The Sit Down with Ron Pope
Nashville-based, platinum recording artist Ron Pope has recently concluded the European leg of his “Neon and Glass World Tour” which concluded with a show at The Garage in London. Prior to the north American dates on the tour Pope is set to release his highly anticipated forthcoming album, ”American Man, American Music” on February 14th via Brooklyn Basement Records.
Once a die-hard New Yorker, Pope made a name for himself in the early days of social media with the viral success of his song, “A Drop in the Ocean” and he ultimately landed in Nashville where his songwriting and production are a natural fit for the Americana, roots, and country music communities.
For a long time, living on the road felt tailor-made for someone like Pope. It’s a long road to that state of contentment, though. “American Man, American Music” reaches back to a time of humiliating gigs in Georgia bars and long stretches making trouble with friends before the complexities of adult life started to kick in. Then Pope falls in love, gets dealt some crushing losses, and starts to take a closer look at the struggles of his community, like swaths of blue-collar areas decimated by opioid addictions. Ahead of the show in London, we spent some time with Ron where he shared more about his new record.
“American Man, American Music” where did that come from because it’s not a song title on of one of the tracks on there. Where was the inspiration to focus on the project with this title?
“Well, I think that a lot of the people who I imagine standing in front the American flag or trumpeting their Americanness are people who I think are assholes so, I don't want to surrender the idea of Americanness to bigots and any other manner of scumbags. I have lived what they call the American dream, I was born to get to teenage parents, didn't come from a goddamn thing and I used my wits, my talents, luck and chance where all kinds of other mystical shit came together and now I am here getting to do this with my life. So, I have I've lived the American dream. I was born with absolutely nothing. and here I am, traveling the world, singing songs for people, It’s a miracle in its way. So, I have loved America, America has been so good to me, but I believe that she must aspire towards the high ideals that she was founded with and we're going to fall short. People fall short all the time, but I believe that we should be looking towards those ideals as that should be our North Star and I don't think that's always happening. I don't wanna surrender the idea of Americanness to people who are pieces of shit. You can be a good person who believes in kindness, love, equity and things like that but be American and believe in America, which I do. Then, I'm a man and what does that mean to me? It's a not that because I am a man, someone else is not a man. It's just my experience as I am an American and I am a man. Now, I think a lot of people are using I am a man, and therefore you are not. No, masculinity it's different for different people. What it means for me to be a man today is something different than it meant for my grandfather and I think it's probably different to the experience for some of our future generations, our sons and our grandsons. I make American music, you know, I grew up making all manner of American music. I love country music, I love blues and there's jazz vocalists who have influenced me and there's gospel music, but I also learned a lot from hip-hop.”
Once a die-hard New Yorker, Pope made a name for himself in the early days of social media with the viral success of his song, “A Drop in the Ocean” and he ultimately landed in Nashville where his songwriting and production are a natural fit for the Americana, roots, and country music communities.
For a long time, living on the road felt tailor-made for someone like Pope. It’s a long road to that state of contentment, though. “American Man, American Music” reaches back to a time of humiliating gigs in Georgia bars and long stretches making trouble with friends before the complexities of adult life started to kick in. Then Pope falls in love, gets dealt some crushing losses, and starts to take a closer look at the struggles of his community, like swaths of blue-collar areas decimated by opioid addictions. Ahead of the show in London, we spent some time with Ron where he shared more about his new record.
“American Man, American Music” where did that come from because it’s not a song title on of one of the tracks on there. Where was the inspiration to focus on the project with this title?
