“I equate it with a snake shedding skin: Every time that I took [a trip], I got rid of some luggage that I really didn’t need and I got rid of some things that weren’t me anymore, that didn’t fit. I cleaned my closet a lot and got rid of clothes that weren’t me anymore, and I learned a lot.” —Carlos Santana
I was reading Margo Price's memoir Maybe We'll Make It recently, startled to learn that in the early aughts, before Price split for Nashville, she was a student at Northern Illinois University, where I teach. (She was born and raised in Aledo, a small farm town in western Illinois.) She briefly studied Communications, right down the hall from the English Department. I don’t remember if I had her as a student. Judging from her candid memories about her time in DeKalb she probably wouldn’t have made it to class all that often.
“At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I took psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. It turned my world inside out in the best possible way. I bought a couple of ounces of mushrooms from my ex-boyfriend Billy to sell for some extra cash. We were on good terms again and decided to take them together platonically. Per Billy's instructions, I consumed an entire eighth myself and downed some orange juice to intensify things. We walked around outside and the world came alive, visually and sonically. Colors flew at me and my whole being was tapped into a deep vibration I had never felt before. I experienced a great sense of peace and a connection to all living things.”
Price is a difficult artist to box-up, for those so inclined. She’s lived in Nashville, Tennessee for decades, and has both courted and been denied Music City’s trappings. A dynamic study in contrasts, she grew up in rural Illinois but sings with a southern accent; her debut album was released on maverick Jack White’s Third Man Records, hardly a Nashville industry staple (though it may be on its way); she cut a live album at historic and revered Ryman Auditorium, waltzing (and rocking) within a storied tradition.
In January of this year she released her fourth studio album Strays, recorded and co-produced with Jonathan Wilson at his Topanga Studio in Los Angeles, a different beast from her previous records Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (2016), All American Made (2017), and That’s How Rumors Get Started (2020), and a major artistic achievement. Her sweetly evocative, tender-but-tough Tammy Wynette/Stevie Nicks vocals are still there, as are the duets and collabs with celebrated musicians (among them Mike Campbell, from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers band), the commercial sheen, and the muscular, nuanced playing of her band, which features her husband Jeremy Ivey on guitar. (Ivey also co-writes many songs with Price; in addition to Ivey on guitars and bass, her band’s currently comprised of Alex Munoz on acoustic and electric guitars and pedal steel, Jamie Davis on acoustic and electric guitars, Kevin Black on bass, Dillon Napier on drums, and Micah Hulscher on keyboards. Price adds acoustic guitar and percussion.)
Yet Strays arrived bearing news beyond its ten songs: before recording sessions began, Price and Ives rented an Airbnb in South Carolina and over the course of six intense days ingested magic mushrooms. “We ate a lot of them,” Price acknowledges in Consequence, “and then, through osmosis, decided to listen to a ton of music and talk about sonically where we wanted [Strays] to go.” Price and Ives woke up the next day (“when we were not high”) and swiftly roughed out “Been to the Mountain,” “Change of Heart,” and “Light Me Up”—“and the list just kept growing from there.” Price wrote 20 songs that week and has since remarked that she worked longer and harder on Strays than she’s worked on anything. Her hope is that “people would have something to listen to when they are going down into the rabbit hole, going to the mountains, going inward. I have also listened to it while on shrooms later on, so it worked.”
She adds, “It came out exactly as the recipe said.”
“The hallmark feature of the mystical experience, that we can now occasion with high probability, is the sense of the interconnectedness of all things—a sense of unity, a sense of openheartedness or love, and a noetic quality suggesting that this experience is more real than everyday waking consciousness. I believe that the experience of unity is of key importance to understanding the potential existential shifts that people can undergo after having these kinds of experiences.” —Roland Griffiths
“Music had never felt more symbolic,” Price writes in Maybe We'll Make It of that first mushroom trip of hers, at the age of twenty.
“We listened to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and I watched the patterns of the curtains mutating before my eyes. It’s really hard to describe what that first intense trip was like, but it felt like a conversation with God. It stripped away parts of my ego and revealed to me what I already knew in my heart. We are not our bodies, we are souls, temporarily imprisoned inside of this human experience. My value was not in my beauty or the lack thereof.”
