CANCELED Ashley Monroe + Striking Matches

Kacey Musgraves might have been the headline-stealing newcomer of 2013, but for our money Ashley Monroe made an album every bit as noteworthy in Like a Rose. A sweetly thrilling, occasionally heartbreaking voice of experience to Musgraves’s clued-in innocence, Pistol Annies member Monroe teamed up with producer Vince Gill for this platterful of lived-in stories about women coping with bad economic times and worse romantic prospects, saturated with heart, humor and sunny warmth.