Backstage With Margo Price and Pearl Charles at NYC’s Webster Hall

Mexicali Blues

Price was close friends with Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist who died last month. Price says that over Christmas, she found a note Weir had written her, when he gifted her a custom acoustic guitar. “It said, ‘Hope you write some good songs on this,’” she said. That night, she dreamt that she was playing Weir’s “Mexicali Blues” with his band Wolf Bros. On Jan. 10, the news broke that he’d died at 78. “He gave me a lot of great advice,” Price says. “I have some voice recordings of him that I have never shared. He’d just tell his stories, and I would want to remember them. I got to ride on his tour bus at one point, hanging out late at night, meditating with him. It’s just so surreal.”