Margo Price faces her demons, and takes control of them, in her new “Hey Child” music video. The clip draws from the singer-songwriter’s own struggles with addiction and tragedy.
Price wrote “Hey Child” in 2012, after her son, Ezra, died of a heart condition two weeks after his birth in 2010. (His twin, Judah, survived and is now a big brother to Price and husband Jeremy Ivey‘s daughter Ramona, who was born in 2019.) Originally, she and Ivey performed the song in their rock band, Buffalo Clover.
“We were playing shows … and occupying most of the bars in East Nashville. We had begun hanging with a rowdy group of degenerate musician friends and partying harder than the Rolling Stones. We were outsiders to what was going on with mainstream Nashville in every sense, and it was the beginning of my bourbon-drinking phase,” Price tells People. “The song was about how many of our talented friends were drinking and partying their talents away, but after a few years had passed, we realized it was just as much about us as our friends.”
In the “Hey Child” video, director Kimberly Stuckwisch uses the camera’s gaze to represent Price’s mind while “explor[ing] the perpetual cycle of addiction and depression, the scars you carry around with you from its relentless push and pull, and the daily struggle to regain control of what has left you powerless.” The story the video tells — of Price doing drugs, drinking too much, crashing her car and, in the end, winding up in jail — is a true one: Price did, in fact, spend three days in jail after a night of partying gone wrong.
However, just as she did in real life, with her husband’s support, Price conquers her vices in her new music video: The clip ends with her regaining control and breaking free.
“[Kimberly] and I wanted to show pieces of my past lives and how I have moved on,” a recently sober Price explains of the concept. “It was both therapeutic and painful to revisit those memories and who I used to be.”
Price’s solo version of ”Hey Child” appears on her newest album, 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started; she admits that she didn’t want to re-record the song, but her producer, fellow musician and longtime friend Sturgill Simpson encouraged her to do so. The record arrived in July, after a brief delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and follows 2017’s All American Made and 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter.
Also in 2020, Price released a live album, Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman, culled from three May 2018 shows at the hallowed Nashville venue. To conclude the year, she dropped a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “River.”
Coming up this year, Price has a just-announced socially distanced concert at Pelham, Tenn.’s Caverns Above Ground Amphitheater set for May 28. Tickets go on sale at 10AM CT on Thursday (Jan. 28), with a strict slate of COVID-19 protocols in place for the event.
Price is also due to play the Moon Crush Festival, another socially distanced event, this spring. She’s got shows with Chris Stapleton on the calendar, too, though his tour has the potential to be rescheduled again due to COVID-19.
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