The GRAMMY-winning, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Ashley Monroe has announced a UK/European tour in January 2019. The tour will include stops in London, Amsterdam, the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow, UK and Americana Weekend in in Oslo, Norway. Tickets are now on sale.
23/1: Amsterdam, NL – Sugar Factory
25/1: Oslo, NO – Interstate 19 (Americana Weekend)
27/1: Glasgow, UK – Saint Luke’s (Celtic Connections)
29/1: London, UK – Bush Hall – SOLD OUT
30/1: London, UK – Bush Hall
“During the writing process for Sparrow, I was inspired by a trip to the U.K. to perform for the C2C Country Festival,” explains Monroe. “The rich cultural history of the cities coupled with a romantic vibrancy provided the essence behind the song ‘Wild Love.’ I’m extremely excited to return to Europe on this tour and perform in the places from which I continue to draw inspiration for my music.”
Earlier this year Monroe released her critically-acclaimed, Dave Cobb-produced album Sparrow via Warner Music Nashville. Recently, American Songwriter premiered a live acoustic video of the song “Keys To The Kingdom” that was recorded at YouTube’s Nashville Sessions.
Sparrow, called “her most ambitious, startling and first-to-last engrossing album yet” by the Wall Street Journal, was recorded in Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A. Arriving #1 on iTunes Singer / Songwriter charts, Pitchfork said, “The Nashville singer-songwriter looks backwards to move forward on an album that filters contemporary desires and sorrows through the timeless vernacular of country.” NPR Music said, “What Monroe’s accomplished with Sparrow is both subtle and breathtaking: She’s bent her fluency in the communal languages of folk, country, gospel and pop toward powerfully personal expression. Be prepared to be swept up.”
Small, powerful and vigilant, sparrows are known to represent triumph over suffering: and that’s what each song on Ashley Monroe’s 2018 album Sparrow is about, too. Stories of rising above tragedy and seeing the light when it would have been far easier to embrace the darkness. “To me this record is about acknowledging past hurt, forgiveness and freedom to move forward,” Monroe says.
After releasing her Grammy-nominated LP The Blade in 2015, she started writing songs that realised themselves in unexpected ways – nudged loose after working through trauma and turmoil from her childhood.
Through the songs of Sparrow, produced by Dave Cobb, Monroe turns these life experiences into moody, orchestral masterpieces that explore all sides of a fully formed woman unashamed of her scars – the maternal tendencies, the childlike wonder and the sultry moments behind closed doors. She worked with some of her closest collaborators, like Brendan Benson and Waylon Payne, and recorded Sparrow with Cobb in the legendary RCA Studio A while she was pregnant with her son.
Monroe has established herself as one of Nashville’s finest songwriters, able to conjure emotion in unexpected ways and to always find the humanity just beneath the surface. Sparrow continues this tradition, tender and true, in songs that not only provided healing for herself, but healing to the listener, too. She isn’t trying to leave the past behind – she’s using it as part of her story, and to keep growing without its reins around her.
“The most terrible things that happen to you are the most beautiful songs,” she says. “That’s what I respect the most about music.”
