Rosegold

It’s not uncommon for seasoned artists to explore new sounds, but for Ashley Monroe, that exploration meant a complete dismantling of what she’d so far accomplished on her first four solo albums and three collaborative albums with the trio Pistol Annies. Her fifth album doesn’t eschew Monroe’s country roots so much as it looks right past them, allowing Monroe to incorporate the full spectrum of her musical influences, which include hip-hop and R&B, in ways she never has before. “I hope that people feel joy from it,” Monroe says of the album. “I hope that it takes them out of anything that they might be feeling other than joy and put them in a place of happiness.” Below, Monroe walks us through several of Rosegold’s key tracks.

“Siren”
“Aaron Raitiere, my husband, my son, our dogs, and I all went to our river house one summer, I think summer of 2019. I sit and look at the river, and the river gives me distinctive melodies. I was looking at the river thinking of the sirens singing and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the analogies of the siren woman who lures people in. But I was also thinking of my own husband, like in the lyric ‘We’ll have a wildflower garden.’ That was almost like luring someone in to make a life with you.”

“Gold”
“'Gold' was the first song Nathan Chapman and I had written in years, and it came so easily. It was really personal to me, too. Ruby is my son's birthstone. I have ‘love me tender’ tattooed on my back, and that's a line in it, too. And my husband likes Egyptian things. And I think it's kind of cool, too, that I have ‘pharaoh's face’ in the song, too.”

“Drive”
“I went in that day with Niko Moon and Mikey Reaves and I had a melody. I had that part and some of the verse melody, but no lyrics. It was my birthday. And I feel like there's always a special song that'll come through on my birthday, so it was that day that we wrote that. We wanted it to sound like it could be in a Quentin Tarantino movie. I think either Brad Pitt or Leo [DiCaprio] or Matthew McConaughey or somebody will be driving a gold Cadillac, top down, and me in the passenger seat. I feel like that's a no-brainer.”

“'Til It Breaks”
“I was partially thinking of a friend of mine who was going through kind of a dark time. I don't remember who, I don't think it was me, but somebody in there said, ‘Sometimes it doesn't come together until it breaks.’ It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how hasn't that been written before?’ It probably has, but I hadn't heard it before, so I didn't mess with it.”

The New Me
“I definitely wanted it to be at the end, because the last line of the whole album is ‘I'm alive and on fire now that I'm ready to love,’ which I feel like is the whole point of that song, and the record really, or the journey to it.”