Backstage With Margo Price and Pearl Charles in New York
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Glam Rock
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Price kicked off the Wild at Heart tour last fall, and resumed it this year on Feb. 12 in Pennsylvania. She took the train to New York from D.C. this week after a show she describes as “cathartic.” She says she spent the night before the New York show writing songs in her hotel room with her husband and bandmate, Jeremy Ivey.
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Turn the Page
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Price poses after her makeup is complete. She says there are times when she doesn’t even enter the green room before a show, and opts to hang inside her tour bus instead. “I do my hair and my makeup in there, and put on a good record,” she says. “It’s like putting on war paint, and getting in the zone.”
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Meals on the Road
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Price and Ivey order sushi for dinner. Price typically tries to eat three hours before her set, so she can perform on an empty stomach. Then she does vocal warmups, and huddles with her band.
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Love Is a Rose
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Last month, Price performed at a Neil Young tribute concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, as part of the Americana Pre-Grammy Salute. A longtime Young fan, she even knows the deep cuts: “I know the eight-minute ‘Like an Inca’ song from Trans,” she jokes, referring to Young’s 1983 cult album. In the end, however, after “Ohio” and “Powderfinger,” were already taken, she settled on “Love Is a Rose,” which Linda Ronstadt scored a hit with in 1975. “They had a fiddle and banjo and everything, and Jeremy played harmonica,” she said. “So it was exactly like the recording.”
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The Gilded Palace of Sin
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Pearl Charles’ music echoes Seventies singer-songwriters and glittery disco, but her sound is uniquely her own. “I just do what I like,” the 34-year-old musician says. “The Seventies was such a great time for creativity. It [was] the pinnacle of songwriting and the album format. They really got it right, so I lean into that.”
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Not in Kansas Anymore
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Charles holds up her psychedelic Wizard of Oz pants, designed by Philip Seastrom of Big Bud Press. “Have you seen that holy grail video of Stevie Nicks singing ‘Wild Heart’ while she’s getting her hair and makeup done?” she asks. “Oh, my god, such a classic!”
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Desert Queen
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Charles and Michael Rault, her boyfriend and bandmate of seven years, live in Joshua Tree, California. With wood-paneled walls and shag carpeting, their desert home is “the ideal Seventies pad,” she says (though they were recently visited by a Mohave Rattlesnake). They built a home studio there, named Taurus Rising, where they mixed Charles’ most recent album, the aptly titled Desert Queen.
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Rebel Without a Cause
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Price takes a moment in front of a James Dean poster before changing into her stage outfit. She says she styles herself, traveling with three cowboy hats, “and, like, 500 pairs of shoes.”
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Road Dog
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Price frequently tours, and more or less lives on the road. “I have to do it to keep food on the table, but I also enjoy it,” she says. “Even when I’m really depressed about everything, it always feeds my soul.”
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Meet & Greet
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Price singing autographs for her pre-show meet and greet, with help from her sister, Kylie. “It can be hard on the voice,” she says of the pre-show performance. “But I just have the best fans. People will come up and be like, ‘You got me through my divorce,’ or ‘My dad died, and I listen to the record.’ No matter how tired I am, I always end up crying.”
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One Last Look
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Price in her stage outfit, about to go onstage. “It’s hard to care about my music,” she says, mentioning the current political climate. “Because times are so bleak. But I also think people need music, as a way to cope with everything that’s going on.”
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Country Home
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Price hopes to release three albums this year, including an “anti-AI, healthy country record” on reel-to-reel. “I feel like that’s what you got to do these days to keep your name, and feed the content monster,” she jokes.
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Wild at Heart
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Price adds that she wants to explore other sounds and styles on those upcoming albums. “I love it,” she says. In 2016, after she released her debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, with Jack White’s Third Man Records, she wanted to release more music right away. “But everybody was like, ‘No, you have to wait,’ because you had to just work the album cycle for so long. It would be creatively stifling. I get really stagnant if I feel like I have to stay in one genre.”
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Tequila!
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Charles, who’s been featured as a Rolling Stone Artist You Need to Know, likes to take a shot of tequila before every show. She also uses a nebulizer to soothe her vocal cords.
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Johnny Starlite
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Charles and Rault performed gems from her 2021 album Magic Mirror, 2025’s Desert Queen, and some new tracks, including the groovy “Johnny Starlite.”
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Road Trip
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Charles and Rault are currently working on her new album, which they’ll record in the desert, naturally. She frequently drives into Los Angeles to see her family, and she says those trips influence her albums. “I feel like every album I’ve ever made, I’m always like, ‘It’s a road trip album! It’s a driving album!'” she says. “But that’s because I spend the majority of my life in a car. It’s your safe space. You can control the temperature and the music, and you can decide when you stop and when you start. You’re not on anyone else’s schedule or anyone else’s like path.”
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Grievous Angels
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Price and Charles after Charles’ set. “I wanted to get her out to open some shows,” Price says. “We hang a lot anytime I’m in L.A. and we shoot the shit. And Michael and Jeremy are really good friends, we always are doing double dates.”
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Playing in the Band
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Price performing with her band: drummer Brandon Combs, guitarist Sean Thompson, guitarist and vocalist Logan Ledger, and bassist Alec Newnam.
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Mexicali Blues
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Price was close friends with Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist who died last month. Price says that over Christmas, she found a note Weir had written her, when he gifted her a custom acoustic guitar. “It said, ‘Hope you write some good songs on this,'” she said. That night, she dreamt that she was playing Weir’s “Mexicali Blues” with his band Wolf Bros. On Jan. 10, the news broke that he’d died at 78. “He gave me a lot of great advice,” Price says. “I have some voice recordings of him that I have never shared. He’d just tell his stories, and I would want to remember them. I got to ride on his tour bus at one point, hanging out late at night, meditating with him. It’s just so surreal.”
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Edge of Town
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Price and Ivey onstage. During the set, they performed Ivey’s “Edge of Darkness,” off his new album Its Shape Will Reveal Itself.
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Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down
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Price says she’s currently working on a country song called “Sex Is Cool, But Have You Ever Fucked the System?” inspired by her hero Kris Kristofferson’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” She also wrote a recent track for the Billy Bob Thornton series Landman, though it didn’t make it into the show. “It’s called ‘Screw You and the Horse You Rode In On,’ and that one’s really fun,” she says. “It’s not necessarily political, but really anything can be.”
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Fight the Power
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“Thank you for again for coming out to support us today,” Price told the crowd. “Middle-class music is disappearing. We have to make sure rich people aren’t the only people making music.”
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Maggie’s Farm
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Price performed several cover songs in her set, from George Jones’ “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” to Waylon Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye.” She also included two Bob Dylan classics: “The Times They Are a-Changin'” and her closer, “Maggie’s Farm.”
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Cosmic Pals
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Price and Charles hang out before Price’s set. When she’s not performing, Charles likes to DJ out in the desert. “The more I do it, the more I can justify spending more money on records,” she jokes. She’s often seen walking into establishments with a huge quantity of LPs. “Everyone is like, ‘What is wrong with you? You seem insane!'” she says. “But I don’t know what I’m gonna DJ till I get there. I gotta feel out the vibe!”
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