Mon Rovîa: 2025

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Mon Rovîa's Act 4: Atonement EP, was released in the bitter chill of January, but this rising Liberian-American singer and songwriter is in the midst of a sultry summer to remember, on tour and making his Newport Folk Festival debut in July. It's gratifying to imagine this thoughtful, poetic young man, ukulele in hand, playing his incisive songs in front of a who's who of fellow musicians and appreciative fans.

The Act 4: Atonement EP is the culmination of Mon Rovîa's four-part tour de force of EPs which reflect on his life as a child, teenager and young man. He was born in Monrovia, Liberia during the first Civil War which roiled the West African nation, leaving at the age of 7 during a second Civil War with an adoptive American family of missionaries. (He still has family in Liberia.) Like many refugees who arrive in the United States seeking sanctuary and safety, Mon's past is, in his words, remains a guiding undertow of his life, although he considers Chattanooga, Tennessee to be home.

His moniker of Mon Rovîa honors the city of his birth, but his music springs from the hills, valleys, and towns of Appalachia. His songs are as gentle as a feather drifting in air, but often wrestle with complex, dark psychological and philosophical quandaries.

Mon is a storyteller on a Homeric or hero's journey of discovery and in conversation for this FUV Live session, he spoke of the trials of his life and the place of growth, healing, and atonement where he finds himself presently. We discussed present-day America, and how he felt, as a war child, watching critical government agencies for foreign aid and refugee assistance stripped of funding or shuttered.

Mon arrived at Studio A with his bandmates, guitarist Tyler Martelli and bassist Sam Hudgens, and they treated us to four beautiful songs: "crooked the road," "Rust," "Winter Wash," and a new, still-unreleased song, "Heavy Foot."

"I used to sit a lot more in pessimism and that view of the world, " said Mon Rovîa. "But the fans and their love, the changes that have come from them believing in what my team and I are trying to accomplish, has given me a lot of hope. Cemented hope, not something that's like the wind, but something truly firm, that you can walk on."

[Recorded: 2/26/25. Engineered by Jim O'Hara with Erin Merriman, Renee Majekford, abd Gwen Taylor. Produced by Meghan Suma. Videographers: Louisa Schramm, Adithi Vimalanathan, Olivia Iannaccone, Cate Dalton, Gina Slavin, and Vee Venning.]