Margo does: full-spectrum, analog, uncompromised.
It feels fitting. Margo may be a “hard headed woman,” — but in the best way. She resists shortcuts. She embraces quirks and holds on to the grit and the humanity that make music—and life—worth listening to.
“Anytime someone comes over and looks at the Wrensilva, they think that it’s vintage,” she says. “I’m drawn to old consoles that you see abandoned at Goodwill. You’ll see a sick 8 track player – but does it work? This piece (the Wrensilva M1) has been a dream come true piece for our home.”
So, how does the new record sound on the Wrensilva?
She grins: “Sounds pretty damn good!”
And in her saloon-turned-mudroom, with ghosts on the walls and a console that sings like it’s always been there, humanity lives on.
