Ron Pope Shares 'The Life in Your Years' Video

01-18-2025

(BBR) Nashville-based platinum recording artist Ron Pope has released "The Life In Your Years," the newest single and accompanying performance video from his forthcoming LP, American Man, American Music, set for release on February 14, 2025, via Brooklyn Basement Records.

"I've been traveling to play music since I was a kid, and I was never especially attached to one place-or to very many people, for that matter," Pope told Magnet Magazine in their premiere. "I felt as if I'd been specially crafted to live in constant motion. Other people got homesick on the road; I got sick of home whenever I was forced to sit still...As I've gotten older, I love to be at home," he continued. "I'm a father and a husband way before I'm anything else. Now, I go out on tour for my family and then get home to them as quickly as I can."

"The Life In Your Years," which Magnet called a "somber, reflective ballad," follows contemplative track "In The Morning With The Coffee On," heartland anthem "Mama Drove A Mustang," "I Pray I'll Be Seeing You Soon," the playful "Nobody's Gonna Make It Out Alive," "I Gotta Change (Or I'm Gonna Die)," a gut-punching commentary on the opioid epidemic, and "I'm Not The Devil (ft. Taylor Bickett)."

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."