Margo Price / Ways To Be Wicked
Ways To Be Wicked
defiant, bruised, sardonic
A hard-bitten country-rock kiss-off aimed at a partner who inflicts pain and seems to enjoy it. Margo Price frames cruelty and desire as tangled together, insisting that inflicting hurt is easy but real intimacy is a skill her tormentor has never learned.
toxic relationships masochism and pain tolerance cruelty versus love power imbalance defiant self-awareness
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses her partner directly throughout, alternating between accusation and weary confession; she seems clear-eyed about the dynamic even as she admits she'll likely fall back into it, which makes her a knowing rather than naive speaker.
What happens
The song doesn't move through a plot so much as circle an established pattern: she names the partner's cruelty, admits her own history of being drawn back in, and repeats the central charge that he's skilled at hurting but ignorant of love. The bridge briefly zooms in on his demeanor -- described as reptilian and self-satisfied -- before the song returns to its refrain, ending on a fade-out that trails off mid-thought rather than resolving.
How it's built
Built on a tight verse-chorus loop with almost no lyrical development between repetitions, which mirrors the stuck, cyclical nature of the relationship being described. The bridge is the only formal departure, shifting to short, clipped imagery before snapping back to the chorus. The final section decays into repeated fragments and wordless vocalizing, structurally enacting exhaustion or resignation.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song opens with a direct question that immediately establishes an unequal emotional exchange -- her pain seems to give him satisfaction. She admits a pattern of being fooled before, which frames the entire song as a repeat performance rather than a first offense.honhoney
First chorus
“so many ways to be wicked”
The refrain draws a distinction between cruelty and love as separate skill sets. Cruelty, she suggests, is easy and has infinite variations; love is singular and, in this partner's case, entirely absent.
Second verse
She reframes her endurance as a kind of competence, almost pride, in absorbing mistreatment. The image of watching his eyes light up as she suffers underscores that his pleasure is tied specifically to her descent, not to any mutual experience.
Bridge
“those cobra eyes”
The bridge strips down to fragmented, image-driven lines that characterize him through cold, predatory features and a satisfaction in his own dark nature, offering the song's most concentrated character portrait of the antagonist.
Final chorus and outro
The chorus repeats twice before dissolving into broken phrases and vocalizing without words, which enacts a kind of running-out-of-language -- the argument has been made, and all that's left is exhausted sound.
Craft
- repetition/refrain
- The chorus's central claim is repeated almost verbatim each time, reinforcing that this is an old, worn-in grievance rather than a new realization.
- animal imagery
- Describing the partner's eyes in serpentine terms casts him as instinctively predatory rather than simply unkind, suggesting his cruelty is closer to nature than choice.
- paradox
- The narrator claims she can withstand pain well while also being led toward ruin, holding together endurance and self-destruction in the same breath.
- euphemism/innuendo
- Physical language about being handled roughly blurs the line between sexual and emotional violence, keeping the source of harm ambiguous.
Reading it
The most direct reading is a confessional country-rock song about a partner whose cruelty is inseparable from his charisma, and a narrator who is honest about staying anyway -- less a story of naive victimhood than of eyes-open complicity in a painful pattern. An alternative reading treats the whole song as a broader statement about a certain kind of man who mistakes control and infliction of pain for intimacy, with the specific relationship functioning as a stand-in for a familiar type rather than a single real situation.
Context
This is the title track from Price's 2020 EP Ways to Be Wicked, released between her full-length albums. Stylistically it leans harder into rock and blues-inflected swagger than her more traditional country work, which suits the song's confrontational tone. I don't have confirmed biographical details tying this song to a specific relationship in Price's life, so any autobiographical reading should be treated as speculative.
Listen for
- the shift in tone during the bridge, where the imagery turns colder and more serpentine
- how the chorus melody plays against the harshness of its lyrical content
- the way the outro breaks down into repeated fragments and wordless vocals
- subtle changes in phrasing between verses despite near-identical lyrics, which can signal shifting emotional weight
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