Two days before she surprise-released her new album, Ashley Monroe posted an open letter to the city she has called home for most of her life. In it, she recounts notable moments in her impressive career: moving to Nashville after her father died, signing record deals, getting dropped by labels, releasing six solo albums and four with the Pistol Annies, co-writing two No. 1 country hits, and earning three Grammy nominations. This long list of accomplishments doesn’t even mention her work with the Raconteurs, her co-writes with Guy fuckin’ Clark, or that one of her records (2013’s Like a Rose) is a stone-cold classic of 2010s insurgent country. All her successes, however, mean next to nothing in Nashville: “I still feel underestimated, let down, taken for granted,” she writes, before concluding, “To my beautiful Nashville, I wish you loved me as much as I love you.”
It’s a love/hate relationship: Dear Nashville opens with a song called “I Hate Nashville,” a sentiment that’s relatable to anyone who’s ever tried to navigate the throngs of tourists outside the celebrity-branded bars on Lower Broadway or experienced the hellscape that is I-65. Monroe alludes to her professional setbacks, but she sings like it’s a devastating breakup song. And in a way, it is. Nashville is an emotionally manipulative lover: never faithful, never loyal, barely calls, and always, always deflects blame. “I hate Nashville and its stupid neon lights,” Monroe sings. “You give and break and it just takes the best years of your life.” Airing your frustrations with the music biz can be tricky: Most listeners can’t relate to industry woes the way they can relate to broken hearts, faded love, and dearly departed family (and those who can relate—like the label execs and radio programmers she’s singing about—may not ever hear these songs).
No score yet, be the first to add.
But Dear Nashville succeeds because Monroe’s songs are rueful rather than bitter, determined and occasionally defiant but never defeated. Wisely, she distinguishes between the city itself and the art made there: “Country music is the reason I’m alive,” she declares, and she holds that long u in “music” as though she’s swooning over the thought of her favorite songs and her favorite players. She shouts out Vince Gill (who co-produced Like a Rose and produced her 2015 album The Blade) along with her pedal steel player, Paul Franklin, a legend who’s played for everybody of note in Nashville and some people of no note. When she says she loves country music, she means the people and the sounds they make. Her obsessions have made her an effective co-writer who loves words for their vowels and consonants and a good producer who loves the physical reverberations of old guitars. Last year’s Tennessee Lightning was her most ambitious project to date: a double album full of solid songs and unexpected musical settings that expanded her vision of how country might sound and what it might convey.
