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The Pistol Annies haven’t released a studio album since 2021’s Christmas LP Hell of a Holiday, but that doesn’t mean the trio of Ashley Monroe, Angaleena Presley, and Miranda Lambert are finished making music. In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Monroe says she’s writing with both of her band members and that the group has a batch of unheard songs finished.
“We’re texting all the time. We have a lot of songs that nobody’s heard yet that we’d love for them to one day,” Monroe says. “We can’t have our last record we make be a Christmas record. Even though I love that record, we have to do one main record.”
The timing of any new album, however, is on Jesus’s time, Monroe quips: “We say, ‘Jesus is our A&R guy.’ We’ll know when.”
In the meantime, she raves about Presley and Lambert’s solo careers. “Angaleena is thriving… working on her own music. Her and I have been writing a ton,” she says. “Miranda’s been touring her butt off and is thriving in her world and her realm. I’ve written with her recently.”
As for Monroe — a.k.a. “Hippie Annie” — the Tennessee native just released her new album Tennessee Lightning, titled after another nickname she’s inherited. This one was given to her by the songwriter Shelby Lynne. “I went over to her house, a year or two ago, and she always opens her notebook and has a pencil, and she hit it and she said, ‘I wrote down Tennessee Lightning,’” she recalls. “I loved it, so we wrote it…. Then she started calling me ‘Tennessee.’… I like that as my little superhero name.”
Monroe talks about the experiences that informed Tennessee Lightning, including a harrowing 2010-era overdose on pills, in the new episode of Nashville Now.
Download and subscribe toRolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast,Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, onApple PodcastsorSpotify(or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists like songwriterMargo Price, comicDusty Slay, and singer-guitaristLukas Nelson.
