Mon Rovîa

Singer, Songwriter & Storyteller

Mon Rovîa was born in Liberia, West Africa, during the first civil war, and adopted by an American family and brought to the United States.

Now based in Tennessee, the modern folk artist is known for his debut album, Bloodline, and has performed at Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits and Red Rocks, and was named one of Spotify’s Juniper Artists to Watch.

His sold-out headline tour A Place To Gather North American, across the UK and Europe, cemented Mon’s reputation as a compelling live performer and community builder. He has appeared on CBS Saturday Morning and The Kelly Clarkson Show, while NPR spotlighted his breakout single “Heavy Foot”. He also made history as the first-ever musical guest on The Mel Robbins Podcast.

Beyond music, Mon is engaged in humanitarian work, and uses his songs and shows to try and bring people together.

Tell us about yourself and your background.

My name is Mon Rovîa, I was born in Liberia, West Africa during the first civil war, adopted by a beautiful family, and brought to the United States. I’m a songwriter and a storyteller. I try to make music that listens closely to people, to memory, and to the quiet truths that we all know, but often find hard to carry.

Most of my clear memories of Monrovia, Liberia come from a trip I took in 2003 or 2004 with my father. We were there for about two and a half weeks and it was a really scary time, because there was an outbreak of war. It brought back traumatic things that maybe I had forgotten about until I went on this trip. I grew up trying to figure out how to take care of those things.

During the war, my birth family couldn’t take care of all of us. It just so happened that my adoptive parents were one of the families helping people in Monrovia. I was brought to them and ended up staying with them through that time. When I was around five I ended up being adopted. We left Liberia about a year later and ended up in Florida.

My birth mother died during childbirth. She lived a really hard life, as I’ve come to learn from my sister. It’s really amazing that I’m here at all to be honest, just because of the life she lived and the kids she had. She lost a lot of kids before me.

As I grew I had a lot of survivor’s guilt, because I didn’t take care of anything, really. As I lived in the States I assimilated and tried to forget my people and the past. I didn’t want to understand it, because of the guilt of living. My sister and brother were still in Liberia, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the gift of my life. I was tormented by that for a long time.

I think that’s why music played such an important role in my life. It was the only place I could be honest with myself: to write. I was not good at speaking my emotions at the time, but pouring them into a song, onto the sheets of paper, and thinking deeper in the silence, I started to try to piece together my own history. It was a long road to forgiveness of self and then forgiveness of others.

What does it mean to you to be truly free?

I feel truly free in the presence of my good friends, who know the darker colours of my life and choose to sit in a circle with me and try to understand me. But who also love me as if I were whole. That’s when I feel most alive; there’s no walls or barriers in the way. I’m fully seen. And in those moments, I’m light.

The darker colours are the fears, the failures, the ways I’ve hurt other people in my life. If you can sit in a circle of people, with them knowing those things, you’ve already come such a long way. It means you’re accepted; they love you not just for the goodness you bring to the earth, but also because of the trials you’ve taken on the earth. That’s really important to me, to have that with people who are close to me. It’s true freedom.

“IF I’M FEELING HEAVY, I GO OUT IN THE WOODS... OUTSIDE, JUST HEARING THE TREES AND THE CYCLE OF THINGS.”

Are empathy and listening something you are trying to inspire through your work?

It’s a dying thing, empathy. That’s what they try to take from us. The world is so connected, but we would like to think that suffering is just for some – poverty is for others, not us. It’s important to know that, no, that’s not the case. We see it in our own country more than ever, that the problems we thought were far off have now come across to where we are.

So in my work, most importantly, I want people to stay open to the possibility that we really are all in this together. With the songs and even the shows, I want people to feel connected to each other in this space. You may all have different stories and different religions, maybe you don’t agree on much, but there’s a way to live together. I try to bring that forward as much as possible.