“Well, I think that a lot of the people who I imagine standing in front the American flag or trumpeting their Americanness are people who I think are assholes so, I don't want to surrender the idea of Americanness to bigots and any other manner of scumbags. I have lived what they call the American dream, I was born to get to teenage parents, didn't come from a goddamn thing and I used my wits, my talents, luck and chance where all kinds of other mystical shit came together and now I am here getting to do this with my life. So, I have I've lived the American dream. I was born with absolutely nothing. and here I am, traveling the world, singing songs for people, It’s a miracle in its way. So, I have loved America, America has been so good to me, but I believe that she must aspire towards the high ideals that she was founded with and we're going to fall short. People fall short all the time, but I believe that we should be looking towards those ideals as that should be our North Star and I don't think that's always happening. I don't wanna surrender the idea of Americanness to people who are pieces of shit. You can be a good person who believes in kindness, love, equity and things like that but be American and believe in America, which I do. Then, I'm a man and what does that mean to me? It's a not that because I am a man, someone else is not a man. It's just my experience as I am an American and I am a man. Now, I think a lot of people are using I am a man, and therefore you are not. No, masculinity it's different for different people. What it means for me to be a man today is something different than it meant for my grandfather and I think it's probably different to the experience for some of our future generations, our sons and our grandsons. I make American music, you know, I grew up making all manner of American music. I love country music, I love blues and there's jazz vocalists who have influenced me and there's gospel music, but I also learned a lot from hip-hop.”
“The first music I ever bought myself was a tape from the Wu-Tang Clan before they had popped off out of the trunk of a car after they had done a radio performance and they were out in the middle of the day and there was like 100 people gathered around the trunk of this car. So, I bought a tape from them having never heard their music. I was just like they're selling tapes out of that car, something's going on. My uncle was like, why do you wanna get a tape from these people? You don't even know what the music sounds like I said, well, all those people seem to think it is very good, so I wanna know what's going on. I was like seven or eight years old and I bought a tape from Wu-Tang. So, I learned there are elements of that what I do that are all of these different facets of American music that allow me to make this stew that I'm making, this incredibly varied thing that came to be my own, it’s like my own secret recipe. Just because if I make a recording that sounds like bluegrass, that doesn't mean that hip-hop is less American. In fact, that's one of the most American forms of music. It's something that was made in America, and it's got African roots and elements of it. To me, I'm basically saying with the title of this album, that this is who I am and you're all welcome to be here in this space with me. I made this music but it’s for all of us and I don't want anyone to feel disqualified from using any of those words. If you become an American citizen today, you're just as American as I am, my family are immigrants, if you're not a native American, you're an immigrant. Everybody in America that's not a native American is basically an immigrant.”
Did you have that like a working idea to build towards for the project or was it just that everything fitted in to kind of paint that picture and the title became the best way to describe it?
“We recorded a bunch of songs and when I was going through and decided what made sense as something to create a cohesive thing, something that was a statement on its own as a group of things, so that it felt like an album and not just a random assortment of songs that we put together. I wanted it to feel like something that made sense as an album, you know, I've been making albums the whole of my career, so I would say once we finished recording, then called the herd and got down to what would be the final track list on the album, it became apparent exactly the story we were sharing and that's when I came to the title.”
I admit, I’m quite new to your music and on listening to the album which I do really like, I was thinking of how to describe it to people sonically. I hear elements similar to Shane Smith & The Saints and Dropkick Murphys in what you do, then the magic of Wikipedia tells me that you were born in New Jersey where I also get The Gaslight Anthem and the Dave Hause with The Mermaid northeastern feel too.
“I lived in New Jersey until I was eleven and then I moved to Georgia. My experience is pretty particular in that my family is from the north, but I really grew up in the south and so I wanted to make music in the south and that definitely informed what I make. I think a fascinating thing that I've found is that as people have been reviewing this album and I have started to hear from people almost none of them ever reference anyone that I have ever listened to in a big way and that’s really interesting. Shane Smith I have only heard recently because he was on Yellowstone and Tyler who made that show is such a crazy Shane Smith fan and he put all the Shane songs in there and I was like, who's this guy? I think it's really neat, like somebody referenced Steve Earle at some point in one of these things and it was an album of Steve Earle's that I was like, I actually don't know this record then I put it on it I was like, oh, I can see that. I think that's a really cool thing, like The Gaslight Anthem, for instance, I never listened to like I never had like a phase where I listen it all the time, but I know what their music sounds like and I know they are very big Bruce Springsteen fans and so am I. I was going play on a tribute to Steve Cropper once but I think it was when the pandemic came and we didn't get to do it but when you think about that sort of guitar playing, like when I was a kid, the way I learned about Steve Cropper, I was playing something that kind of sounded like Little Wing. I was messing around playing something akin to Little Wing in that general vicinity and somebody said, oh, you're doing some of those Cropper things and I was like, what's that?
