Nashville songwriter Ron Pope humbly steps into fatherhood with new song, ‘My Wildest Dreams’

After his first child was born, Ron Pope couldn’t write songs. 

For this tenured storyteller, that’s rare. Since picking up the pen as a teenager, Pope couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t writing two or three or sometimes four songs a week. 

It’s just what he does. 

“I've always written a lot of music,” said Pope, a Georgia native living in East Nashville. “It’s part of my process. For me to get one good one, I usually have to write 10 to 15 bad ones.

“(But) I just couldn't write, you know. I was like wandering around for days, wearing pajamas.” 

Spoiler: Pope found his pen again, deciding to write about his experience of newfound fatherhood. 

The result can be heard on “My Wildest Dreams,” the first song Pope wrote after his daughter's birth. An ethereal, humbling reflection, listeners hear light guitar and piano as Pope sings, “You are not quite what I pictured you to be/ You’re better than my wildest dreams.” 

Hear the poignant ballad, streaming exclusively via The Tennessean, below. 

“It's just the simplest, most honest way that I could distill what it felt like to become a father and how powerful and experience it was to meet this person who had been an abstract idea in my mind for such a long time,” Pope said. “Your children before they're born, they're just, they're a dream. They're a hope. They're a wish. And then she's a person. 

“You're holding her, you're looking at her, you're learning about her. That was the most powerful experience my life.”

The song comes off his new full-length, “Bone Structures,” out March 6 via New York-born, Nashville-based Brooklyn Basement Records. Pope wrote the album for his daughter, a collection of songs that he said either speak directly to her to share a father-to-child life lesson.

It’s a joyous album, Pope said, but comes influenced in part by a frightening moment. Pope and his manager-wife Blair Clark, (who co-founded and manages Brooklyn Basement Records) were in the vicinity of a masked robbery while on tour in London, leaving the new parents distraught. 

The experience ignited a period of creative reflection for Pope. 

“There's nothing like having kids to make you realize how finite your amount of time on this earth is,” he said. “That's when I decided to shape the record (as) a message only to my daughter, written directly to her and to no one else. God forbid if I wasn't around when she grew up … this is like life insurance. I don't want her to have to cash this in, but, just in case, it's there. 

“I know that kind of sounds maudlin, but, honestly, the record is incredibly hopeful.” 

Pope released “Bone Structures” independently, as he’s done with most releases in his career. And independence suits him. He tours clubs, theaters and ballrooms internationally, regularly lands song placement on network television and welcomes 1.5 million monthly Spotify listeners to his songs. 

Clark runs the label, which offers services to eight artists, including blues player Matt Anderson and standout songwriter Emily Scott Robinson. 

“We're lucky like that Ron can make the music and I can figure out all the rest of the parts,” Clark said. “Not everybody has that.”

Ron Pope on tour

Ron Pope kicks off his latest tour Friday at Mercy Lounge. Tickets cost $25, music starts at 8 p.m. More information at ronpopemusic.com.