Margo Price / Midwest Farmer's Daughter / 2016
Since You Put Me Down
bitter, defiant, self-lacerating
A breakup song built around a single, escalating image: the narrator drinking hard enough to kill off her own conscience so heartbreak can't reach her anymore. It's classic honky-tonk misery dressed up with a sharper, more theatrical central metaphor than the genre usually bothers with.
heartbreak and self-destruction alcohol as anesthetic hardened self-protection small-town isolation pride versus grief
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing her ex directly, alternating between refusing to speak his name and admitting how much damage he's done. She's not a fully reliable narrator of her own state -- she claims to be turning to stone while clearly still raw.
What happens
The song opens in the immediate aftermath of abandonment, with drinking and lying as coping mechanisms. Each chorus repeats and escalates the same act -- destroying the 'angel' of conscience or hope with a different liquor -- suggesting a nightly ritual rather than a single night. The bridge widens the lens to the bar itself and the town's other lost souls, then narrows back to her own stubborn refusal to change, ending on the same unresolved wish to become emotionally numb.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form with a recurring chorus that varies only its bottle brand, functioning almost like a drinking-game refrain -- the repetition itself enacts the compulsive loop it describes. A bridge steps outside the personal narrative to comment on the bar's other regulars before returning to the narrator's own defiant self-image, and the final chorus repetition doubles the last line instead of resolving it.
Section by section
Opening verse
Establishes the aftermath in blunt, unglamorous terms -- drinking, lying, and framing her own self-destructive impulse as a separate, almost demonic character she's now keeping company with.
First chorus
“I killed the angel on my shoulder”
Introduces the song's central conceit: conscience or hope destroyed by drink. The specificity of the liquor brand grounds the metaphor in real, working-class detail rather than abstraction.
Second verse
Shifts to direct address, laying out rules of engagement with the ex -- silence, refusal to forgive, a wish to remain a haunting presence rather than a memory. The tone hardens from grief into something closer to threat.
Bridge
“sucking all of the good blood”
Zooms out from personal heartbreak to the bar as a shared wasteland, suggesting her situation is not unique but part of a broader pattern of stalled, drained lives in the town.
Final verse and chorus
She reasserts her identity as an outsider by choice, then repeats the chorus one more time, ending on a doubled final line that signals the numbing project is ongoing and unresolved rather than achieved.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- The 'angel on the shoulder' figure, standard shorthand for conscience or hope, is literalized as something she actively murders with alcohol, turning a cliché into a violent, specific act repeated with escalating liquors.
- symbolic hardening
- The recurring wish to turn a broken heart to stone frames emotional numbness as a deliberate project, not just a side effect of drinking.
- vampire imagery
- The bar regulars are cast as parasites draining the town's 'good blood,' extending the drinking theme into a broader image of communal decay and stagnation.
- refrain with variation
- Each chorus swaps the specific bottle (whiskey, tequila, unnamed liquor) while keeping the structure identical, mimicking the repetitive, ritualized nature of nightly self-medication.
Reading it
The most direct reading is that this is a drinking song about grief management -- alcohol as the only available tool for dulling heartbreak, with the 'angel' standing in for hope or vulnerability that the narrator finds too painful to keep alive. A secondary reading treats the stone-heart wish ironically: the song's insistence on hardening, repeated without ever landing, suggests she hasn't actually succeeded, and the ritualized repetition of the chorus is evidence the wound is still open rather than closed.
Context
This song appears on Price's debut album, which drew heavily on classic honky-tonk and outlaw country traditions -- bar-room heartbreak, plainspoken vocabulary, unglamorous detail. I don't have specific biographical or production background on this particular track beyond that album context.
Listen for
- how the chorus's melody handles the repeated 'angel' line each time it returns
- whether the vocal delivery shifts in weariness or bitterness across the three verses
- the specific liquor named in each chorus and how the escalation is voiced
- the tonal shift in the bridge when the lens widens to the bar's other patrons
About Margo Price
Margo Rae Price is an American country singer-songwriter, producer, and author based in Nashville. Born in Northern Illinois, after several years of living and performing in Nashville she released her debut album Midwest Farmer's Daughter in 2016.
b. 1983 / United States
Full biography and catalogue