Margo Price Reveals Close Encounter With Nashville’s March 3 Tornado
Margo Price is currently quarantined at her Nashville-area home with her family, but prior to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the singer-songwriter and her husband, musician Jeremy Ivey, had close encounter with the deadly tornado that swept through Nashville early on the morning of March 3.
After the storm wreaked havoc throughout north and east Nashville, including East Nashville's Five Points neighborhood, Price shared on Twitter that she had left the area "just minutes before the tornado hit, completely unaware that it was coming." In a new essay for Vogue, she gets more specific: She, Ivey and some friends had been at 3 Crow Bar, hanging out by one of the bar's large windows, and were on the way home when they learned of the tornado warning. One friend, Danielle, was headed to the couple's house when a tree fell into the road, crushing her windshield and totaling her car ("She survived but was traumatized from the experience," Price writes).
"As we pulled in the driveway, the rain began to pour down and the winds bent the trees sideways ... The tornado never came to our home, but it had hit the exact spot where we were sitting moments earlier," Price explains. "We were lucky: We got out without a scratch, but many of our friends and neighbors’ homes were destroyed. A lot of people that we knew suddenly lost their jobs and many of the local businesses that made our neighborhood unique were torn apart."
One week later, on March 9, Price was part of a tornado relief benefit concert. The next day (March 10), she and Ivey decided that they and their two children would begin quarantining themselves. "The first week wasn’t so bad," she says, but "[d]ay nine of self-quarantine was a memorably low day." The death of good friend and fellow artist John Prine of the coronavirus on April 7 and Ivey's own contraction of the virus, not to mention Price and Ivey's inability to tour, continued to make life stressful and difficult.
"I don’t know what the next year is going to look like in any way, shape, or form. This virus won’t be the end of humanity, but the continued division of the folks in this country might be," Price writes, also noting that Ivey "is finally starting to feel better, but not 100 percent." She adds that she misses life pre-quarantine -- "I miss hugs and live music and getting tattoos and traveling and sharing food and passing joints and everything about the old days," Price says -- but notes that her family will be staying put for a while longer.
Price was due to release a new album, That's How Rumors Get Started, on May 8, but opted to postpone the release indefinitely, until she can properly promote and tour in support of the project. In her piece for Vogue, Price notes that she's not felt capable of self-promotion with everything else that's been happening, both personally and in the world around her.