From Liberia to Tennessee: Mon Rovîa on bridging cultures with Afro-Appalachian sound ahead of Nashville show

Yahoo

30-01-2025

Singer-songwriter Mon Rovîa straddles two worlds. For him, it's important to pay homage to both in his music.
The Chattanooga-based folk musician, born Janjay Lowe, moved to the U.S. from his home country Liberia during the country's civil war.
He had never planned for a career in music, but he felt pulled toward it as he reflected on his identity. "I decided if I was going to do music, and if anything was to happen to it, I would dedicate it back to my people," he said.
Over the past few years, he's been making waves with his Afro-Appalachian tunes after going viral on social media and gaining a loyal following.
His distinct, gentle voice and fluttery, ukulele-heartened tracks, including "crooked the road.," "City on a Hill" and "Big Love Ahead," have captivated audiences. Fans are even elevating Mon Rovîa's name up with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake and Bon Iver.
Mon Rovîa has released a series of EPs following the hero's journey, starting with 2023's "Act 1: The Wandering," and "Act 2: Trials," "Act 3: The Dying of Self" in 2024, and the last chapter, "Act 4: Atonement," on Jan. 10.
On Mon Rovîa's upcoming tour, the "Heal With Others: Appalachia Tour," he will stop in Nashville for one of his seven shows to showcase the songs that began his career.
Before hitting the stage at the Basement East for a sold-out performance on Friday, Jan. 31, Mon Rovîa sat down with The Tennessean.
Mon Rovîa was born in Liberia, West Africa during the country's first civil war and was adopted by a Christian missionary family alongside two other boys, ones who had fought in the war. Together, the new family immigrated to America around 2000.
His family relocated to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where his adopted father was the pastor of a church. They later moved to Montana, about 30 miles outside of Whitefish, and Nassau in the Bahamas before resettling in Florida, where Mon Rovîa found music. Or more aptly, music found him.
Growing up, he mostly listened to Christian music. It wasn't until high school when his family fostered two boys that the world of indie music revealed itself.
His foster brothers introduced the then 16-year-old Mon Rovîa to a new world of music, like the Fleet Foxes, Radical Face and Bon Iver. One of his foster brothers, Hunter Martinez, now plays guitar in the band Goth Babe.
"The love of music kind of was formed there," Mon Rovîa said. "It's been awesome seeing us now ... it's super cool to be on this journey of music together."
Mon Rovîa started playing guitar around that time, creating a band with his brothers called the Tribe of Shrews. Their tunes are still on Spotify for the curious internet sleuths.
But he still wasn't sold on a career in music. "I was a pretty shy kid. Still am, to be honest. But that opened the door for me to be a little bit more open to trying my hand out at singing."
Mon Rovîa left Florida and headed to Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga for college, where he studied English but found himself in the throes of depression as he tried to unpack newfound feelings about his roots.
"I felt survivor's guilt, lack of identity, the yearning for home and the yearning to understand history — my history, specifically — and the history of my people, something that I had not tapped back into at all in all these years that I was living in the states and trying to assimilate to some different culture," he said.
"It was really lonely being raised in a primarily white family, kind of middle-classish white experience, but never being fully in there. But also at the same time, not relating to the African American experience either."
Mon Rovîa felt isolated and misunderstood. "It all came to a head on Lookout Mountain."
He left school and spent some time helping his father renovate his new home in California.
"We were tearing down walls and putting up different structures — mirroring the experience I was having inward of tearing down old things alone," he said. "It's amazing to see that I needed that loneliness then to really look at the mirror, to really look at myself and break down old things."
That's when Janjay Lowe became Mon Rovîa.
He found joy in creating music again, in reconnecting with his roots through song. The music brought more clarity to Mon Rovîa about his identity. This music was for "the land, the story, the stories of others that are cast aside, that are forgotten, stories that are untold," he said. It was for home.
So he settled on the stage name in honor of the capital city of Liberia, the city Monrovia.
He still continues to return home to visit Liberia and learn his family history, and he's on track to visit again this year.
Mon Rovîa's music has the sounds of his birthplace interlaced within them, like melodies that shift suddenly within the verses, and then fall back into their original tune.
This West African music characteristic became integral in Appalachian folk music in the 1910s, Teen Vogue reported.
Mon Rovîa combines his knowledge and experience with West African music with the sounds of Appalachia, just as others have done before him — breathing new life into a cycle that constantly reinvigorates genre as a concept.
When Mon Rovîa sits down to create music, he calls it "downloading from the source."
"Most of the stuff comes out of thin air," he said. "I guess I don't really think about it too much at all. I hear the music, and that's just an open exploration of mostly self." More recently, Mon Rovîa's been turning away from his inner world to the outer world for inspiration — it's new to him.
"My writing process is poetic," he said. "I tend to not write many things until I'm in the studio, so I don't sit at home writing." He may jot down a couple lines of poetry in a moment of inspiration, and that later turns into a song.
One song on his January EP came about exactly that way. Mon Rovîa was visiting Lake Como in Italy last year and saw two swans sitting together. As he watched the birds, he jotted down the lines: "From afternoon 'til dusk / I'm loving you too much / Until desire turns to dust / Loving you 'til I rust."
A year later, the memory of the afternoon revisited him in the studio, and voilà. Add in Mon Rovîa's tranquil vocals, ambient guitar and hazy piano and the song bloomed into an introspective love story for the ages.
Now, as Mon Rovîa works to craft his debut album, perhaps similar formative moments will flood back to him in the studio.
He's not sure when his work on the record will conclude, but he is hopeful to "have something for the fans to continue the story."
Mon Rovîa will perform at The Basement East on Friday. You can learn more about him at monroviaboy.com.
Audrey Gibbs is a music journalist with The Tennessean. You can reach her at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Chattanooga's Mon Rovîa brings Afro-Appalachian sound to Nashville