Artist Spotlight: Mon Rovîa
Mallory Wallace-Usry | October 28, 2025
Photo by Zyne Isom
Warren Wilson College (WWC) is no stranger to a peaceful protest; it’s especially no stranger to folk music. Combine them, and you’re met with Mon Rovîa, an artist who has recently gained traction for his Afro-Appalachian folk songs about love, resilience and resistance.
Born Janjay Lowe, Mon Rovîa spent the first years of his life in Monrovia, surviving the Liberian Civil War. After his mother died in childbirth, Rovîa, along with his sister and brother, was left in the care of their grandmother. Soon after, Rovîa was dropped off with a missionary family in the community, not knowing he wouldn’t see his birth family again for years.
Rovîa describes this experience in an interview with Mel Robbins.
“[My aunt] picked me up and said, ‘You’re going to go live with this family,’ so from that day on, I lived with them,” Rovîa said. “We lived through the war before we went back to the States. I don’t think I realized how much it did to my mind, being pulled from the land, the language, the similarity of people. I didn’t speak for a long time.”
Rovîa’s adopted family settled down in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he still resides today.
Having experienced such violence just to be whisked away to a completely different world before the age of seven, it makes sense that one of the themes of Rovîa’s music is acceptance of the past. Songs like “Whose Face Am I” and “City on a Hill” address the feelings of grief and confusion that come on the other side of pain.
“There’s so much more beyond the past,” Rovîa said. “You can’t let the past hold you and take you out of the world that you are meant to be a part of.”
A thread of radical hope connects all of Rovîa’s music. Floating atop gentle ukulele riffs, Rovîa sings about second chances in life and love in a lilting tone reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens and Nick Drake. Much of Rovîa’s sound comes from the intersection of African and Irish musical traditions that came together in the mountains of Appalachia.
In an interview with Solomon Pace-McCarrick for Dazed magazine, Rovîa describes what drew him to folk music.
“One reason I love folk music is that their voices were unique – I didn’t sing for a long time because people would tell me that my vocals were ‘unique’, too,” Rovîa said. “They wouldn’t say it was good [laughs]. A normal hip-hop or pop person had a clean vocal, and I wasn’t like that. I found a lot of comfort listening to different sounding vocals in folk music. It was more poetic in form, where you had to sit and listen to the lyrics over and over again to understand them.”
I discovered Rovîa in 2023 when he appeared on my feed playing his song “Garden Gate” while standing in an overgrown garden. Since then, his music has soundtracked my spring and summer seasons, and has served as a reminder of warmth when it’s freezing out, both literally and figuratively. Recently, it seems other people have started to feel the same.
Rovîa has sold out every show he headlines. His comment sections are full of people with whom his songs resonate deeply, and for good reason.
In an increasingly unstable social and political climate, it’s hard to find time for introspection. For many, Rovîa’s music taps into a gentle emotionality that is often lost in the stress of daily life. His songs are an invitation to slow down and consider what truly matters.
Amidst today’s political upheaval, I find Rovîa’s penchant for vulnerability incredibly comforting. Recently, I’ve had “To Watch the World Spin Without You” on repeat. With classes ramping up and evenings darkening, it’s easy to relate to his lyrics.
When asked about what inspires him, Rovîa mentioned the work of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
“I spend a lot of time learning about the Civil Rights movement and African Americans of that time, because a lot of the present day mirrors the past,” Rovîa said. “We’ve been afraid to look back, afraid to address the root of the issues that have lingered through time.”
Though his music is gentle, his message is loud and clear: opposition to the forces of oppression that keep people disadvantaged, opposition to capitalism, war and injustice.
“I want to be an artist that is remembered in that vein – that he said something in times when nobody said anything, that went out when everybody stayed in,” Rovîan said. “We're all embers of some history, man, we have to keep it burning.”’