Description
On Midwest Farmer’s Daughter—whose title is clearly meant to echo Loretta Lynn‘s famous origin story—Price emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes that split the difference between so many ampersands: country & western, rock & roll, rhythm & blues. It’s an ambitious piece of music-making and storytelling, featuring a road-hardened backing band called the Price Tags and a singer whose flinty voice conveys both a guarded vulnerability and a reckless scrappiness. She fiddles while Nashville burns on “This Town Gets Around,” three minutes of inside baseball that details all the unscrupulous managers and sexist promoters who populate the industry like fleas on a hound. “I guess it’s me who gets the joke,” she sings. “Maybe I’d be smarter if I played dumb.”
