The Universal Songwriter

"You have to do this every day on tour actually, to make sure you haven't lost your mind. So let's see if I can do it, okay – today is Thursday, October the 11th, my name is Ron Pope and I am in Salt Lake City, Utah. That's it – I know that I can still keep going if I know what city I'm in, what day it is and what my name is!”

You couldn't ask for a better introduction from a young man who sounds as chipper as a high school kid despite being halfway through a tour promoting Atlanta, his eighth solo album in just five years. And they've all been independent. “You know,” Pope explains, “as soon as I could pick up a pencil I started writing these little stories and poems. Then when I was in my third year of college, I joined a songwriting circle and met a lot of these incredible songwriters and they seemed to really believe in me and helped me to see that I could do this.”

He stuck at it and busked, worked as a security guard, waited on tables, just to keep making music, forming a band called The District with some of that songwriting circle, cutting three albums in two years. In 2007, a YouTube clip of A Drop In The Ocean – one version is currently sitting at almost 23 million views – brought Pope to the attention of the wider world and has gone on to feature on The Vampire Diaries and 90210 among others. The single was one of only two he'd recorded for a major label the year before. “After that, once I started to sell a lot of music, the sharks they smelled blood in the water and people who wouldn't have dreamed of signing me before, they saw that people were paying money for this song and that's all they cared about.”

With the new album, Pope says, “while each of the songs obviously stands alone I definitely wanted to create an album that felt like something that you could sit down and listen to and it was an experience, you know? I think to some extent, at this point, with it being such a 'singles economy' – the music industry – a lot of people aren't as focused on creating albums. They're, like, 'Okay, what's the next hit gonna sound like?' And when you buy a record, a lot of times it's a mixed bag.

“So I really wanted to focus on creating something that made sense or was a unit, so I locked myself in my house for a couple of weeks and wrote songs all day. That allowed me to really kind of make sure that I wasn't pulling from a different headspace; I kept myself in the same headspace, focused on just these songs and nothing else. Then when it came time for Paul [Hammer, guitar, banjo and piano] and I to produce the album, I wanted to make sure that the production felt very honest and distinctive, felt like me and nothing else.”

Pope says that lyrically, he's trying to speak on the universal human experience. “Something that will make sense to anyone, that people will get, you know? It's not just for younger people, it's not just for older people – you don't have to know me or know the characters in these songs to get them,” he explains. “That's what I'm always trying for – I wanna speak on honest and universal human themes, 'cause I think the measure of a great song, whether it's about going out and partying or a broken heart or falling in love or whatever, when you hear those songs, they're about you.”