Sprawling offering from country A-Lister on a personal journey.
Tennessee native Ashley Monroe has been a fixture on the Nashville music scene for many years now. Starting out as a songwriter, she developed a solo career and has seen major success in the A-list country music scene. She has had many successful collaborations, perhaps most notably with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley in the no-nonsense ‘supergroup’ The Pistol Annies.
However, all this came grinding to a halt in 2021 when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. She said, “I stopped writing, I stopped hearing melodies, I stopped thinking about songs at all”. Happily, the treatment was successful and the cancer went into remission. The music came back to her, “like a flood, just this rush of inspiration”. A vision for the album that would become ‘Tennessee Lightning’ started to form. “I realised I wanted to have an album that embodied … all the different sides of me as an artist”.
‘Tennessee Lightning’ is certainly sprawling in its scope. Seventeen songs encompass new work by Monroe, and a handful of covers that she chose because “there’s so much emotion (in them)…you can feel your heart open up when you sing them”.
Certainly, there is huge promise in the opening tracks. ‘I’m Gonna Run’, originally written in 2004, has a simmering, intense groove, even though (musically) it comprises of little more than a stripped-back, moody twang guitar accompaniment by T Bone Burnett and Monroe’s voice. Sometimes you don’t need more, and it’s a striking start to the record.
It is followed by one of the standout tracks of the album as a whole, the epic ‘Risen Road’. Monroe draws on painful childhood experience, when she lost her father as a teenager, and started using her mother’s painkillers to help her deal with her own pain (“I was the pain killer queen for a while”, she notes). It is an absolute monolith of a song, with Monroe harnessing her experience to build something huge and meaningful.
At its best, ‘Tennessee Lighning’ touches these moments – the brooding ‘Magnolia’, the piano ballad ‘My Favourite Movie’, the inventive pop sheen of ‘Bitter Swisher Sweet’, the frankly delightful lullaby of ‘Moon Child’ (which can take its place alongside other classic songs of comfort such as ‘Forever Young’ or ‘Everybody Hurts’).
As a listener, there are several strands to this album that don’t always seem to mesh, though. The songs mentioned so far are strong and thematically match. However, there is a run of songs that seem to point more to mainstream pop country radio (‘Hot Rod Pie Dream’, ‘Amen Love’, ‘Moths’), which, if they have a deeper well of meaning, it is well hidden. Given that songs such as ‘Recover’, Magnolia’ and ‘Bitter Swisher Sweet’ also exhibit a pop feel, these alone might have adequately represented that part of her oeuvre more effectively.
Then there are the covers, ‘You and Me’ (Penny and the Quartet), ‘Blown Away’ (Jeff Lynne), ‘That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’ (Leonard Cohen). All are pleasant and do not detract from the album, but are they all needed?
Pruning down from these songs to a more manageable 12-13 tracks might have made a better experience for the listener and a more cohesive collection for the undoubtedly emotional journey that Monroe has been on.
Of course, how many people sit and listen to an album in its entirety these days is another question. ‘Tennessee Lightning’ is likely to tick all the boxes her existing fans enjoy, and the surfeit of songs will be a bonus. For the occasional or new listener, try ‘Risen Road’, ‘Magnolia’ and “Moon Child’ for the full range of what Monroe can deliver as a writer and performer who is not afraid to step outside the mainstream.