The trip “shined a light” on Price’s insecurities, also, and required that she “face my fears about the future. We are all going to grow old and die one day, so why sacrifice your life to do something that doesn’t thrill you? There was renewed hope in my dreams. In that moment, I had found the secret to understanding the universe and what my role was in it: I would drop out of school and become a musician.”
Price is unsparingly honest in her memoir, which was published by Texas in 2022 on the eve of Strays. She writes about her fitful adolescence, alcohol abuse, a brief prison stint, years of brutal hangovers, and the tragedy of losing an infant son (she also has a son and a young daughter). Her courtship with and marriage to Ivey are narrated in all of its glory, and the seams show: there are doubts, infidelities, some meanness, epic money problems, long, shitty nights given to menial jobs, drinking and drugging, graphic career disappointments. Price and Ivey separated briefly; she carried on an affair. She ultimately quits her corrosive drinking. Now “California sober,” Price smokes and trips with the zeal of an evangelist.
It's all in the memoir, which is heavily narrative—she’s got a van full of great stories to tell—complemented by the occasional insightful moment of self-reflection. There aren’t too many. Price keeps her lens focused on her story, a carefully-crafted if reckless trajectory from small-town Midwestern farm girl and struggling, alcoholic Nashville-transplant to a married, road-touring mother of two and Jack White-blessed Next Big Thing singing and performing at the Grand Ole Opry.
In October, Price and her band released Strays II, not quite a sequel but an extension of Strays. An album as an evolving, organic thing. Partially written during that six-day shroom trip in South Carolina, and recorded during the Strays sessions, the new material conceived by Price is shaped as a trio of three-song acts: Topanga Canyon, Mind Travel, and Burn Whatever’s Left. I pre-ordered the album bundled with a packet of Mind Travel Mushroom Tea; a “Mind Melt Marble” colored vinyl edition will also be made available. “When you thought it was just a micro dose,” Price teased on social media.
Those expecting Price’s psychedelic excursions to have yielded conventional psychedelic music might be thrown off. Only a few songs on Strays and Strays II evoke what one might think of as typical hallucinogenic experiences. There are no guitars or organs holding trance-like drones, no backwards tapes, phasing guitars, or corny panning across the stereo spectrum. No studio attempts at recreating temporal dislocation, or the feeling of being high. Price’s journeys have clearly and profoundly touched, even changed, her—she’s rawly honest and forthcoming in her interviews—but her music, with its modest twang, straightforwardness, and formal attention, remains rooted in traditional music.
Psychedelics seem to have brought Price closer to her true, reckoning self, where her professional ambitions and personal struggles are cast in sharper relief and, in their paradoxical urgency and pettiness, pale in the light of eternity and are rendered humbling against the vast scale of the universe. Tucked into the sleeve of the vinyl edition of Strays is a facsimile of a hand-written note from Price. In it she quotes Chief Seattle, the indigenous Suquamish and Duwamish chief famed for championing ecological obligations, who wrote, “All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” Price, moved, adds below this, in her own words,
I belong to no one
I am cosmic dust
I am a speck on a speck
I am air, I am a shadow
I am a leaf in the forest
I am a star in the darkness
I am a red tailed hawk
I belong to no one
Such earnest epiphanies, glanced at an angle, can strike one as facile, yet that’s the nature of a deep, sudden insight: what feels startlingly true and unique to you has been revealed to countless others before, each person reverberating in the overwhelming newness and clarity of their exclusive experience, each feeling as if they’ve been gifted something fresh. There’s a reason we have clichés (and a reason why we’ve evolved, over millennia, in perfecting the eye-roll), and clichés must be transcended in art if they’re going to feel authentic and not hackneyed. Price manages to do this by burrowing deeper inside, trusting that her psilocybin days brought her to genuinely valuable, enlightening places that were inaccessible otherwise. In “Time Machine” (written by Napier and Christopher Houston Denny, but of a piece with Price’s own songs), she sings, “I want to find what's hiding on the inside / I want to feel reality.”
