Ashley Monroe: ‘It’s Hard for Me to Write a Happy Song’
Two days before the official release of her critically-acclaimed new album, The Blade, singer-songwriter Ashley Monroe launched her third solo LP with a glittering performance at an East Nashville club. Throughout the evening, the Tennessee-born chanteuse invited several of her Music City friends and collaborators to share the stage. Among them were Jessi Alexander, co-writer of four cuts on The Blade, Justin Davis and Sarah Zimmerman, better known as duo Striking Matches, who penned two tracks on the LP, and Vince Gill, who (as he had with Monroe’s brilliant 2013 album, Like a Rose) co-produced the disc with Justin Niebank and also wrote a cut with Monroe.
But what quickly had the room, and the Internet, buzzing was the presence of Monroe’s longtime pal Miranda Lambert, making her first stage appearance since announcing her divorce from Blake Shelton just days earlier. Although the two co-wrote the album’s stone-cold country closer, “I’m Good at Leavin'” (with Alexander), not surprisingly they chose another to perform for the show’s encore instead – Lambert’s Number One hit, “Heart Like Mine,” which the friends penned with Travis Howard. The collaboration was the most poignant example of just how powerful and cathartic both friendship and music can be.
Monroe was born in Knoxville in 1986, although the depth and maturity of her songs certainly belie her years. At 13, she faced grown-up heartache when her father died of cancer. Still in her teens, she relocated to Nashville and soon signed a music publishing deal, followed by a developmental deal with RCA Records, then a full-fledged contract with Sony Music that yielded one project, the remarkable 2006 album, Satisfied, which would go unreleased until 2009. In addition to two albums with Pistol Annies, the trio she formed with Lambert and Angaleena Presley, a Kentucky coal miner’s daughter and a gifted songwriter in her own right, Monroe released the outstanding solo LP, Like a Rose, to resounding acclaim in 2013. A few months after the album debuted, she married pro baseball player John Danks, and in 2014 had a Number One country hit, singing on Blake Shelton’s “Lonely Tonight.”
As a solo act, Monroe has yet to crack mainstream country radio’s narrow – and decidedly male-centric playlists, an unfortunate reality of the current climate and certainly not a reflection on the new album’s songs themselves. In a perfect world, “The Blade,” an absolute stunner of a tune and, surprisingly the only one Monroe didn’t have a hand in writing, would be a multi-week Number One and a CMA nominee, and other tracks on the album, in particular the clever and devastating “Bombshell” and the biting “Dixie,” would follow in its footsteps. Regardless of The Blade‘s chart accomplishments or critical praise, Monroe’s songwriting is as pure and unvarnished as her heart-piercing voice, making The Blade an instant classic, and cementing Monroe’s status as a top-flight writer and a country legend in the making.
Rolling Stone Country sat down with Monroe to talk about the songs on her Like a Rose follow-up, including one that emerged as a combination birthday/wedding gift and another that sums up her feelings about country radio. She also revealed why her manager waited a whole month before playing her “The Blade” and why she finds it challenging to write positive songs.
What do you remember about the first time music had an effect on you?
I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church with the shape note hymnals. The first time I got chills when I was singing, I’ll never forget it. We had just started going to church and the church was so small. I was the only kid in the choir because they would say, “Does anybody want to come up and sing?,” because it was that kind of church. There wasn’t a pre-selected choir. I remember singing, [sings first lines of “Have a Little Talk With Jesus”], I got chills from the very tip of my head all the way down to my toes. It caught me off guard. I was four. I remember after I got through singing with the choir I ran down to my mom and I said, “Mom I got chills.” She said, “That’s the spirit.” That’s when I first associated that you can sing the songs and have that feeling. It happens a lot now!
