Simon RushworthAshley Monroe — Dear Nashville (Mountainrose Sparrow)
It’s tough making your voice heard in Nashville.
Tougher still if you’re a woman.
And tougher again if you trade in blunt honesty and industry-disrupting narratives.
Some might say Ashley Monroe’s love/hate letter to her adopted home town is brave.
Others might brand it bordering on the foolhardy.
Sure, it’s bound to create some discomfort amongst the blinkered suits on Demonbreun Street.
An introspective eight-track concept album might even cause a few of Monroe’s Opry-hopping peers to take a long, hard look at themselves.
But if — at the very least — it adds fuel to the fire of a much-needed conversation then it’s job done by a multi-talented singer songwriter with opinions to burn.
Dear Nashville is the voice of an addict admitting there’s no way out.
You can imagine Monroe taking her seat at a weekly meeting of Music City Anonymous and confessing her habit’s only getting worse.
You see, Nashville’s lure runs deep where the architect of 2025’s stirring Tennessee Lightning is concerned.
Country music’s city of dreams has been incredibly good — and painfully bad — to Monroe over the years.
And while she can’t walk away from the place that might still make or break her, this is the compelling manifesto of a resilient artist walking head first towards her uncomfortable truth.
Dear Nashville’s one of the most thought-provoking, powerful and passionate records you’ll hear all year.
Why hate Nashville?
Piercing opener I Hate Nashville does what it says on the tin.
Kinda.
On the one hand railing against everything that’s artificial, overstated and out of reach, it’s also a heartbreaking admission of complicity.
Monroe explains how ‘everybody tells you the next big thing’ and how Music City’s music business ‘takes the best years of your life’.
And yet, here she is, almost 25 years later, still living the fabled dream.
Monroe’s not looking for sympathy, by the way. This concept piece isn’t meant to elicit pity.
Hell, she knows better than most that there are hundreds more wannabe Lainey Wilsons far worse off than her — hiding behind Broadway’s bright lights, juggling three jobs, struggling to pay the bills and blindly believing in that one big break.
But one of country music’s most relevant outliers has the life experience and the new-found confidence to tell it like it is. Warts and all.
What Are We’s spoken word intro. is sensational. What follows is one of Monroe’s finest moments as a modern-day storyteller. And it’s a high bar.
Then there’s the perfectly pitched, set-closing ballad Quittin’. In fewer than three minutes Monroe manages to say it all, one more time.
That addiction rears its ugly head as the sweetest of vocals — its disarmingly charming — is juxtaposed with the most honest lyrics here.
‘You’re the tunnel that I go down’ admits a seemingly helpless Monroe as she confesses to venturing further into the Music City abyss.
There may be no way out of Nashville. But at least Monroe’s found a way to escape the façade.
Main image credit: Becky Fluke
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