Having just released his debut album, Bloodlines, the singer discusses his fractured identity, survivor’s guilt and how he took solace in Mumford & Sons

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.”