Narrowing down a track list is a hard task for any artist, but it’s especially difficult when you’re choosing from the past 100 years of music history.
That’s exactly what Asher Monroe had to do for his new album, Songs of the Century, which dropped last month. “I’ve been lately saving a lot of music in decade form, in terms of the music that I like,” Monroe, 35, exclusively told Us Weekly, explaining that “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz “sparked the whole idea” to do a covers album highlighting one track from each decade. “My homework assignment was to really go through each decade starting with the ’30s.”
While Monroe is an established singer-songwriter, reality TV fans may recognize him from his brief turn on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. His fiancée is Diana Jenkins, who appeared in season 12 of the Bravo series. The couple share daughters Eliyanah, 3, and Elodie, 7 months. (Diana, 51, also shares son Innis and daughter Eneya with ex-husband Roger Jenkins.)
For the 1980s, Monroe chose Culture Club’s “Victims” — a great track, but not the first song that comes to mind when thinking about Culture Club. “The ’80s gave me the most challenge because on the nose, there’s so many huge, classic, big, power ballads,” he explained ahead of Us Weekly’s exclusive premiere of his “Victims” music video. “[‘Victims’] spoke to me the most in terms of its message, and then also the challenge of maybe modernizing it, which we tried to do. And that was always my goal with this whole album, was to keep the authenticity of these original, classic, iconic songs, but also give a little bit of a modernized spin on it.”
Monroe added that “Victims” went from being his “least favorite” song choice to being one of his top tracks on the album. “You just never know with music you know where it’s gonna go until you really get to the bitter end,” he explained.
Culture Club frontman Boy George approves of Monroe’s cover, calling it “touching and delicate” and praising Monroe’s “sweet” vocals. “It was honestly such a huge honor to have him give his two cents and praise to this song,” Monroe told Us. “It just really meant the world because you want to do justice to the music. … So, it was just a wonderful thing to hear from him regarding his music, his baby.”
Monroe says the whole family are big music fans — especially Eliyanah, who wakes up and immediately starts requesting her favorite songs. “Her maturity in music is kind of growing,” he told Us of the toddler. “She’ll go from little kid Kidz Bop stuff to she wants to hear ‘We Will Rock You’ by Queen. I’m like, ‘Where did that come from?’ But she loves it, and it’s on her playlist.”
As a longtime music fan himself, Monroe admitted that he sometimes tires of hearing the same songs over and over at Eliyanah’s request, so they’ve come up with a solution. “Our negotiation is you get to play one of your songs, and then Daddy will play a new song that you’ve never heard,” he explained. “And of course, I try to cater music that I think she would like, but that’s been our game. So she’ll have to listen to something I play, then she plays hers. And it’s kind of a fun game. And then eventually, sometimes we fall onto new songs by that game. And then she’ll be like, ‘Oh, I like this one.’”
While Monroe and his family only appeared on one season of RHOBH, he says he wouldn’t rule out a return to reality TV — with one major change.
“I’m so glad that I did it,” he explained to Us. “But if I were to do it again, I would want to do it with more creative control. Because that’s the one thing that I feel like we didn’t get. You’re on someone else’s network. The producers half the time aren’t really working on your behalf. Some are, you’re trying to figure so much out, and there’s good and bad, right? We’ve talked about it even as a joke in our family life and how we travel with the chef and we have multiple different languages going on at one time. We have so many characters that live in this house, we’re always flying around multiple places in the world and we’ve always thought, like, ‘Oh, my God, we just wish there was a camera rolling to follow our crazy, nutty, wild, fantastic life.’ That would probably be the only way I’d be open to it, if we really had the creative control to do what we wanted to do.”
Songs of the Century is out now.