Brooklyn singer/songwriter, Ron Pope, touring in support of his new album, Calling Off The Dogs, plays a solo, all-ages show on Friday, June 13, at the Astor Lounge. DANIEL CONAGHAN reports.
No stranger to our shores, Ron Pope will be celebrating his new record, Calling Off The Dogs, with a fresh batch of musos on his East Coast show this month.
“I’m actually using all Sydney-based musicians as my tour band. I’ve got a crazy kind of personal connection to Australia, because one of my best friends lives in Sydney and he’s opening the tour. His name is Cam Nacson.
“When I came down in 2012 we just ran around meeting a ton of people he knew, so I kind of have this great connection with Australia through having a really good friend who lives there. Cam introduced me to Michael McGlynn who owns the Vienna People Studio in Sydney, and he’s mediating a band for me, so he found all these great musicians.”
The first single from the album, Lick My Wounds, is a sharp contrast to A Drop In The Ocean, the song that launched Pope’s solo career in 2005, and he thinks the progression is a natural step.
“I feel like if you’re gonna make the same record over and over again, there’s really no point to it,” he notes. “It’s like, ‘why not listen to the old record?’. So I always figured that if I could evolve, I would probably entertain myself more and entertain the fans more by doing something new and interesting.
“For me, Calling Off The Dogs was an adventure, I wanted everybody to hear that I was trying to search the depths of my creative ability and go into everything I understand about music and everything I understand about what it is to be a person, and try to tell those stories. It was definitely an adventure for me, writing and producing this record was really exciting.”
And even after a decade-plus in the music industry, there are still little things that can surprise Pope. “I was once walking somewhere, and my wife called me and was like, ‘you’re on TV right now!’. And I had no idea it was going to happen, so that kind of thing can occasionally happen. Friends will be somewhere and I’ll pop on the radio or something. It’s exciting to be surprised, hearing my music in people’s day-to-day lives.”
Pic: Eric Ryan Anderson
