Ron Pope

Artist Information

RON POPE - AMERICAN MAN, AMERICAN MUSIC

For Ron Pope, the road was his ticket to a different life. From the time he was a teenager, the New Jersey-born, Georgia-raised songwriter was on tour, playing some form of rock, country, or soul with his buddies. Pope has been doing that for more than half of his life at this point, visiting every corner of this country (along with many others) in the process. That experience has come to define how he views the world: the man he’s become over the years, the musical community he’s built, the unforgiving passage of time, and the complicated truths at the heart of American life.

“I never really felt at home anywhere growing up,” he says. “For a long time, living on the road felt tailor-made for someone like me. And then I found love, grew up and developed a sense of home centered around that love. But America is a character in my personal story in a way that it might not be for other people.”

Pope gives a clear-eyed examination of that story in his new album American Man, American Music, released via his own Brooklyn Basement imprint. The follow-up to his 2023 album Inside Voices, it’s an ambitious project that uses the touchstones of his sometimes-wayward journey to ask big questions. Don't be misled by the title. He’s an American and his guitar-driven roots rock is decidedly American, but this isn't some exercise in macho bluster meant to exclude anyone. Instead, it’s a grand statement on survival, love, and resilience, along with a dawning understanding of how far a dream can take you.

In Pope’s case, that’s pretty damn far. His parents were just teenagers when he came along, and the family struggled mightily to make ends meet. That hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth upbringing shaped him in countless ways, imbuing him with a blue-collar sensibility and empathy that would stick with him well past the time when he had to wake up before school to unload semi-trucks. It would hit him like whiplash after he became a platinum-selling artist with “A Drop in the Ocean” a few years later.

At the start of Pope’s musical journey, he was just a child—scraping by and finding his way into trouble seemingly everywhere he went. He remembers that period of his life, with a mixture of nostalgia and relief, in the album-opening track “Nobody’s Gonna Make It Out Alive.” A groove-heavy, fiddle-laced rocker, the song roams from Florida’s sandy beaches to empty bars in nowhere Georgia, a blur of late nights and humiliating gigs. Pope admits it wasn’t all pretty, but concludes that you have to try to live without regrets, even if things get hairy.

“Going on the road and playing music in front of hostile crowds, it felt like what I thought living was,” he says. “When I think about that kid, it doesn't feel like me anymore. I'm looking at him from a distance, with the perspective of the grownup that I've become. I wish that kid had a little more guidance and help.”

Pope’s musician friends became a proxy family in those lean years and they all did their fair share of partying. “The Queen of Fort Payne, Alabama” is a snapshot of that time and its abundance of “Cigarette smoke, Natty light, bleach blonde girls.” “There was a big window of my life where I almost never saw any relatives but I was with my buddies every minute of every day,” Pope says. “Now that it’s a distant memory, I look back on it with real fondness. There was a simplicity to it; I didn't have any responsibilities except to try and stay alive. I love my life now but there's no denying that it's more complicated than it was back then.”

Somewhere along the way, Pope grew up without even realizing it was happening. He met his wife, and they eventually started a family. His idea of home began to change and re-center around them. Pope sings about that shift on American Man, American Music, describing a quiet moment with his wife in the gentle “In the Morning with the Coffee On,” and keeps her close to his heart in “Where You’re Kept.” But there’s heavy loss as well, as Pope recalls the devastating, delirious aftermath of his grandmother’s death with the raucous “Klonopin Zombies.” By the end of the album, he’s saying a prayer for these crucially important women in his life—his wife, daughter, mother, and grandmother—in “The Life in Your Years.”

As part of his passage into adulthood, Pope really began to wrestle with the definition of being an adult. “What’s the measure of a man,” he asks in “I’m Not the Devil,” but doesn’t try to answer it. That’s an individual interrogation, and everyone has to find out for themselves. “When I was learning to write songs, the biggest question was, ‘Who am I?’” he says. “Now I know who I am. But the question now is ‘What does that mean?’”  

In the present day, what that means for Pope is checking in on his communities, friends, and family, seeing who fell by the wayside and who’s still around. With “I Gotta Change (Or I’m Gonna Die,” Pope examines how the pharmaceutical industry has wreaked havoc on the blue-collar communities in which he grew up, depicting one man’s struggle with addiction alongside his obligation to take care of his family. “What’s a man worth if he can’t work?” Pope wonders. There’s hope here, though: his protagonist understands the stakes and finds the determination to get his life back on track.

“I've seen many honest, hardworking people fall victim to opioids,” Pope says. “The fact that no one from the pharmaceutical industry is going to jail for poisoning our country with this shit fills me with a kind of rage that I find difficult to articulate.”

Which brings us back to America. Unlike other performers who’ve tried to put a narrow definition on what it means to love America, Pope’s embrace of the place where he grew up is rooted in the idea that everyone is welcome here and that we need to keep pushing for it to be better. That view was formed over miles and years going to or from some place, trying to get his own little piece of the American dream.

“I’m so in love with the majesty of the whole thing,” he says. “I’m aware that America has failed to live up to the ideals that it was built from, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to elevate ourselves toward what those ideals are.”

If there’s an answer to Pope’s question about the measure of a man, it’s in there somewhere. It’s in that understanding that we all deserve to have a place to call home, we all deserve to have a shot at building a life here, and we all have a family, whether blood or chosen. American Man, American Music celebrates those moments in Pope’s life on the move.

“This is an ode to the life I'm living now, the journey it took me to get here and all the people I've known and loved along the way,” he says. “I'm trying to acknowledge not only that it could've been me who fell off, but it could've been any of us. We've got to appreciate the good whenever we can take a bite out of it, because it's no secret that the darkness will eventually come for us all.”