Strays opens with the charging “Been to the Mountain,” with its strutting, “Gloria”-like riff and stirring rock and roll dynamics that build and crest. (A rousing track, it killed when I saw Price and her band play in Chicago earlier this year.) The driving performance pushes against a carefully calibrated arrangement, and indicates just how transformed Price is, confident enough in her newly-cleansed point of view to let it rip with her band. The lyrics cycle through personalities (“I’ve been a dancer, a saint, an assassin / I’ve been a nobody, a truck-driver shaman… I am the hunter and I am the hunted / I am a baby unwanted / I’m an alchemist teacher, I’m a sinner, I'm a preacher”) as if the singer’s shedding skins, evolving toward something urgently felt yet hard to name.
In the first verse, she makes a key discovery—“it was me underneath / I just know who I’m not, man, that’s alright with me”—but the larger insights arrive at the end of the song—
And I know that there’s more out here than this
As I stare in the void of the black magic vacuum
I know the scent of death like a perfume
as Price plays mischievously with time itself, losing and finding herself, then murmuring, and then belting out, the lines
No, this ain’t the end, this ain’t the end
This ain’t the end, this ain’t the end
Oh, take off your tired eyes
Undress your holy thighs…
—as the words collide against each other in reverb, in a bit of studio trippiness. “I always saw [“Been to the Mountain”] as being the peak of a trip because I wanted this album to be a whole psychedelic experience in itself,” Price remarks in Stereogum, going a bit further in a comment on Apple Music: “This was one of the very first songs that flowed out the next day after we came down from our mushroom trip. I just really wanted to incorporate poetry. I wanted it to be really psychedelic, and I wanted this album to be able to serve as a record that people could put on if they were going to maybe dabble in psychedelics.”
“I think it can be a companion piece in that regard. I feel like whenever I have taken a psilocybin trip, there’s always that moment right before everything starts happening in your brain and your body, and you feel like you’re about to go on a roller coaster. That’s what I wanted—to capture that feeling.”
“Do you want to be different? Do you want to do something that’s not the chosen path?” Price asked rhetorically in an article in Billboard on the occasion of Stray’s release. “You can absolutely do that. That’s really what mushrooms have taught me.” Such revelations don’t come without their more complicated flip side. “Sometimes I feel so ‘different,’” she confessed in a tweet on X, virtually shrugging. “My musical style can be hard to describe these days. We play country music for people who like psychedelics.”
The tyranny of taxonomy: Price pops up in music-database searches under “Americana,” “Neo-Traditionalist Country,” and “Contemporary Country,” but never in searches of further-reaching genres such as “Cosmic American Music,” “Cosmic Country,” “Stoner Country,” even the broader “Alt-Country.” As an artist she seems fated to drift between and among polarities, a stimulating if frustrating journey.
“Psychedelics are not a substance for faith. They are a door to authentic faith, born of encountering directly the sacred dimension of everyday experience. This is not the only gate to that discovery, but it is the most ancient and universal, and potentially the most accessible to the majority of the human race.” —Rick Doblin
With “Where Did We Go Wrong,” on Strays II, Price seems to have written a genuine UFO song: “Saucers in the desert air / Reports came in from everywhere.” (And meanwhile her head’s in the Milky Way. Metaphors? Maybe.) And she dabbles in psychedelic imagery in the closer “Burn Whatever’s Left,” with its tea-brewing mystic, church bells tolling in ancient hills, and lines such as “I left my body, I left this world / My spirit untethered, my hair unfurled.” Yet in “Closer I Get” she reckons with the harder moments before and after illumination: “I try to live in the light of day, but I don’t feel enlightened… My heart lives in the same old cage, but these walls have tightened.” Originally written as Stray’s opener, the song was “conjured from the ashes of our initial psychedelic trip,” Price comments on her website, adding, “Sometimes your perception and depth of field changes depending on where you’re at in life.” With its gentle, Fleetwood Mac roll, affecting melody, and irresistibly catchy chorus, “Closer I Get” mines the poignant place between getting and losing.
