Minneapolis is well known among touring artists as an excellent city to play. The crowds are plentiful and knowledgeable, and there are a variety of good rooms to play in the city. One of the true highlights is the main room at First Avenue. With a capacity of 1,550, it’s a fun place to see a show. The sight lines are good from anywhere in the room. Furthermore, the space feels very intimate. The two tiers stack everyone close to the stage, giving the concert a communal feel that can disappear in a slightly larger room. It was at this location where Margo Price and The Pricetags played on March 1.
A thing that I have grown to love about Minneapolis is that shows tend to be very prompt. If the band is supposed to come on at 8 or 9, they are on within 10 minutes of that time. There isn’t too much loitering. It’s truly fantastic. This show was no different. At 8 PM, a young woman and a gentleman were on stage and started directly into a song. As we learned slightly later, the woman is Meels, and the gentleman is her sideman, Jackson Craig. She had been invited by Margo Price to play on a few dates with her, and as she played, it was clear how she ended up here.
Much like Price, her songs are neatly constructed and finely detailed, the kind of songs that Price has been doing since she released Midwest Farmers’ Daughter. Like Price, Meels’s songs recalled a more traditional form of country, one that focused more on people and emotions rather than patriotism and motor vehicles. But that sentence makes her sound like she is some pure revivalist outfit, which she isn’t. She has a modern perspective, one that is tired of the various difficulties that come with late capitalism.
In addition to the songwriting, she has an excellent voice. Her style contains the twang and lonesomeness of old-school honky tonk singers like Hank Snow, Hank Williams, and early-era Dolly Parton. She was very good at using her voice to convey emotions, as she did while playing “Willow Song,” which is from her recent release Across The Raccoon Strait. Here, she was able to get across the vulnerability that sits at the core of the song.
Her and Craig’s guitar work was strong. It was never overly flashy, but it helped to color in the imagery of the lyrics. It was clear that she and Craig were having a bunch of fun playing, which is always exciting to see in an opener. In addition, I listened to the aforementioned album after the show, and it is a full-band affair. The songs on the album sound great, but so did the two-guitar/guitar-and-banjo versions that I heard live. This was just further affirmation that her songs are very good.
On the whole, I think that she could probably do a small venue tour on her own, but since she’s still growing as an artist, it’s smart that she’s opening with well-established country/Americana acts as it will only help to grow her audience and not put her too far in the hole.
After a brief interlude and a short discussion with one of the two other Black people in the audience at this show (we ran into each other by accident because this is how Black people work in white spaces; it’s a natural instinct), The Pricetags walk on stage, plug in, and give each other the nod as Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” fades off of the PA. They proceed to start playing a fun, fast intro riff, letting the audience know that the star of the show was on her way. And without fail, Margo Price comes bounding on to the stage. And she’s absolutely ready to go.
Price and her Pricetags hammer through songs from her most recent album, Hard Headed Woman (a 2025 album of note for this newsletter, for the record). They did a particularly spirited version of “Red Eye Flight,” with her lead guitarist taking an absolutely massive guitar solo as the band sat in the pocket and watched with glee. In between songs early in the set, Price gave thanks to Meels for opening for her and got into a bit of a rant about how “good country” exists, but it doesn’t get the promotion that it should, which she knows as someone who has been in country music for decades at this point. This is a valid argument that I will return to later. I should also note that at this point, Jelly Roll caught a stray, leading to laughs from the audience.
Margo Price is unabashed in her politics, showing active contempt for ICE and their occupation of Minneapolis as well as the Trump administration. One of the standout songs on Hard Headed Woman is “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down,” and this song takes on an extra resonance in a city where the population has been fighting tooth and nail against a crew of jackboot thugs in balaclavas and tactical armor. Her defiance came through again during the encore of the show, where she played “Oval Room,” a song by Blaze Foley.
Rather than singing about the monster that is Ronald Reagan, Price changed a few lines and made it a song about Orange Donny. When she got to the end of the song, she stopped playing her guitar and threw up double birds, receiving a raucous whoop from the audience. It would have been shocking if someone was offended by this act, but this is America in 2026. The show ended with Meels joining the band and playing “Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan, an antiestablishment song for the ages.
When Price and the Pricetags ended for the night (before 10:30 pm), Alison and I stared at each other and were just deeply impressed by how good the show was. The band was firing on all cylinders, stretching some songs out and speeding others up. They had clearly been playing together for a long time and still had fun doing it.
Price is an excellent performer. She had complete command of the room and kept the energy high for the entire show, making a 75-minute set fly by. I also want to give her extra props for her enthusiastic tambourine work. Furthermore, she sounded excellent in the room. There are no huge studio tricks done on her voice. The woman you hear on record is the woman you hear on the stage, and she is an great singer. If she’s in your town, it’s worth your time to go see her play.
Now, to return to the earlier point about “good country.” Price is correct in saying that there is a bunch of good country music out there that should be big, assuming that it got the correct promotion. In a fair world, she’d be playing the Armory rather than First Avenue. To add to her initial point, I think that it is to the detriment of the genre that the faces of it are people like Morgan Wallen and Blake Shelton, people who have watered down this mighty genre.
If there is one thing that I’ve always known about country music, it plays well on record as well as in a room. Country requires its musicians to be extremely skilled and dialed in at all times. This allows for bands to change the shapes of songs from show to show, altering their tempi or extending them out. This makes the live experience dynamic and unique. When you see artists like Wallen out in the world, that joy is lost because their band’s job is to hit marks. That improvisatory joy can only come from people for whom country music is still a way of life, from people who really respect what the music is about.
This is what Price showed. Country is not a cynical ploy to sell records for Price. She’s not playing for the pop audiences. She’s playing for the folks who want songs with emotion and passion, songs that speaks to their lives. Country is her life. She channels the past of country while not falling into its regressive worldview. You won’t catch her singing “God Bless The USA,” but you will hear her and the Pricetags tell it like it is. It was refreshing to see this live, and it reminded me of why I like country music.
Now, to finish with a quick rant. I need older folks to be better behaved at concerts. So, when at a standing room show, there are certain pieces of etiquette that need to be followed. If you’re a tall guy, avoid posting up in front of someone shorter than you. Even better, if you walk in front of someone, make sure it’s OK with the people behind you that you’re there as one gentleman did before Meels. If you are going to slide in front of someone, let the person you are passing know that you are there, either by saying something or putting a light hand on their shoulder so as to not startle them. The older folks at the Margo Price concert did not heed these simple pieces of audience decorum. Instead, they just elbowed past people and crowded into spaces that weren’t really available, which ended up with them hovering over people and that’s just rude. Civility doesn’t fly out the window just because we don’t have seats. Please do your part to make the concert experience a pleasant one because concerts should always be fun (unless the band sucks, but that one is out of your hands). (Side note: If someone needs a guest rant, I’ve got one in the chamber about old people being rude in public that goes well beyond this.)
That is all for The Rinse this week. I thought about adding some quick recommendations to this, but I have next week for that. That one is probably going to be long, so prepare yourself. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, tell someone else about it and have them subscribe. As always, take care of yourselves and each other. Pet a dog or cat if they will allow it, and be safe in the winter weather.
