Long before he started packing out theatres and earning millions of listeners with his poetic folk-pop, Mon Rovîa began life in Liberia at a time when many of his country’s youngest were armed with assault rifles and forced to fight as child soldiers in a brutal civil war. After his mother died, his grandmother needed help raising his sister, brother and him, and placed him with a white missionary family from Florida. He was the only member of his family to escape the war. “That is something that weighed heavy on me as I grew,” he says. “Why was it me? Why couldn’t my siblings come, or why wasn’t it one of them?” It would be years until he knew what became of them.
Today, his stage name – he was born Janjay Lowe – is a stylised version of the Liberian capital Monrovia; his songwriting addresses his fractured identity, and the spectre of colonialism that surrounded him in Liberia and the US, applying emotional intimacy to global realities. His approach, he theorises, “starts with people trusting that you’re not afraid to be vulnerable in your own way. Then you start talking about the bigger picture.”
Of all the coffee shops in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the one Lowe chooses for our interview is in a downtown business district that appears to have cleared out for the holidays. Only a handful of patrons trickle in while we talk over mint tea on a December afternoon, and that suits him. “I don’t really like to be noticed,” he says, casually attired in a dark, plaid flannel shirt. That kind of modesty is his trademark: at his sellout shows, he avoids grand gestures and invites audiences into his clarifying calm. But despite his aversion to attention, Lowe stands out among a new generation of singer-songwriters translating TikTok fame into tangible success.
On his debut album, Bloodline, the arresting serenity of his music is in deliberate contrast to his harrowing past. Listeners have compared him to Nick Drake and Labi Siffre, cult heroes of elegant folk sensitivity. He dubbed his music Afro-Appalachian folk, having learned that a predecessor of the banjo also originated in west Africa, and enslaved musicians and their descendants helped create the string band music associated with the region he now calls home. “You just see that these things have been whitewashed over time,” he says.
Before he became Mon Rovîa, Lowe grew up in a white, American, middle-class background – radically different environment from the one into which he was born – and relied on his keen perceptiveness to acclimatise. “The real person that I am was never really shown,” he says. “I understood what it was to be the funny guy. I had friends easily.” But when he was alone with his thoughts, “that was a whole other journey of loneliness”. Deep down, he acknowledged: “I’m not OK at all, but I’m in this American space being what I need to be, the token Black guy.”
Lowe accepted his adoptive family’s evangelical Christian faith, and life revolved around church. Attending private Christian schools insulated him from much of American popular culture, although when he was in high school, the family moved to the Bahamas for mission work and he gained two foster brothers who introduced him to Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. Soon he was poring over Mumford & Sons lyrics like a seminal text. “I spent a lot of time with their songs because there was a religious aspect of struggle, and I was intrigued,” he says. When his foster brothers formed a band, he wrote eagerly, but left the lead vocals to them.
With no particular career ambitions, Lowe seized the opportunity to play football for his conservative Presbyterian college near Chattanooga. Living alone for the first time, he “was battling a lot of different things, when it comes to adoption and identity and survivor’s guilt”. And he couldn’t help but consider how entangled his experience was with the history of colonisation. Music became a way of processing his experiences. Taking his stage name was a way of symbolising his commitment to “remember my people, remember the journey and the blessing of my life, and my mother, and my siblings that I’ve not thought about in years”.
At first, he dabbled in melodic rap and digitally programmed bedroom pop. “If you’re a Black American, you gotta kind of lean that way,” he says of the race-based genre parameters by which he initially felt confined. But nothing clicked. Then he posted an acoustic clip of an original for a lark and received enthusiastic feedback from his friend – and future manager – Eric Cromartie. In a separate interview, Cromartie recalls advising him: “‘Go to TikTok, put the beats down and just go with your ukulele.’ And within three weeks, he blew up.”
In 2020, Lowe started self-releasing EPs while working everyday jobs, but in 2024 he signed with Nettwerk Music Group, the Canadian indie label that launched Sarah McLachlan’s career, and dropped the side hustles. “I didn’t think I would ever be able to put my full mind into music,” he says, “and now I get to.”
Bloodline benefited from that freedom. The call to collectively resist abuses of power in the gently galvanising Heavy Foot emerged in part from a study of leading thinkers in the American civil rights movement, including James Baldwin. Contemplating the south’s romantic distortions of the American civil war gave rise to Somewhere Down in Georgia, whose circling guitar figure, pensive vocals and naturalistic imagery feel haunted by the unreconciled traumatic history of the south. “They refuse to look at it clearly and do the things necessary to make those amends,” he says of the region. “A lot of the south lives in this place of deterioration because of that.” Despite these heavy themes, Lowe’s delivery is a gentle marvel.
He also conjures and recasts his own painful memories. Pray the Devil Back to Hell, informed by a documentary of the same name, conveys his awe at the Liberian women who ended the war. Black Cauldron traces his evolving perspective on his relationship to his mother. Though her life ended tragically early, he points out: “The story doesn’t end. She has a son who miraculously gets rescued and gets to help other people on a journey of healing.”
Plenty of pop and hip-hop artists have used voice recordings as tone-setting interludes, but on Bloodline, Lowe shares audio clips of life-altering significance. They’re excerpts of WhatsApp messages from the Liberian sister, now a mother herself, with whom he only recently reconnected. “That’s really where I’ve gleaned a lot of my own history,” he says. In the intro to his searching song Whose Face Am I, she can be heard addressing him in Kolokwa – Liberian English – as Janjay and telling him that the father he never met was Senegalese.
Soon after the album’s release, Lowe will embark on his second European tour, and he longs to return to Liberia. Bloggers there started posting about him last year, he has seen videos of Liberian musicians interpreting his songs and the Liberia music awards recently named Mon Rovîa outstanding artist of the year for 2025. “It’s been the biggest joy of my life,” he says, “to be welcomed back to a place I didn’t think I would ever be welcomed to.”
