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Photo by Alexa King.
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Photo by Alexa King.
Up until now Ashley Monroe has spent her career on solid ground, rooted to the traditional twang of her Knoxville upbringing.
It’s worked wonders, leading to Grammy nominations as both a solo artist and a member of the sass-talking super trio Pistol Annies (with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley). But with her fifth album, Rosegold, Monroe floats off into the atmospheric ether. Leaving country behind to explore hypnotic pop for the first time, Monroe emerges like a butterfly from a chrysalis of life change. First came the birth of her son Dalton, and then the end of her major label recording deal. And now there’s nothing tying her down.
“When I got dropped by Warner Brothers it set me free,” Monroe explains, thinking back to the months after 2018’s Sparrow. “I didn’t even know I needed to be set free because they’d always been super supportive, but it’s like my wings weren’t all the way out yet. Really since I was seventeen, I’ve been on a label of some sort. So in the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking, ‘Write country’ — and I like to do that. But it’s interesting that when that got shed, something else came into the picture.” Arriving on April 30, the “something else” is a dreamy sense of wonder. Ten otherworldly tracks populate Rosegold, with Monroe letting her voice soar over melodies that shift and twist like vapor. One moment she’s talk-singing a flirtatious proposition, the next promising better days like an angelic chorus of one, and each track feels like a different dream come to life — which is very much on purpose.
Starting in 2019, Monroe would wake each morning and try to capture fragments of songs that came to her the night before. Often breezy and bathed in sonic optimism, she saw the visions as a chance to remake herself into something, well, happy. But there’s still a vaguely unsettled feel to much of the project, and it makes her evolution all the more intriguing.
Monroe has long been praised for lonesome writing that harkened back to country’s early classics. She says that’s because music was her way of unloading her soul, and after her father died of cancer when Monroe was just thirteen, that soul was often burdened with sadness. But these days there’s a new sense of light. “After I had Dalton, I shut off sadness,” she says. “All I know how to say is I got super protective of my joy because I hadn’t felt it in so long. Something caught on fire in a way, and I started hearing these melodies that I didn’t even know what they were.” Working from a closet sanctuary in her home, Monroe focused on the heat from that flame of positivity, but on Rosegold, it still often seems just out of reach. She drew inspiration from listening habits that include everything from Three 6 Mafia to Diamond Rio, and the only requirement for her new sound was that it had to give her chills — and the opening track “Siren” is a prime example. Somehow both alluring and foreboding, it draws the listener in and then seems to trap them in its melody. Monroe says it was partially informed by the mythical forest sirens of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, so that contrast makes perfect sense. But fans have likely never seen this “funky but silky” side of her before.
“I feel like that sexy part of love, I’ve never really expressed it,” she admits. Elsewhere, Monroe continues to challenge expectations — and imaginations. A more admiring kind of love is found on breathy but beat-driven “Gold,” a priceless valuation of Monroe’s husband and son. The gritty electro-blues of “Drive” feels straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film, and “Flying” drifts with the effortless ease of a windblown cloud. Each was co-produced by Monroe (another first for her), and she knows how surprising the project may end up being to longtime fans ... so surprising that she considered going incognito for it. But ultimately, that would have missed the point. “I kept writing and I was like, ‘Should I do it like Daft Punk? Should I cover my face and make this an alter ego?’” Monroe says with a laugh. “But then I was like ‘No, it’s you. One hundred percent.’” In fact, Monroe finishes on that thought, sounding prophetic on “The New Me.” Haunting and beautiful, it pulls all of the album’s elements together as she proclaims a new dawn, singing over and over that she’s “ready to love” in a virtual trance of sleek shadow pop. And for the first time, she seems to really believe it. “It all does feel a bit like a metamorphosis,” she says. “Just the entrance of love in my life, and my love of music combined with this new freedom. It was like all roads led to this.”