Music, Allyship, and Community with maudlyn monroe

Our friend maudlyn monroe, a Ft. Collins-based musician and longtime ally of Indigenous communities, is collaborating with the Tipi Raisers as part of their new album Heart-Shaped Rock! The single South Dakota is out today, and we're honored to amplify their music here on on our blog.

This collaboration is inspired and informed by the Indigenous wisdom of reciprocity - we get to share maudlyn monroe's moving and inspiring new song with you all, and they are donating 50% of the proceeds from the single towards our ongoing work in Native communities.

We got a chance to talk to maudlyn about their artistry, their connection with Indigenous communities, and the inspiration behind this collaboration with The Tipi Raisers.

Check out the full interview below!

Cover art for Heart-Shaped Rock by maudlyn monroe

Tell us about who maudlyn monroe is as a project.

Hi! I think first off, people get easily confused by the project name! They try to call me Maudlyn, and I should probably just accept it, and start answering! I’m kind of the whole project anyway. My last album greedy pushy needy is what I call “up-tempo emo/lackadaisical punk” project, and this album, Heart-Shaped Rock, goes back to what I call “orchestral indie folk.” 

So I’m a singer/songwriter, I’m a multi-instrumentalist, I’m a producer, and I’m a sound engineer, and I call the project maudlyn monroe because I have “so many emotions.” 

I play most of the instruments on the albums. I learned sound engineering to put these albums out. I also teach poetry, so there’s a real lyrical focus to what I do, it tends to be pretty lyrically dense. 

What's the story behind the single South Dakota?

So I grew up in Sioux Falls, and then I left for school in Vermont. My junior year, when a lot of my classmates were going abroad, my plans changed and I didn’t go abroad. Instead I applied to be a teacher’s aide on the Rosebud [reservation], this other country in my home state. They were so in need of teachers that they offered me, a 20yo with no education training, a full-time substitution position. And I took it. It was really beyond me. I had studied decolonization, African-centered mostly, and I’d grown up with some Lakota friends and my mom was on the Tribal Arts Council. So I knew the damage I did not want to do coming to the Rosebud. But I was also really unprepared for the position. And I’d never been a racial minority before, nor a cultural one. And it changed the course of my life. I found out I had a calling to teach, and I did some good work, and I made some mistakes. But it was a really hard year for me—not even a full year, I had health problems, and I had to leave early. And after that I shifted a lot of my focus afterward toward Indigenous-specific literature and history. This song is about that complicated relationship with missing home, longing for home, feeling so frustrated by the colonial realities of my colonial home, and also feeling like I didn’t have a home there anymore. 

What inspired you to collaborate with The Tipi Raisers?

I hate self-promotion. I hate it! I tend to feel self-promotion, and my music career at large, is kinda self-indulgent? But I need my music, and so I need to promote. What I don’t hate at all is mutual aid and community support. And I want my music to have meaning. I want to make music in a way that matters to communities I care about. I will shout every day about my songs, if it means that I can raise some awareness and support—and maybe even some funds—for those communities. I met Dave [when he spoke] at the Universalist Unitarian congregation where I also make music for community that matters, and I was just lucky y’all wanted to be a part of it!

What is the importance of community to you as an artist?

This is complicated and funny, because I both feel that art is central to community—and I struggle so much with community, even around my art, maybe especially around my art. It’s to do with my neurodivergence and my own trauma, but I also think it’s to do with, generally speaking, white cultures. We’re pretty fractured and individualistic. I feel kind of fractured when I hang out with my different friends and communities, like some of them don’t even know I’m an artist. My deepest relationships are with other disabled folks, and with other anti-racist folks, and with people in minority communities who need community, in this very material way, to get through the world.

In these difficult times, I even struggle with, where are the artists? I was a music major, I have an MFA in poetry, I teach writing and poetry. All the art I’ve ever studied shows me that it’s central to cultural continuity, to survivance, to resistance to oppression. And I look around me and there’s some amazing art in the world! But a lot of it is also just…entertainment? I don’t want to minimize that. I think that’s important too. We need escape and relief and joy. But when it becomes a business like this then people say “stay in your lane” and “that’s not what art is for,” like they just want you to “shut up and be entertaining,” but that’s definitely what art is for! It’s for the messy stuff. It’s for the hard times. We need places to feel our rage and our grief and our frustration and our heartache and the complicated, complicated realities of being alive in this world. 
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And when it’s a business, you have artists who stop being willing to put that complicated being human stuff, and fighting for the people who need fighting for, out on the line. This is a benefit of poetry, actually. No one expects to get paid being a poet. And my poetry classes are these oases, these glorious communities of people coming together in a truly human way. A deep-feeling, empathetic way where we feel complicated things, together. It’s not Native survivance, but it’s a kind of survival. I think the best art does that.