Joining us in the studio for this year’s final Bumbershoot Secret Stage show is rising Nashville rising star Margo Price, who released her debut record A Midwest Farmer’s Daughter on Third Man Records earlier this year. Hers is an archetypal country star story: Price grew up in a small midwest town, worked a variety of odd jobs, and moved to Nashville to make it big. Her husband and musical collaborator even sold their car to help pay for her recording session in Memphis. Her classic honky-tonk sound and storytelling prowess are reminiscent of legends like Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris.
Price had a strong start with "Tennessee Song," her honeyed voice sailing over the room for this traditional honky tonk tune about longing for the beauty and history of Tennessee. Her band has all the trappings of a bonafide country act: the pedal steel, tinkling piano, and a row of tapping leather boots. The song finishes with a soft synth line, an unexpected injection of digital influence into an otherwise very traditional 70's-style country song. "Hands of Time," a ballad about hard times—being broke, heartbreak, getting involved with a married man, losing a child—is unfortunately an autobiographical piece for Price, depicting the cruelty of time and the resilience of women in times of adversity. The upbeat "This Town Gets Around" was the real stand-out of the performance. Its upbeat tongue-in-cheek nature and the capricious tone of her beautiful voice was classic Dolly Parton: serving the harsh truth of the pitfalls of trying to make it in Nashville with a smile and a wink.If you're at Bumbershoot today, you can catch Margo Price tonight at the Starbucks stage at The Mural Amphitheater at 6 PM.
The instrumentation in Radiation City tends to add up to more than the sum of its parts, so if the droves of passersby drawn towards the Fisher Green stage early in the Bumbershoot afternoon weren’t sure of the cause for their attraction, that might’ve been why. Instead of screaming guitar solos, c…
On the second day of Bumbershoot, Seattle garage-rock duo Pony Time played their final show to a full house in the KEXP Gathering Space on Saturday afternoon. Luke Beetham (vocals/bass) and Stacy Peck (drums) did not disappoint, turning out their usual bass-heavy tracks, highly danceable as evidenc…
