New Music
Interview
Mon Rovîa: “It’s about learning to take the nutrients from the things that have hurt us and move forward”
Chatting music that builds bridges across the divide with the Afro-Appalachian singer-songwriter
It’s been a long and winding road for Mon Rovîa, aka Janjay Lowe, both musically and personally. As he’s preparing for the release of his second album, Bloodline, and a UK-EU tour in January 2026, we meet over Zoom to discuss shaping his identity at the crossroads of his West African roots and the folk traditions of his current home in scenic Chattanooga, Tennessee, near the foot of the Appalachian mountains, enriching and expanding a sonic palette that emotionally connects far-flung geographies, present and past.
Born in Monrovia during Liberia’s civil war, he escaped the fate of a child soldier when he was adopted by Christian missionaries and moved to the U.S. Music, as a soul-baring outlet and source of communal healing, came much later as he dabbled in hip-hop and alternative on his 2021 debut LP Dark Continent, before setting off on a journey of self-discovery in four Acts/EPs: The Wandering, Trials, The Dying of Self, Atonement – each a step closer to the poignant, self-revealing portrait of Mon Rovîa captured on Bloodline.
With viral detours along the way – see gently rolling ballad ‘crooked the road.’ – and a little help from his bandmates Josh Durant, Sam Hudgens and Tyler Martelli in varying the dynamics on stage, Mon is laying the groundwork for his most captivating act yet.
You moved between two very different countries, cultures and realities as a child. How did you experience that transition?
Since I was somewhat young coming to the States, the language and everything was lost pretty quickly. A lot of the things that, as a child, I didn’t have words for, the feelings that were there… When I think about survivor’s guilt, for example, and the loneliness, the longing for your own culture. People underestimate how those things being stripped away, how deep that can go for children, and children don’t have the words to explain that until later. As they grow, they sense maybe they have depression, or they have these mood swings, these things that come with not having a place to go and talk about them but having to deal with them themselves, in their own ways and whatever that outlet is to them.
From a young age, I was pretty silent. I sat in a lot of sadness throughout a lot of my life, and that lent itself to depression and different things that came along the journey. It was really a lonely experience. You come into a middle class, kind of white experience in America as a Black kid. So, most of my friends were at that time white and I didn’t fit in there. There’s just this space of feeling quite empty but not having the words to express that well.
Is that when music became the language that you could express yourself in, at that age?
It’s super funny. Music wasn’t really used like that for me until much later. When I was a kid, I had fun with it with my friends, cause we made funny songs. I saw that I was able to string words together in clever ways. I was always great with rhyme schemes and thought process, but it wasn’t till probably after college that I started to use it more therapeutically and understand that. I was always into writing and reading, so I did write as an escape, and poetry, and different things always caught my attention because of the hidden meanings and feelings that linger in those words, that great poets would put out.
I didn’t live my life surrounded by, “Oh, music is gonna be the escape”. I went to school up here in Chattanooga, and I was doing English. It’s almost like the music found me and pulled me to it. I didn’t dream of this thing, “One day I wanna be a famous singer. I wanna be known for these songs that can help people”.
I suffered. So later on, after school, as I went through my own mental crisis, dealing with identity and all these things, I decided to put my heart and soul into writing these words, and writing them into music. And even then, I didn’t know it was gonna go out and touch other people like it has.
Was it around the time of Dark Continent that everything started to come together? Because the sound of that album is so different from Bloodline. How did things evolve between the two?
Dark Continent came after I had left California and had gone through this process of living back at home with my parents, and my mind was shattering. They helped heal me and bring me back into a place of being sentient, you know.
In California is when I said I wanna name myself Mon Rovîa, I want to try to help people through different things. That was 2019. We come to 2021, when Dark Continent was released, and I was still exploring. I didn’t know where my voice fit, I wasn’t playing the ukulele either. I was still kind of dancing over beats, lyrically. Because I thought, as a Black man, at the time, rap was such at the epicentre. I was like, “The only way into the space of people that are listening would be to have some beats and rhythm and try to rap a little bit through this process.”
Dark Continent isn’t really rap, it’s definitely more alternative. That was just the search, me exploring my different sounds. That project wasn’t anything that blew anybody out of the water, but it was a fun project to do with some friends. It made me start to think that, maybe, there’s more here musically for me.
Covid comes along, as we all know well, and during that process, I started to dabble on the ukulele, just because there was nothing else to do. I started to go back to what I loved, which was singer-songwriter music, and gained confidence: “I can be anything, and be in the space of folk or country. You don’t have to be a white singer to go into folk spaces.” That was the process. “Will I be laughed at by my African-American friends, or the population of African-Americans, or Africans?” Because they just do different types of music.
But, for some reason, I started to accept and write simple little melodies and songs on the ukulele. And then 2022, near the end, comes along. I start to go on TikTok. It was just me playing the ukulele for hours. Setting my phone up, playing live and people would just come onto the screen and sit and listen. All of a sudden, people started to stay. Someone’d be at work and they would have my channel on, in the kitchen cooking, or whatever their daily activities were. And the community’d start to grow from there. And it wasn’t until 2023 that it started to click to me that this is what I’m meant to be doing: it’s soothing, healing; trying to find an answer for people to sink into, to deal with the everyday extremities of life.
On ‘Old Fort Steel Trail’, out of Bloodline, you wonder if the past is a prison and it’s time to lay it to rest. In what ways was your past holding you back, and how has that changed now?
