2024 Women of Live: Mandelyn Monchick

Artist Manager | Red Light Management

With her unquenchable high spirits and unstoppable work ethic, Red Light Management’s Mandelyn Monchick has been helping create momentum for 2023 breakout country star Lainey Wilson since the drawling Louisiana farmer’s daughter was living in a small trailer outside an independent recording studio. If the songwriter with a strong sense of self was “too country for country music,” Monchick was determined to maximize every opportunity or chance her client was afforded.

While in an entry level job with a Nashville entertainment attorney, Monchick explains, “That’s when I met Lainey and started to help set up co-writes for her. She didn’t really have any sort of champion at the time, and I just thought she was a great songwriter with something special. From there, we were hellbent and determined to see how far we could take it.”

From a deal at Broken Bow Records, a breakout hit with “Things a Man Oughta Know,” awards by the bushel, including the prestigious Grammy for Country Album of the Year for Bell Bottom Country and the coveted Country Music Association Award for Entertainer of the Year, Wilson embodies the hopes, work ethic and dignity of working people, especially women, in a way that can only be called unflinchingly authentic.

It didn’t hurt that Wilson’s role on “Yellowstone” telegraphed a persona that paralleled her own hard-won success. But more importantly was the young manager’s commitment to keeping her artist moving forward and forging key alliances; opening stints with Jelly Roll and HARDY got her in front of the new guard of country music fan, while her duets with HARDY (“wait in the truck”) and Jelly Roll (“Save Me”) not only won awards, but showed she could hold her own with the genre’s most high-impact and format-blurring acts.

If it was step-by-step and inch-by-inch, the North Carolina State graduate didn’t care. All motion in Wilson’s case was positive. As she explains, “Keep your head down, dream big, and work small. It takes a lot of little successes to build something great. Don’t get too obsessed with the outcome.”