Did you have that like a working idea to build towards for the project or was it just that everything fitted in to kind of paint that picture and the title became the best way to describe it?
“We recorded a bunch of songs and when I was going through and decided what made sense as something to create a cohesive thing, something that was a statement on its own as a group of things, so that it felt like an album and not just a random assortment of songs that we put together. I wanted it to feel like something that made sense as an album, you know, I've been making albums the whole of my career, so I would say once we finished recording, then called the herd and got down to what would be the final track list on the album, it became apparent exactly the story we were sharing and that's when I came to the title.”
I admit, I’m quite new to your music and on listening to the album which I do really like, I was thinking of how to describe it to people sonically. I hear elements similar to Shane Smith & The Saints and Dropkick Murphys in what you do, then the magic of Wikipedia tells me that you were born in New Jersey where I also get The Gaslight Anthem and the Dave Hause with The Mermaid northeastern feel too.
“I lived in New Jersey until I was eleven and then I moved to Georgia. My experience is pretty particular in that my family is from the north, but I really grew up in the south and so I wanted to make music in the south and that definitely informed what I make. I think a fascinating thing that I've found is that as people have been reviewing this album and I have started to hear from people almost none of them ever reference anyone that I have ever listened to in a big way and that’s really interesting. Shane Smith I have only heard recently because he was on Yellowstone and Tyler who made that show is such a crazy Shane Smith fan and he put all the Shane songs in there and I was like, who's this guy? I think it's really neat, like somebody referenced Steve Earle at some point in one of these things and it was an album of Steve Earle's that I was like, I actually don't know this record then I put it on it I was like, oh, I can see that. I think that's a really cool thing, like The Gaslight Anthem, for instance, I never listened to like I never had like a phase where I listen it all the time, but I know what their music sounds like and I know they are very big Bruce Springsteen fans and so am I. I was going play on a tribute to Steve Cropper once but I think it was when the pandemic came and we didn't get to do it but when you think about that sort of guitar playing, like when I was a kid, the way I learned about Steve Cropper, I was playing something that kind of sounded like Little Wing. I was messing around playing something akin to Little Wing in that general vicinity and somebody said, oh, you're doing some of those Cropper things and I was like, what's that?
They were like, you know, Steve Copper and I was thinking, who's that? So, I got to that style of guitar playing through Hendrix, would had obviously played on all kinds of R&B and all these things, he was a really interesting kind of rhythm guitar player in that way. Then I got to Steve Copper, then I was like listening to those Otis Redding records, Sam & Dave and all the stuff that Steve Copper played on it and it became incredibly integral part of what I make. I got a different door in and I didn't hear “Hold On I'm Coming” at first, I heard Jimi Hendrix and you know, right now so many records sound like Turnpike Troubadours. I think there are so many bands that sound like Turnpike Troubadours right now, so you could be a fan of any one of fifty different things as a kid and then all of a sudden you make records that sound like Turnpike having never listened to them. I think that's a cool thing, like I don't know, now you can access any kind of music and so many different records so I think it's cool that you hear things in this that I had have never consumed.”
To touch on a couple of the tracks on the album specifically, I like “The Queen of Fort Payne, Alabama” a lot, it's really fun and uplifting track on the record. Who was she? How did you meet her? Was it someone you and your friends met on a random night and what was it about her that made you paint her picture as a character in a song?
