Disappointment and struggle are near certainties in the pursuit of a music career, and grief is a certainty in life, but some people draw more than their fair share. With that in mind, let’s get reacquainted with the extravagantly talented songwriter and country singer Ashley Monroe. Her beloved father succumbed to cancer when she was just coming of age. She’s lost record deals and been marginalized by country radio. She had to overcome cancer herself, amid the ennui of the pandemic and in the prime of her life. And yet in an hour of conversation, Monroe expresses zero regrets and complains not a whit.
My opinion: She ought to be much better known and have an easier time.
Her opinion: It’s all good.
“I've always known there's gonna be other avenues,” Monroe says when asked about being dropped from a record company. “Even now. I mean, maybe it's just delusion, but either way, it works in my favor to not stay down too long. I’m just like, well, there'll be something else. And honestly, there always has been. So I can kind of look back and go, okay, it always did work out one way or the other.”
She is also rich in friends and believers, and many of them helped her make her newest album Tennessee Lightning. T Bone Burnett and Marty Stuart are here. So are Brittany Spencer, Butch Walker, Karen Fairchild and Shelby Lynne. But the vision is Monore’s entirely, and it’s transfixing. The 17 songs flow by like a swift river. The hour-plus run-time is fully justified by the luxurious variety of sounds and its provocative personal journey.
“I had a little cancer thing in 2021 and then when I came out of that, I just did a lot of reflecting,” Monroe tells me. “My gut wanted to think about where I'm from. And what I kept seeing was kind of in chronological order, like the beginning of this record being where I'm from - the beginning. And then I kept seeing young love and innocence, you know, fire. And then grief, you know? And then kind of reflection. Because I think that's kind of where I was in my real life.”
Where she's from is near Knoxville, the same East Tennessee country that produced Dolly Parton, Chet Atkins, and Kenny Chesney. Her girlhood was stable and rich with family ties until her father declined fast and died from cancer when she was 13 years old. That’s when music went from a diversion to an obsession.
“I held on to that guitar I got on my 13th birthday. And I would just sit on the side of my water bed and hold that guitar like a lifeline. And I would write. I don't even remember what all. I mean, it was the only thing for a while. Then my relationship with music changed, and it became the thing that was going to get me out of that town.”
Doors opened for her on Music Row. She landed a publishing deal and joined the scrum of daily songwriting. She got a recording contract with Sony/Columbia, and then the dance with radio began. Two singles charted but didn’t crack the top 30. Her debut album was shelved and then never released until another label picked it up a few years later, launching a substantial three-album run on Warner Bros. But in the midst of that, she conspired with friend and co-writer Miranda Lambert to form Pistol Annies with indie country artist Angaleena Presley.
“I mean, us three together, it's just such a deep, like, fire bond,” you’ll hear Monroe say as she talks about the trio, which released four albums between 2011 and 2021, two of which topped the country album sales chart. “It's just kind of just undeniable.”
In this hour, Monroe talks about overcoming a profoundly disrupted coming-of-age, about working with super-producer Dave Cobb on her album Sparrow, about coming back from cancer, and about the new dimensions in sound she explored on Tennessee Lightning. “I love music so much, and I love being creative,” she says. “So I like to see that I've changed, and I've shown all sides. I think it would be so boring if everybody did the same thing all the time.”