“Mind Travel” explicitly explores a psychedelic state. Written in response to an out-of-body experience Price had while tripping, the song is “pretty much beat poetry on drugs with a back beat,” she explains, noting the she and Ivey had “some pretty incredible breakthroughs about accepting death and just reckoning with how fast it's all going,” before adding, “It's okay to be reflective and remember the past as long as you don't get stuck back there.” Price feels that the song and the album’s “second act” are about learning to be content in the present. The smoothly undulating arrangement, anchored by an assertively searching, inviting piano lick, feels satisfied, at home and rooted, but the song can’t help but evolve in its final minute into the closest thing to a ”freak out” that a Price song reaches, that piano riff smilingly leading the listener through a brightly-lit door in front of which the song had been otherwise pleasantly loitering. The final twenty seconds offer—what, the sound of crashing waves? Radio static? A distant thunderstorm? My wife hears whirring chopper blades. Anyway, the attempt in noise to aurally pin down where Price went, now that she’s returned.
Price seems to have always considered herself in vivid ways. In an arresting passage in Maybe We’ll Make It she describes a job she took working at the fabled Belcourt Theater during her mean, early years in Nashville. When she wasn’t selling tickets or beers, she’d catch whatever flick was playing there; one was Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated concert at Altamont Speedway outside of Tracy, California. “One of my coworkers, Manda, convinced me the best seat in the house was sitting on the stage behind the screen,” Price writes. “We both quickly shotgunned a beer and then walked up the small wooden staircase to the stage.” The screen was transparent (Price: “translucent”), and, by turning her head, Price could regard the audience through the film’s projection. “Mick Jagger was up there shaking it like a Vegas showgirl. I gazed through his image to see the crowd's reaction. It was exhilarating and terrifying.” Unseen by the theater crowd, she and her friend shared a joint as Price looked up at Jagger and rock and roll spectacle, reveling in their shared-screen moment, their hallucinogenic transparencies.
George Harrison: That’s the thing about LSD. You don’t need it twice.
Interviewer: You’ve only taken it once?
Harrison: Oh no, I took it lots of times. (laughing) But I only needed it once.
My experience with cannabis runs deep, from the ridiculous (the time I passed out at the top my living room stairs and then, alarmingly, “forgot” how to breathe) to the sublime (hearing the Beatles’ harmonies in “Here, There, and Everywhere” one evening in a way so startlingly beautiful and new that, the next morning, hearing only traces of that miracle, I was both enraptured and kind of heartbroken). More recently, I listened to the Who’s Quadrophenia in its entirety on good, strong edibles. Jimmy’s fraught journey from crowded London streets to a lonely rock off the coast of the English Channel, and Pete Townshend’s songs singing that journey, felt thrillingly dimensional and cinematic. And those new neural pathways have stuck with me.
I listened to Strays and Strays II recently on edibles, and the experience was unedifying. In Turn On Your Mind Jim DeRogatis references a remark made by the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh, that “psychedelic music is any music that’s heard while tripping.” Price herself imagines her new album as the soundtrack to a psilocybin journey. Maybe I haven’t taken the right drugs. But I’m not complaining, nor feeling defensive or left out: the music on Strays and Strays II is striking, thoughtful, and deeply felt, and more profound than listening to it while tripping (perhaps) is the sober knowledge that shrooms have changed Price and Ivey, and thus have altered their songwriting. What matters are the songs, whatever they’re filtered through upon arrival.
In a suburban Chicago record store a year or so ago, I was struck by an album that the clerk had put on, a loud, trance-like jam that sounded through the small store like a sonic edict from somewhere else, and yet here I was standing in the middle of it. The album was 11:11 by the Glasgow-based collective Kundalini Genie. Moved—I was sent—I bought the record on the spot and have jammed to it countless times since, the top of my head prying open a bit more with each listen.
Three decades ago in Athens, Ohio I was strolling to my house on the west side of town when I caught wind of an enormous and ecstatic sound coming from my neighbor’s front porch. “What’s that?” I cried out.
“It’s Nirvana,” she answered, her face blissy and complicated, her eyes alive. I hadn’t heard Nevermind yet. What I heard was my neighbor saying the word that meant paradisical, joyous—and the language fit. Something happened inside of me in that moment that I can only describe as mood-altering—and perhaps mind-altering—a vivid connection to something that I most certainly could not have accessed a block away, or a minute before. Talk about contact highs.
