“You don’t have to do a lot of things to die,” the country singer says in a wide-ranging conversation on Nashville Now podcast
For all the talk of authenticity in country music, few artists are truly willing to go there when it comes to opening up about tough times in their lives. That’s not the case with Ashley Monroe, whose new album, the stellar Tennessee Lightning, is informed in part by what she calls her “dark years.”
The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and member of Pistol Annies reached into her most harrowing experiences when recording the 17 tracks on the album, from the death of her father when she was just 13 to past use of pain pills to her 2021 cancer diagnosis. In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Monroe reveals that she once overdosed on a combination of substances around 2010. Instead of brushing it under the rug, she’s using the tale to caution others.
“My deal was that I mixed things, and that’s the thing I want people to know now,” she tells Nashville Now. “I always tell people who are younger than me: ‘Don’t mix things. You don’t have to do a lot of things to die.’ That’s why there are so many accidental ODs. It’s not like you have to take a whole bottle of something. You can take a little Xanax, a little pain pill, and a double vodka, and you just stop breathing.”
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Monroe says she didn’t go to rehab for her pain pill use, which started after her dad died when she was 13. Instead, after the overdose in her 20s, she made a hard and fast decision. “I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to go to rehab, I’m not going to do them anymore.’ And I flushed them down the toilet,” she says. “We all have those dark years. There were a lot of good things happening, but me personally, I was just more lost than ever.”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists like songwriter Margo Price, comic Dusty Slay, and singer-guitarist Lukas Nelson.