The past for me has just been one of sadness, where I thought I needed to wrap that blanket around me forever, because I deserved it. A lot of times people have these thoughts, you know it well, where things happen in your life and you have no control. Yet the human mind loves to go, “It’s still my fault for these things,” even if you don’t have a part to play. It’s an interesting trick in there.
I lost my mom when I was young. I never knew my father. The war took many people. I separated from my brother and sister, who live in Liberia. A lot of it for me, the sadness, the guilt, came from a long time living and never really giving back to the gift of my life and the opportunity to come to the States. Though it has its problems, as we all are very much aware of America, but the opportunity to go and make something, or to give something back… How much of my time I wasted trying to live this American experience, trying to be “American happy” and not deal with anything that matters.
That’s what kept me back from music. Cause all the while, music called. In the distance, the instruments, being a part of different things at school, my friends playing music when I was young. It was there, in the sun but I was afraid to walk out of the shadows towards it. Old Fort talks about laying down the past, and not to forget, because the past is super important. People have gone through some terrible things. As have I, my brothers as well. It’s about learning to take the nutrients from the things that have hurt us, and then move forward. Leave the lessons that don’t help you. Take what you can get and keep walking towards a better day. “Have I learned my lessons since then? Pierce through this veil. I’ve been digging up what’s left”.
You’re still in touch with family back in Liberia. What are your feelings about that part of your past now?
I have a connection with my sister; we talk all the time on WhatsApp. I’m able, because of the people that have lifted me to music, to help them in a great way down in Liberia. Honestly, outside of my family there, it’s beautiful as a culture and collective. Just recently, I won an award out of my country for music, which I never thought was possible. I’d never thought that they would even acknowledge my existence of being in America and still trying to raise that banner of Liberia, because of the things that have happened.
There’s always been a rift between Liberians that live in the country, and Liberians that are in America. You’re not really Liberian cause you don’t live here. So, there’s been an opening, an awakening, an awareness there of them championing me from the country, that has been more for my heart and done more for my soul than anything I think I’ll ever do. Because that’s my blood, that’s where I come from, where my mother is buried. Having the love of the people, of the land, it’s been a beautiful thing. But I wouldn’t have come to it if music didn’t take me to where it has, and I didn’t deal with some of the things that I had to.
So now, it’s all beautiful. There’s only smiles, to be honest, ear to ear!
Music, building bridges! Μuch like ‘Heavy Foot’ – you reference from guns flying off the shelf to poverty, but that song is incredibly uplifting. With tensions brewing everywhere around us, it’s a gift to be able to put your point across in such a non-confrontational way.
I love to hear that! I think the glue of that song is the chorus: “Love me now, Hold me down / And the government staying on heavy foot / And they tried to keep us all down.” Τhe main theme is togetherness. You can talk about the things that are happening in the world. When I wrote that song, all I had in the beginning was the chorus. I didn’t even know it was going to be a protest song, Ι didn’t really write it to become that. Music lent its hand later on, when I was in there with my friends, and the lyrics started to come.
We were like, “Maybe we should talk about some of these difficult things. The beat is so playful. How do we find these words but not hit it too hard at the same time?” That was an act of illumination probably from music. Because it is a very delicate mixture, you’re very right about that. The chorus being so light and lifting and reminding everybody that we’re all in this experience together.
Know who really is against you in the world. It never necessarily is the people that live your experience, your neighbour next door, those that are in your similar demographic. It’s usually those that believe that they’re beyond, that they believe themselves to be some sort of God or being that wanna control and take over. Those are the people that everybody needs to come and see and put a face to. And they try to put faces to, and things on us below, and that’s the illumination part of the song that really gives to that strength. It’s been beautiful to see the love of the people, really attached to it in different ways.
You’ve said that your music’s mission is to heal – you and others, from every nation and background, together. You must be feeling quite proud to be in place to make it happen, especially as you didn’t feel you belonged on either of the worlds you grew up in.
Being proud of myself is something I’m trying to work on. There’s always more to do, and sometimes I still feel like I fall short, as usual. Maybe that’s just an artist’s take on what they do.
But I’m very happy to be able to see others rise themselves. Really, the music that I make is just a friend to an awakening. It’s always the people doing the hard work of trying to pull themselves out of things and realise, they have the strength and they’re meant to be here. No matter what I do, it’s up to them to decide. I’m really glad to be a key to open slightly a door for them, to maybe push all the way open and see.
I still have my things, of course, that keep me up at night but, overall, it’s been out-of-this-world amazing to see the music reach the places, and the people that it has all across the world.
Can you share any stories that have really touched you, people that have resonated with what you’ve been through?
One that really touched me was ‘Whose face am I’, which is about me speaking to my parents, that I didn’t know and the questions that I had there. And so many people that were adopted were messaging me, “This is what I’ve needed. This is what I felt but didn’t have the words to say”.
‘To Watch the World Spin Without You’ is another song I think that many have attached to. So many people sit alone and really do feel distanced from the experience of the living. They sit in their rooms, they look out the window, they long to feel the grass, to bask in the sun and they don’t feel that energy. It really is a thing, and you watch the world go on and you’re not even a part of it. So that one’s been really beautiful, to see people come out and be like, “Man, your song made me go outside and realise that I can be a part of the world and that I’m supposed to be here”.
Recently, I had a message from a fan that they tried to no longer be here. They lived, and so they went to the hospital and, in the hospital, they ended up playing my music for her and she starts to understand that she wants to be here, and she writes me this message: “It’s crazy how much of my mind changed listening to the music, and how much I wanted to go out and help other people.” There’s no words, you know. Your heart could explode, for real!