“Quite the opposite of that, she is my best friend from childhood’s mother. She grew up in Fort Payne, Alabama with the guys from the band Alabama. On that song, the second verse says, as our mother has become angels, my brothers we survive. So, she passed away a few years ago and a number of my closest friends have lost her mothers in the last few years and my grandma, who I was incredibly close with and who was a big part of my life, she passed away, my grandfather passed away so, my friends and I were entering this point in our lives where we aren't kids anywhere. That song is reminiscing about the summer when I turned 21 and it was a really special time, my friends and I had our first apartment together and now, when we get together, sometimes we fuck around and forget that we're not 21 and the last time I got together with these guys, my friend got so fucked up that he didn't get in the house. I showed up being like, where is he and they like, he's still on the lawn! Like, man, he's somebody's dad y'all can't treat him like he's got to be careful for them now, he's too old. You get together with your childhood friends and you think you're a kid again so, that song touches on that summer, but talks about where my friends and I are now. We’re raising up our own babies and we're husbands and fathers so it starts long before she was a mother or a lawyer or a wife, you know, like some of our friends, girls we were hanging out with and in my like little gang of kids at that point, you know, now they're all grown up ladies and we're grown up guys. We all have husbands, wives and children, some of them are, on their second husband or second wife, and they’ve got a bunch of kids and important jobs. I like how a song like that can feel sweet and uplifting where the actual content of the song is really about some pretty emotional stuff when you’re looking back on your youth after it is gone and how that makes you feel.”
I like the fact you kind of bookended the record where you've got you start off with “Nobody’s Gonna Make It Out Alive” which is a fact and then you end with this really strong and powerful message in the last song of how living is not about the years in your life, but “The Life In Your Years”. When you were piecing it together, was that a big part of the order of the songs to have a defined beginning and end of life as a story in that way?
“Yeah, to some extent, the idea of this whole thing, "Nobody’s Gonna Make It Out Alive" is a story, I'm young, I just set out on the road and this is when we were ducking boyfriends and having to threaten promoters, you know, if they didn't pay us, we were going to bust up the place because at least in jail they'd feed us, you know that kind of shit. That's the beginnings of a quote unquote career in music. It's the Wild West you have got to go out and try to figure out how to survive, knowing that in the end, nobody is going to make it out alive. It's the only thing I really have learned through a whole lifetime of moving through this world and by the end, I'm an adult in "The Life In Your Years". I'm singing to my mother, to my daughter, to my wife and I'm talking about how I've taken this journey and I have grown up, I want to be the man that all these people need me to be and that I have promised to try to be and I am grateful that I have so far had such a beautiful life. I understand our time is so limited and I want to tell the people who love me that I have appreciated the time that I have been given and I hope to have more, but when we run out of that time I want them to know that I have done my best for them and that when I am away from them, I always wish that I was with them and that despite all the ways that I have failed, I really have done my best."
AMERICAN MAN, AMERICAN MUSIC TRACKLIST
1. Nobody's Gonna Make It Out Alive
2. I Gotta Change (Or I'm Gonna Die)
3. Klonopin Zombies
4. In The Morning With The Coffee On
5. I Pray I'll Be Seeing You Soon
6. The Queen of Fort Payne, Alabama
7. I'm Not The Devil
8. Mama Drove A Mustang
9. Where You're Kept
10. The Life In Your Years
The new album “American Man, American Music” from Ron Pope will be released on February 14th via Brooklyn Basement Records and is available to pre-save HERE.
The “Neon and Glass World Tour” continues with the North American leg starting in St. Louis, Missouri on February 20th and you can full dates along with ticket details on his WEBSITE whilst you can keep up to date with all that Ron is up to on INSTAGRAM TIKTOK X & FACEBOOK.
