Ashley Monroe brings passion, good music to World Café Wilmington
The first verse of the title track to Like a Rose, Ashley Monroe's 2013 album that announced the singer as one of the very best songwriters in Nashville, goes like this: "I was only 13 when Daddy died, Mama started drinking, and my brother just quit trying/ I'm still bouncing back, heaven only knows/ How I came out like a rose."
The first verse of the title track to Like a Rose, Ashley Monroe's 2013 album that announced the singer as one of the very best songwriters in Nashville, goes like this: "I was only 13 when Daddy died, Mama started drinking, and my brother just quit trying/ I'm still bouncing back, heaven only knows/ How I came out like a rose."
"Like a Rose" was not a strictly autobiographical song for Monroe, who headlines the World Cafe Live at the Queen in Wilmington on Friday in support of her new album, The Blade. For one thing, the song's heroine packs her bags and heads south from North Dakota, not Knoxville, Tenn., where Monroe grew up.
But the song, which was the product of a cowriting session with Guy Clark and Jon Randall, is shot through with emotional truth for the now-29-year-old Monroe, who moved to Music City with her mother when she was 15, two years after her father died of pancreatic cancer.
"Knoxville just became very different without my dad. My mom and I were grieving, and I knew we needed a change," says Monroe, speaking on the phone this week from a hotel in New York, where she was with her husband, Chicago White Sox lefthander John Danks. ("Baseball season is over," she says. "It's music season.")
Monroe was always musical, and she got her first job singing at the Smoky Mountain Barn Theater in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., when she was 11.
"My grandfather would play Eddy Arnold or Jim Reeves or Patsy Cline, and I would get this feeling deep inside my heart that I would try to explain, and couldn't. I played classical piano, and I would feel the same, or when Daddy would play the Eagles, and 'Desperado' would come on. I had this deep connection with music. Any awards show or the Opry would come on, and I would pretend I was there."
She didn't start writing songs, though, until her father got sick. "I started writing because I was so sad. These songs are coming to me, and it's making me feel better to write them. Music was a lifeline. It was the only thing that made me feel good after my daddy died. So I told my mom, 'Let's go to Nashville - what do I have to lose?' She said, 'OK.' "
While still a teenager, Monroe signed her first publishing deal. But it has been a long road since then, and though she has achieved a degree of success - she scored a No. 1 with her "Lonely Tonight" duet with Blake Shelton - her commercial fortunes have not yet been commensurate with the talents displayed on both the sterling Like a Rose and the nearly-as-good The Blade.
Working with producers Vince Gill and Justin Niebank, Monroe - who is also a member of supergroup Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley - says she has been "really lucky" that her label, Warner Bros., has allowed her artistic freedom. Not that she would be about to relinquish it if it didn't. "It's my music, and that's who I am," she says. "I won't do anything that isn't in my heart and that I don't want to do. That's just kind of the bottom line."
Despite critical success, Monroe has not made significant inroads on country radio. She would prefer not to get in the middle of the squabble that ensued earlier this year when country radio consultant Keith Hill said stations that wanted ratings success should "take the females out," calling female artists not the lettuce but "the tomatoes of our salad."
"Of course, I'm for women," Monroe says. "But I'm for Chris Stapleton, who is not a woman. I'm for Jason Isbell. I'm for Kacey [Musgraves], I'm for Brandy [Clark], I'm for Miranda, too. But I'm for good music. Whether it's male, female, or transgender, that's what I'm rooting for. I don't like every female I hear on the radio, and I don't like every male I hear on the radio. It's about music to me, more than gender."
Ashley Monroe, with Ryan Beaver, plays at 8 p.m. Friday at World Cafe Live at the Queen in Wilmington,
500 N. Market St., Wilmington. Tickets: $16. Information: 302-994-1400, queen.worldcafelive.com.
215-854-5628@delucadan