The song is from her upcoming August album
Three-time Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Ashley Monroe releases “Magnolia,” the latest single from her forthcoming album Tennessee Lightning due out August 8th via her label Mountainrose Sparrow. Co-written with Waylon Payne and Brendan Benson, the new single arrives with an official video shot in Muscle Shoals, Alabama directed by Erika Rock.
“Waylon Payne, Brendan Benson and I wrote this song back in 2015. It’s haunted me ever since. We were on a Bobbie Gentry train-of-thought that day… musing as to what she might be up to these days and talking about how much her music affected us. We let ourselves get deep into the Mississippi Delta. I definitely honed in on that part of my own soul. I like sleeping on sheets of satin too… but you sure can’t hide my gingham soul,” Monroe explains about the new single. “From the day we wrote this song, I saw the scenes I was singing about in my mind. And when it finally came time to shoot the video, I knew we had to go to the Delta. We didn’t have time to go all the way to Mississippi, but we went to Muscle Shoals and with a little help from our friends, we were able to create exactly what I had envisioned.”
Next month, Monroe will celebrate the tenth anniversary of her Grammy-nominated 2015 album The Blade with a one-night-only show at Nashville’s The Basement East on July 25th, where she will perform the record in its entirety. In August, she’ll celebrate the release of Tennessee Lightning with a performance at The Grand Ole Opry on August 8th before heading to the UK and Europe for a run of co-headlining shows with Fancy Hagood.
Tennessee Lightning was co-produced by Monroe with Grammy-winning producer/engineer Gena Johnson (John Prine, Jason Isbell) and features special guests T Bone Burnett, Brittney Spencer, Waylon Payne, Brendan Benson, Butch Walker, Karen Fairchild and Armand Hutton. The result is a rich, multifaceted meditation on identity, purpose, and meaning from an artist who’s learned to see herself — and the world around her — in a whole new light following a life-altering diagnosis.
