EXCLUSIVE: Ron Pope Announces New Album for February and Premieres 'Mama Drove A Mustang'

Whether it's Alan Jackson saving up to buy a Mercury to impress a girl he's got his eye on or Johnny Cash piecing together a Cadillac from stolen factory parts one piece at a time, country music's love affair with automobiles has been collecting miles for as there's been a long open road to drive them on.

Ron Pope is no stranger to the open road. For him, the road was always his ticket out of one life into another. Pretty much ever since he was a teenager, the New Jersey-born, Georgia-raised songwriter has been out on tour.

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 on February 14th 2025. 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.

The title of the album is a nod to Ron's hardscrabble upbringing. Born to struggling teenage parents, Ron was often left in the care of relatives and regularly dealt with food insecurity. He never felt at home anywhere - until he discovered the road and the concept of "America" became a frequent character in his personal story, as he formed the idea of what "home" is.

Today, he gives us the first taste of the new album in the life affirming, steering wheel slapping heartland rock anthem 'Mama Drove a Mustang.' Evoking a very particular American landscape, the driving guitars count down the white lines of the highway as Pope reflects on the distance between adolescent dreams and adult realities.

Earnest without slipping over into sentimentality and authentic without ever sounding contrived, 'Mama Drove a Mustang' feels like a raucous descendent of the kind of punk spirited alt-country of The Replacements or Copperhead Road era Steve Earle.

"My mom was born in 1964, the same year the Ford Mustang came growling into this world," Ron Pope explained about the song. "When she was a newly minted divorcee at 25, there was only one vehicle that she could imagine herself in; the problem was, she had two kids, and that tiny sports car was a wildly impractical ride for our nascent family. Despite the reasonable objections that sensible people around her registered, when I was six and my brother was just two, she went out and saddled herself a white 1989 wild horse, the coolest car she’d ever own by a country mile."

"That car was something of a metaphor for my upbringing," he adds. "There was lots of shit we probably shouldn’t have done, but my parents were kids too, figuring it all out as they careened through their twenties occasionally bumping into the proverbial guardrails, so we often just went ahead and made the mistake, took our lumps and kept on rolling."

"I carried that 'fuck it, let it ride' attitude with me as I went out to seek fortune and fame in the bright lights. I ran long and hard with very little to show for it except an endless hangover and then, when my dreams inexplicably started coming true, I was gut-punched with the reality that none of it changed the way I felt about myself. When I’d wake up still drunk, stuck to the floor in some strange apartment or I’d find myself leaning against the bars in a New York City holding cell, that hummed true; when people started applauding me and saying I was special, that was unfathomable."

Over the course of American Man, American Music, he reckons with what it means, to him, to be a man, find love, start a family, and build a home around it. Coming back to that idea of home as a place where everyone is welcome, he takes a closer look at the struggles of his communities froma viewpoint formed over miles and years going to or from someplace, trying to get his own little piece of the American dream.

"Figuring out how to put down my bullshit and become a grownup for my own family has been a big part of my trip as a human being," he says. "The journey from scared little kid, flying down the highway in a white blur with a sometimes dangerous (if well-meaning) lunatic behind the wheel to a fairly stable grownup/father/husband/song-and-dance-man has been jarring, to say the very least. All of that’s in 'Mama Drove a Mustang' I guess. I love my mom, and she loved that ill-advised quarter-life crisis car. She’s a chill grandma now and thank God she finally quit driving like she’s trying to qualify for Daytona."

“This is an ode to the life I'm living now,” Pope says about the album it's taken from, “the journey it took me to get here and all the people I've known and loved along the way.”

"I grew up playing blues, country, classic rock, soul, and just about anything else we could think of on stage in tin-roofed road houses, honky tonks, and biker bars," he says. "I sang folk songs and old bluegrass tunes on back porches and in living rooms; I borrowed just as much from the Carter Family and the Allman Brothers as I did from Aretha and Albert King. One year, I told everyone in school that Muddy Waters was my real father; no, I am not kidding. You'll hear a little bit of all of that on this record. I learned to make music as I rumbled through the heart of America slinging my guitar at the front of a Southern Rock band; the lines between 'genres' were blurred beyond recognition and that's where what I do was truly forged. All of that is what's at the heart of this particular American man and my particular brand of American music."

Listen to 'Mama Drove A Mustang' exclusively on Holler below.

American Man, American Music is released on Brooklyn Basement Records on February 14th 2025. Presave the album here.