Nashville-based platinum recording artist Ron Pope will return to the UK and Ireland this week, kicking off his Neon & Glass World Tour. The tour will see Pope headlining shows in Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester and London where he will be joined by rising talent Emily Scott Robinson. Speaking on his return to the UK and Ireland, Pope shared, “some of the most exciting nights in my life have come on stages in the UK and Ireland (we’ve had some damn good times OFF stage, too). I am so excited to be headed back. See y’all soon! Expect fireworks.”
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, visiting every corner of this country (along with many others) in the process. That experience defines how he views the world: the man he’s become, 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,” Pope recalls. “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.” 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 of 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 begins to take a closer look at the struggles of his community, like swaths of blue-collar areas decimated by opioid addictions.
Through it all, Pope’s empathy comes through in the album’s open-hearted messages: we all deserve to have a place to call home, we all deserve to have a shot at building a life, and we all have a family, whether blood or chosen. “This is an ode to the life I’m living now,” Pope says, “the journey it took me to get here and all the people I’ve known and loved along the way.”
Pope is set to release his highly anticipated forthcoming album, American Man, American Music on February 14th via Brooklyn Basement Records, with the next single ‘The Life In Your Years’ to be revealed this Friday – available to pre-save here.
Image (c) Kylie Rebecca
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