To touch on a couple of the tracks on the album specifically, I like “The Queen of Fort Payne, Alabama” a lot, it's really fun and uplifting track on the record. Who was she? How did you meet her? Was it someone you and your friends met on a random night and what was it about her that made you paint her picture as a character in a song?
“Quite the opposite of that, she is my best friend from childhood’s mother. She grew up in Fort Payne, Alabama with the guys from the band Alabama. On that song, the second verse says, as our mother has become angels, my brothers we survive. So, she passed away a few years ago and a number of my closest friends have lost her mothers in the last few years and my grandma, who I was incredibly close with and who was a big part of my life, she passed away, my grandfather passed away so, my friends and I were entering this point in our lives where we aren't kids anywhere. That song is reminiscing about the summer when I turned 21 and it was a really special time, my friends and I had our first apartment together and now, when we get together, sometimes we fuck around and forget that we're not 21 and the last time I got together with these guys, my friend got so fucked up that he didn't get in the house. I showed up being like, where is he and they like, he's still on the lawn! Like, man, he's somebody's dad y'all can't treat him like he's got to be careful for them now, he's too old. You get together with your childhood friends and you think you're a kid again so, that song touches on that summer, but talks about where my friends and I are now. We’re raising up our own babies and we're husbands and fathers so it starts long before she was a mother or a lawyer or a wife, you know, like some of our friends, girls we were hanging out with and in my like little gang of kids at that point, you know, now they're all grown up ladies and we're grown up guys. We all have husbands, wives and children, some of them are, on their second husband or second wife, and they’ve got a bunch of kids and important jobs. I like how a song like that can feel sweet and uplifting where the actual content of the song is really about some pretty emotional stuff when you’re looking back on your youth after it is gone and how that makes you feel.”
I like the fact you kind of bookended the record where you've got you start off with “Nobody’s Gonna Make It Out Alive” which is a fact and then you end with this really strong and powerful message in the last song of how living is not about the years in your life, but “The Life In Your Years”. When you were piecing it together, was that a big part of the order of the songs to have a defined beginning and end of life as a story in that way?
“Yeah, to some extent, the idea of this whole thing, "Nobody’s Gonna Make It Out Alive" is a story, I'm young, I just set out on the road and this is when we were ducking boyfriends and having to threaten promoters, you know, if they didn't pay us, we were going to bust up the place because at least in jail they'd feed us, you know that kind of shit. That's the beginnings of a quote unquote career in music. It's the Wild West you have got to go out and try to figure out how to survive, knowing that in the end, nobody is going to make it out alive. It's the only thing I really have learned through a whole lifetime of moving through this world and by the end, I'm an adult in "The Life In Your Years". I'm singing to my mother, to my daughter, to my wife and I'm talking about how I've taken this journey and I have grown up, I want to be the man that all these people need me to be and that I have promised to try to be and I am grateful that I have so far had such a beautiful life. I understand our time is so limited and I want to tell the people who love me that I have appreciated the time that I have been given and I hope to have more, but when we run out of that time I want them to know that I have done my best for them and that when I am away from them, I always wish that I was with them and that despite all the ways that I have failed, I really have done my best."
AMERICAN MAN, AMERICAN MUSIC TRACKLIST
1. Nobody's Gonna Make It Out Alive
2. I Gotta Change (Or I'm Gonna Die)
3. Klonopin Zombies
4. In The Morning With The Coffee On
5. I Pray I'll Be Seeing You Soon
6. The Queen of Fort Payne, Alabama
7. I'm Not The Devil
8. Mama Drove A Mustang
9. Where You're Kept
10. The Life In Your Years
The new album “American Man, American Music” from Ron Pope will be released on February 14th via Brooklyn Basement Records and is available to pre-save HERE.
The “Neon and Glass World Tour” continues with the North American leg starting in St. Louis, Missouri on February 20th and you can full dates along with ticket details on his WEBSITE whilst you can keep up to date with all that Ron is up to on INSTAGRAM TIKTOK X & FACEBOOK.