“I think that we have been psychedelic in our live performance for a really long time,” Price remarks in Consequence. “I’m not trying to compare my band to the Grateful Dead in any way, but there is a lot of improvisation that comes along with us getting on stage. You know, stretching songs out, changing tempos, changing things up, we’ve been doing that for a really long time.” She adds, “I am trying to get more psychedelic lights. I would love to have more of a budget, a production. But we’re not quite where I wanna be yet. I would love to have projections and really trippy things going on.”
In the Chicago show at The Vic in February, Price’s choice of cover songs was striking. After “Radio,” the rousing statement-of-purpose from Strays, she leapt behind a second drum kit as her band strutted through Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ “Pump It Up” (Black's grin while grooving the bass line was indelible), and ended the night with an elated take on Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Let Me Roll It,” a tune tailor-made for Price to find inside some winking, playful joy. (Her band also played Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”—Price has a variation of the title tattooed on her arm—and Sleater-Kinney’s “Turn It On” during that year-long tour dubbed “‘Till The Wheels Fall Off.”)
Early in the set, led by Napier’s striking, expressive snare march, the band worked their way through Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” a choice that might surprise an onlooker who would assume that Price’s only debt is to Nashville. In the band’s hands the song, a half century old now, built menacingly in its still-startling way, moving the show into something more dimensional and fuller of edgier possibilities than it had been. (I can bet Price was imagining those trippy projections.) Clearly grooving with the vibe and the crowd’s knowing participation, she chose to have fun with the song, the flip side to her darker and more complex stuff—providing an answer song to the pre-show Willie Nelson piped over the PA and theme music of sorts to the Women In Weed informational booths positioned at the front of the venue.
I regularly teach Walter Benjamin’s essay “Hashish in Marseilles” in my Writing Creative Nonfiction workshop. Part of a series of “protocols” that Benjamin hoped to gather for a book about the philosophical and psychological consequences of drug use, the piece can be read both as “drug lit” and as a stroller in the “walking essay” tradition. The conversations about the essay are nearly always interesting, as students are eager talk about recreational drug use (and are definitely more comfortable doing so relative to a decade or so back). Invariably we get around to the “stoner’s epiphany” and the eye-rolls it generates—my students are familiar with 3 am dorm room epiphanies gifted by a toke or three—but also the genuine enlightenment that can come from smoking weed or taking hallucinogens.
When we zoom in on the handful of insights that Benjamin reached as he walked, very stoned, the streets of his French port city, some of the more skeptical students come around to recognizing the value in Benjamin’s experiment: his unexpected discovery that “ugliness could appear as the true reservoir of beauty;” the uncanny thrill “of recognizing someone I knew in every face”; the startling and profoundly moving recognition, while in “the deepest trance,” that a couple of men whom Benjamin strolled past (“citizens, vagrants, what do I know?”) could reveal to him the truth that “All men are brothers.” (“When I meet a stranger there’s nothing stranger / feeling that I’m meeting them all over again,” Price sings in “Black Wolf Blues.”) These gifts of illumination, shivers of intuition bordering on empathy and universal love, were revealed to Benjamin because he was high. But were such insights already in him? Do we need drugs to experience such intense things?
One student, who’s never smoked weed or taken hash, said to me, “I don’t have to now.” She gestured at Benjamin’s essay. “I’ve read this.”
I drive on the long, straight roads of DeKalb County, past enormous farmlands and rural buildings, toward an endlessly flat horizon, listening to Strays and Strays II. The landscape I gaze at is keenly familiar to Price, who evokes it in her memoir, sings about it both nostalgically and ruefully in her songs, and who’s never fully shaken off its dirt. Her grandparents lost their farm in the 1980s during the agriculture crisis; in May of this year Price was invited to be a member of the Board of Directors for Farm Aid, an honor “beyond my wildest dreams.” If Price carries western Illinois eternally in her mind, she’s also made room in there for Nashville, and for the cities and countries she visits on tour, and she keeps carving out space there for wherever her travels, psychedelic or otherwise, may take her. Wherever she goes, when she returns she’ll pick up her guitar, and she’ll tell us.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, and AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series). Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo credits: Alysse Gafkjen (top), High Times (bottom)