‘Having Cancer Reset Me’ (Exclusive)

Ashley Monroe didn’t name her new album after one of its songs or even a lyric. So why Tennessee Lightning?

“That’s me,” the accomplished singer-songwriter, 38, pointedly tells PEOPLE.

 If the title sounds like a superhero, the Knoxville, Tennessee, native wouldn’t disagree. For the album cover, she decked herself out in a fire-red Wonder Womanly outfit, her curly hair cascading to her shoulders like a warrior’s mantle.

 In fact, she earned those curls in a very real battle. “After chemo,” she explains, “my hair came back in, unable to be straightened.”

The new album, Monroe’s sixth solo effort (out Aug. 8), is her first since her 2021 diagnosis of a rare form of blood cancer and months of grueling treatment that’s since kept her in remission. But as much as Nashville artists love to dissect their misfortunes in song, Monroe has gone in almost the opposite direction with her latest project. This is determinedly not a “cancer album” — something that she seems to telegraph with the large shiny bird on the front of her superhero outfit that looks like, for all the world, a phoenix rising.

If anything, this is Monroe’s comeback album — in the most fundamental sense — and she’s emerged more creative and passionate than ever.

“Having cancer just reset me to go live and find joy,” she says. “Gosh, life is so precious, and when you feel good, go live. Go find something that makes your day even better.”

For Monroe, that’s always been songwriting, and post-cancer, she’s given herself a whole new measure of freedom. “Basically,” she says, “I just opened my heart up and let whatever happen happen without thinking about what anyone would want.”

Ashley Monroe, “Magnolia”

Such freedom has generated a wild emotional landscape for Monroe to explore musically, her crystal voice shining the way. Tellingly, the album was recorded mostly in the dimmest light.

“I just get all the way in the spirit,” she explains about the studio environment that she and co-producer Gena Johnson create. “She knows I like to sing in the dark, so we turn off all the lights, and she’ll light candles. I sing better when I’m in a ball. It’s interesting how you feel really safe to go there.”

Where does she go? To every corner of her life: the love and romance, as reflected in her 12-year marriage to former Major League pitcher John Danks; the irreverence (which she also draws upon as one-third of country’s sassiest trio, the Pistol Annies); the grief, still felt over the father she lost, to pancreatic cancer, when she was just 13; the hope and gratitude for her “angel boy,” 8-year-old son Dalton; even the eclectic musical tastes and influences that stoke her muse, revealed in two covers of deep cuts by Leonard Cohen and Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne.

For 17 fiercely intimate tracks, Monroe is taking stock of her life. “After cancer,” she says, “I was just kind of looking back and looking at all the pieces. … This album is like a patchwork quilt, all the parts of my life.”

Cancer may have stimulated all this reflection, but it wasn’t in charge. As Monroe puts it, between the loss of her father and her own bout, “I don’t want it to be taking up any more of my life than it has already.”

Yet in the most soul-stirring way, she does let one track whisper the impact of her illness: a rendition of the old gospel song, “Jesus, Hold My Hand,” which she first learned as a little girl raised in the Baptist church. Monroe says she remembers singing it to calm herself on childhood visits to the doctor.

“I just randomly started singing it at Gena’s house one day, and she brought the mics around,” Monroe recalls. Fortuitously, organist Billy Justineau happened to be there, as well, and he jumped in to offer accompaniment. The result is achingly tender as Monroe skates on the brink of her emotions.

“It was very organic,” she says. “Something just clicked and I went. That second verse …” She sings the lilting lyrics: ‘Let me travel in the light divine / that I may see the blessed way / Keep me that I may be holy …” Her voice catches and she stops. “Like, I can’t even sing it right now!”

During the recording, she says, “something happened, and I just started bawling. I told Gena, I think this is where my PTSD lives — in the second verse!” Monroe chuckles. “I just feel this, like, humbled spirit when that verse comes around. Honestly, when you listen back to the record, you’ll be able to hear it. It was like something just was locked in there.”

Now her hope, for the entire album, is that it will find listeners who can resonate with all her emotions. “I want it to take people somewhere,” she says, “and make them feel something that they needed to feel, move them in some small way. That’s the whole point for me.”

Long ago, she says, she stopped measuring her success by the numbers, even though she has her fair share of notable benchmarks: songwriting credits for two No. 1 songs (Miranda Lambert’s “Heart Like Mine” and Jason Aldean’s “The Truth”), a chart-topping album with Pistol Annies collaborators Lambert and Angeleena Presley, a Grammy nomination for best country album for 2015’s The Blade.

Today, she measures her success by the respect that’s earned her way into the upper echelons of the Music City community — esteem that attracted a notable list of collaborators to the new album, including Vince Gill, Marty Stuart, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, Shelby Lynne, Tenille Townes, Brittney Spencer and T Bone Burnett.

“The older I get,” says Monroe, “the more I want respect more than some ‘huge fame’ success. I want people to respect my art and what I do because I stayed true to myself. Even if they don’t like it or get what I’m doing, they can’t say I’m not good at it.”

She also measures success by the number of songwriting sessions she’s entered on her calendar.

“Even if I don’t have a co-write, there’s a title that comes through every day,” she says, “so I’ll just say the faucet is on every day. Depending on the week and how busy it is, I’d say I write three to four times a week. I’m okay to write five times a week. I never, ever, ever go, ‘Oh, I have to write.’ I never do it. I’m always like, yes!”

Having such a rich creative life, she says, makes her “a better person, mom and wife.” She’s grateful that songwriting is a career that allows her to fully enjoy her family. She says she learned quickly that she wasn’t cut out for the grind of touring.

“I did a lot early on,” she says, and “it wore me out and defeated my spirit, made me hate the business and a billion other things. I feel like, the older I get, the more I’m like, shoot, do it where you like it.”

That means, to support the new album, she so far has scheduled only seven dates, including five in Great Britain and the Netherlands. “I just want to make sure I don’t wear myself down and take the joy out of it,” she says. “That’s kind of my point because I do love singing for people. I just want to make sure I’m the best version of myself when I show up.”

Ashley Monroe, “The Touch”

Meanwhile, the songwriting continues, these days mostly for other artists: “I feel like, if I have a song on my heart, then I’m supposed to be doing what I’m doing.”

She plans on releasing more of her own music one day on a deluxe version of Tennessee Lightning, which, she vows, will actually include a song by that title. It already has been written, with Shelby Lynne and Jed Hughes, but it just didn’t make this album’s final cut. Monroe reveals that Lynne is the one who gave her the nickname, the inspiration for the song.

Answering the perennial question, Monroe also vows that the Pistol Annies are still very much a part of her future plans.

“I’m always feeling the urge,” she says, “and we have so many songs that we have written that people have not heard yet. It’s always just a matter of getting us together and putting it into gear, so I’m always hopeful. But we love each other, no matter what.”