Margo Worth at Royale, Boston, Feb. 22, 2026

“I’ve lived there lengthy sufficient that I’ve earned the proper to hate it,” Worth stated of Nashville, whilst her music emulated the very best of the nation music capital.

Margo Worth acting at Chief Financial institution Pavilion in 2023. Worth introduced her present tour to the Royale this previous weekend. Ken McGagh for The Boston Globe

By Marc Hirsh

February 24, 2026 | 10:49 AM

4 minutes to learn

Margo Worth, with Pearl Charles, at Royale, Saturday, Feb. 22.

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Margo Worth is in Nashville however not of it. “I’ve lived there lengthy sufficient that I’ve earned the proper to hate it,” the singer stated a number of songs into her efficiency Saturday at Royale. She was about to launch into “Love Me Like You Used To Do,” a gradual grasp at what as soon as was, carried out as a duet along with her guitarist Logan Ledger. It was indisputably nation, even with out the fringed floor-length gown Worth was carrying and the patterned cowboy shirts on most of her backing band.

However the nation that Worth performs and the nation performed on mainstream radio are vastly various things. Worth’s conception of the style is a lot a throwback that she’s basically the equal of an indie band emulating Nineteen Sixties storage rock in a world of grinding guitars and growls. So it’s no shock that she has difficult emotions in direction of the town she continues to name residence.

However difficult emotions are half and parcel of nation of all eras, even after they appear brutally easy. In spite of everything, the leadup to the title of the heavy-footed stomp-and-strum of “Kissing You Goodbye” was “Get your tongue out of my mouth,” and whereas Worth had had sufficient within the spitfire “4 Years Of Probabilities” — with a drumbeat and wah-wah guitar that tossed in components of disco — a full election cycle is a very long time to hold on to hope that issues will get higher.

Not numerous that discovered its approach into Worth’s efficiency itself, which was merely a spirited runthrough with a crack band. With Alec Newnam’s comfortable bass plonks and Brandon Combs’s mild drum clicks pushing it ahead, opening music “Arms Of Time” didn’t get a lot above a burble, however its inertia pressed it ahead regardless. Towards Tex-Mex guitar thrives and a beat that felt like sands shifting underfoot, Worth sang “Wild At Coronary heart” with a decent nation contralto, a twang that she used to poke when it might have simply pierced.

That was Worth all night, fired up with out ever changing into totally electrical. The ominous and gently clomping “Tennessee Music,” the gradual and resigned pleading of “Nowhere Is The place,” and the double birds she flipped after singing “He’s the president, however I don’t care” in Blaze Foley’s “Oval Room” all labored as they have been meant to and didn’t push an inch additional. In the direction of the tip of the honky-tonk speed-clomp of “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down,” Worth maneuvered round guitarist Sean Thompson’s zippy Telecaster runs to snort deeply after the road, “All of the cocaine in existence couldn’t preserve your nostril out of my enterprise,” after which blow white powder off of a paper plate gamely held out by a roadie. It was cute stage enterprise as a substitute of the biting kiss-off it was meant to be.

Even so, Worth and her band have been loads participating regardless. The clattering midtempo lope of “Don’t Wake Me Up” provided up dynamics with out indulging in drastic shifts, as a substitute ramping up and down organically like respiratory earlier than melting into cosmic expressiveness. And Worth was canny sufficient in the identical music to alter the town within the line “I can dream in a snowstorm, caught out in Bozeman” to Boston. (The blizzard, alas, didn’t want any altering.) The Beantown reference in “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down,” in the meantime, was already baked proper into the lyrics.

After leaving the stage for Ledger to sing his personal “All The Wine In California,” Worth returned in a crimson and blue sequined and fringed acrobat outfit as if she was about to leap from a really excessive platform into a really small tub, and kicked right into a ultimate run that started with George Jones’s “I Simply Don’t Give A Rattling.” She closed with Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” one other music (together with the United Farm Staff-adopted folks music “De Colores” and Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Airplane Wreck At Los Gatos)”) related to agricultural abuses.

Worth, Thompson, and Ledger sang three-part concord round a single old-timey microphone earlier than the band tore off right into a cut-time train-track roll. Worth could hate the country-music capital, however not the promise of the music itself.

With simply two acoustic guitars to fill out her sound and singing each one in every of her songs with a laid-back smile in her voice, Pearl Charles opened with an ambling tackle the ’70s-style Pacific coast folk-pop that served as hippie-hangover music.