“This album is a patchwork quilt of my life,” says Ashley Monroe. “It’s a big picture look at where I come from, what I’ve been through, and what I’ve learned looking back on it all.”
Recorded in the wake of Monroe’s transformative bout with cancer, Tennessee Lightning is indeed a work of deep reflection, but more than that, it’s a celebration of life and love and the enduring power of music to heal and make us whole. At 17 tracks, the album is a sprawling epic spanning the entirety of Monroe’s remarkable journey, from the innocence of childhood and the grief of loss to the thrill of romance and the joy of motherhood. Monroe teamed up once again with GRAMMY winning producer/engineer Gena Johnson (John Prine, Jason Isbell) on the wide-ranging collection, weaving together strands of country, folk, blues, soul, and dreamy bedroom pop with the help of a host of friends including Marty Stuart, T Bone Burnett, Brittney Spencer, Waylon Payne, Brendan Benson, Carter Faith, Karen Fairchild, and Armand Hutton. The result is an album as eclectic and freewheeling as Monroe herself, a rich, multifaceted meditation on identity, purpose, and meaning from an artist who’s learned to see herself—and the world around her—in a whole new light.
“I feel like I’ve emerged from these last few years with a pretty profound perspective shift,” Monroe explains. “I’ve learned to be more in the moment, to appreciate what’s right in front of me and enjoy every second I get to spend doing what I love with the people I care about.”
Born in Knoxville, TN, Monroe first arrived in Nashville a little more than 20 years ago as a teenager with a notebook full of mature, emotionally sophisticated songs that belied her young age. She picked up work behind the scenes at first, singing on sessions at Jack White’s Third Man Studios and penning tunes for the likes of Guy Clark, Carrie Underwood, Vince Gill, and Miranda Lambert, all while steadily earning a reputation as a formidable artist and performer in her own right. In 2011, Monroe and Lambert teamed up with fellow Nashville journeywoman Angaleena Presley to launch the critically acclaimed trio Pistol Annies, which would go on to top the Country Album charts, crack the Top 5 on the Billboard 200, and earn a GRAMMY nomination for Best Country Album. Monroe’s solo output was equally lauded, with NPR hailing her work as “subtle and breathtaking” and Rolling Stone praising her writing as “riveting [and] sharp-witted,” and over the course of four studio albums, she would land her own GRAMMY nomination for Best Country Album, share bills with everyone from Vince Gill to John Prine, and perform on The Tonight Show, Conan, Late Night, and The View.
Shortly after the release of 2021’s Rosegold, however, the music went quiet.
“When I got diagnosed with lymphoma and started my treatment, I stopped writing, I stopped hearing melodies, I stopped thinking about songs at all,” Monroe recalls. “Normally it’s a nonstop thing in my head, but cancer and chemo just completely put the brakes on all of that.”
For six months, Monroe focused almost exclusively on her recovery and her family as she underwent a grueling regimen of injections and transfusions. Fever and fatigue became frequent companions, but she refused to surrender to the exhaustion, instead learning to listen to her body as she complemented her traditional treatments with a host of holistic remedies.
“When I finally went into remission, I could feel the life and the music start flowing in my veins again,” she explains. “It was like a flood, just this rush of inspiration.”
Along with that inspiration came a newfound clarity and gratitude, as well as a vision for Tennessee Lightning.
“I started looking back on my life and thinking about all the people and places and experiences that made me who I am,” she explains. “I realized I wanted to have an album that embodied all of that, something that embraced all the different sides of me as an artist.”
Those sonic multitudes are plain to hear on the album, which mixes originals and covers, stripped down acoustic tracks and lush, full band arrangements, bare bones piano performances and exhilarating rockers. Album opener “I’m Gonna Run” sets the stage, with an eerie, cinematic introduction from T Bone Burnett that ebbs and flows before giving way to Monroe’s spare, hypnotic vocal. Originally written back in 2004, the song is at once beautiful and ominous, balancing desire and danger in equal measure as it ushers us into a world of conflicting emotions and messy contradictions. The bittersweet “Moth” grapples with the magnetic pull of someone whose presence only seems to cause more pain; the sweltering “Magnolia” runs from the past only to carry it every step of the way; the seductive “Bitter Swisher Sweet” finds escape in self-medication; and the rousing “Risen Road” blurs the lines between salvation and sin, with Monroe singing, “You can read the Bible / Quote it verse for verse / You can steal the pain pills / Out of mama’s purse / And get a little high on Risen Road.”
“I was the pain pill queen for a while,” Monroe recalls. “I probably started as early as 14 or 15, pretty soon after my dad died.”
While the painful loss of her father still haunts Monroe on tracks like the piercing “Recover,” Tennessee Lightning focuses for the most part on healing and connection. A lo-fi take on Penny & The Quarter’s soul classic “You and Me” celebrates the infinite endurance of true love, while the driving “Hot Rod Pipe Dream” revels in the rush of young, reckless romance, and the tender “Moon Child” pays tribute to the unbreakable bonds of motherhood. Covers of Jeff Lynne’s “Blown Away” and Leonard Cohen’s “That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” meanwhile, lay bare just how much one soul can need another.
“There’s so much emotion in those songs,” Monroe explains. “You can feel your heart open up when you sing them, and when that happens, other people’s hearts open up, too. That’s how we heal.”
In the end, that’s what Tennessee Lightning is all about: transcendence in the face of struggle, community in the face of isolation, love in the face of fear. Monroe closes out the album with a soulful rendering of “Jesus Hold My Hand,” a hymn she used to sing when she was nervous as a child, and the overwhelming emotion is palpable in her voice as she returns to it after all she’s been through.
“Let me travel in the light divine that I may see Thy blessed way,” she sings, tears welling up in her eyes. “Keep me that I may be wholly thine and sing redemption's song someday.”
It’s a full circle moment on a full circle album, but it’s not the end by any means. Ashley Monroe’s still got a lot of story left to live; Tennessee Lightning’s just one more stitch in the quilt.