Watch Ashley Monroe’s Cathartic ‘Bombshell’ Video

Ashley Monroe’s latest video brings to life the very idea the singer-songwriter and her co-writers, Gordie Sampson and Steve McEwan, had when they wrote “Bombshell,” one of the most quietly explosive tracks on her extraordinary LP, The Blade. In the clip, a group of actors walk up the stairs to the roof of an abandoned building, where they are shown writing personal messages on the outside of containers, including such confessions as “I have an eating disorder,” “I am homeless” and “I’m an addict.” With the singer’s help, the vessels are thrown from the roof and as they hit the ground, explode into flames, taking the memory of those various messages with them.

It’s a powerful metaphor for one of The Blade’s most emotionally charged tracks, the writing of which began with the songwriters revealing personal bombshells of their own, after McEwan chimed in with the title.

“We were talking about all the bombshells that we have dropped in life,” Monroe tells Rolling Stone Country. “But there’s no other way to get out of it but to just say it. It changes everything. Whether it’s ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ ‘I’m gay,’ ‘I’m pregnant and 15,’ ‘I got fired,’ ‘I’m leaving.’ There are so many and there are so many I haven’t even thought of. I’d never heard a song about that, about those moments where you have to change everything. I think the older I get I can appreciate that concept because there are so many bombshells I’ve had dropped on me and that I’ve had to drop.”

Although Monroe had no trouble recounting some of her personal bombshells for the sake of her art, she had to repeatedly be coaxed by the video’s director to get closer to the makeshift Molotov cocktails as they were being lit and then quickly thrown to the ground by the actors in the clip.

Monroe continues to tour in support of her third solo album, The Blade, with sold-out shows throughout November in Chicago, Nashville and Decatur, Georgia. On December 4th, she’ll play the Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.