Margo Price Cut a Protest Album With a Mariachi Band and Joan Baez

There was no announcement. The record simply appeared on the third of July, hours before Margo Price was due on stage at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic.

Days of Unrest runs twenty-nine minutes, came out through Loma Vista Recordings, and has been referred to as a protest mixtape rather than a studio album.

Twenty-Nine Minutes Is the Point

The length is the first thing that tells you what kind of record this is. Twenty-nine minutes is shorter than most albums and barely longer than a set, and it is the correct duration for a piece of work made in response to something.

A protest record that took eighteen months to assemble would not be a protest record; it would be a commentary. The mixtape framing sets expectations accurately — material gathered quickly, put out while it is still the subject of the argument.

Releasing it without notice reinforces that. A surprise release skips the promotional cycle entirely, which for an album with a stated position is the difference between making a statement and marketing one.

The timing was pointed. Putting out a record on 3 July, then playing Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic the next day, places it inside the one American cultural event most explicitly about what the country is.

Nelson’s Picnic has been running since the seventies as the gathering point of the outlaw country tradition — a scene defined from the start by artists who declined to be told what a country record was allowed to say.

A 1948 Song at the Centre

The album’s third track is “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”, featuring Joan Baez and Memphis Mariachi.

The song is not new. It is a protest song with lyrics by Woody Guthrie and music by Martin Hoffman, written about the crash of a plane on 28 January 1948 near Los Gatos Canyon, west of Coalinga in Fresno County, California.

Guthrie wrote it because the news reports named the crew and listed the passengers only as deportees. That is the entire substance of the song: the objection is to people being counted rather than named.

Bringing Joan Baez to sing it is the single most loaded decision on the record. Baez’s career is inseparable from exactly this repertoire, and her presence connects a 2026 release directly to the tradition that produced the song.

It also makes a point about repetition. A song written in 1948 about how deported workers were described in the press is being recorded again in 2026, which is either an argument about continuity or an admission that nothing was settled.

Our piece on who gets paid for a traditional song covers the mechanics behind a record built substantially from other people’s material.

The Position Was Already Public

The album did not come out of nowhere. Price had already worn an “ICE Out” pin at the 2026 Grammy Awards as a statement against United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

An awards-show pin is a gesture; a record is a body of work. What connects them is that neither was ambiguous, and the second follows from the first rather than reversing anything.

The money is where the position becomes concrete. BrooklynVegan reported that a portion of proceeds from vinyl sales would be donated to the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.

Directing vinyl revenue specifically is a practical choice. Vinyl is the format with a real margin on an independent-label release, while streaming income at this scale is small enough that pledging it would be close to symbolic.

Goldmine’s assessment was that the recording “sincerely makes an effort to hear and see the Mexican migrant community in a time of need”, which is the question a record like this is properly judged on — whether the people it is about are present in it or merely referred to.

Memphis Mariachi are the answer to that question in practical terms. The band plays on two tracks, with Martin Granados on guitarron and vocals, Eniel Pineda and Jose Patino on trumpets, Jose Perez on vihuela and Alejandro Quijano on violin.

That is a full mariachi instrumentation rather than a guest trumpet, and it is a considerably harder thing to arrange than a genre gesture would require.

Covers, Not Compositions

Much of the record is other people’s songs. The first single, “Maggie’s Farm”, came out on 14 October 2025 — a song written by Bob Dylan, recorded in January 1965 and released on Bringing It All Back Home, built on electric blues and issued as a UK single that reached number 22.

A second single, a double A-side of “Deportee” and “Oval Room”, followed on 30 June, three days before the album.

Track six, “Long Haired Country Girl”, features Billy Swan and is credited to Charlie Daniels — a country veteran singing a country song by a country writer, sitting on the same record as a Guthrie protest ballad and a Dylan cover.

Choosing existing songs rather than writing new ones is itself an argument. It says the material already exists, that the objections being raised are not new, and that the job is to put them back in circulation rather than to add to them.

Two instrumentals bookend the sequence — “San Marcos Theme” at track five and “San Marcos el Fin” at track nine — which gives a twenty-nine-minute collection of covers the shape of a deliberate record rather than a compilation.

The Dylan choice is the one that repays a second look. “Maggie’s Farm” is a song about refusing to keep working for someone on their terms, and lifting it out of 1965 into a record about migrant labour changes what the refusal is about without altering a word of it.

Releasing it in October 2025, nine months before the album, also means the first single predated the record by a long way. That is either a song that was already sitting there or the point at which this project started, and the timing suggests the second.

Made in Nashville, Quickly

Matt Ross-Spang produced, mixed and engineered every track, and also played percussion, electric guitar and acoustic guitar across the record. Kimberly Rosen mastered it.

One person handling production, mixing and engineering on all nine tracks is how a record gets made fast. There is no handover between roles and no scheduling gap between stages.

The player list is deep for a short album: Jeremy Ivey on harmonica, acoustic guitar, keyboards, bass and piano; Alex Munoz on baritone and pedal steel; Logan Ledger, Sean Thompson and Alec Newman across several tracks; Paul Niehaus on pedal steel; Ken Coomer on drums.

Price plays guitar, acoustic guitar and percussion alongside singing on every track, which for an artist who is also a producer and author is consistent with a record made hands-on rather than delegated.

The number of different players and engineers — with separate mixing on one track by Andrija Tokic and additional engineering by Will Chason — suggests sessions assembled in pieces rather than a single block, which again fits a record made quickly around other commitments.

Price released a debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, in 2016, after several years living and performing in Nashville, having grown up in Northern Illinois. This is the sixth studio album, following Hard Headed Woman in 2025.

Two albums in two years, the second of them made and released without notice, is not the pace of an artist managing a career. It is the pace of one responding to something.

Days of Unrest is out now on Loma Vista Recordings.