There is a from Sweden's now-defunct Bravalla Festival in 2014 that perfectly illustrates what's been going on with Georgia singer-songwriter Ron Pope's career. It's filmed from side stage inside a large festival tent, looking out toward the crowd.

Pope, seated at a keyboard, introduces his song 'A Drop in the Ocean' and the crowd, several thousand strong, erupts with the kind of screams and applause you'd expect from a Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber show, then proceeds to shout-sing every word. From a Kentucky singer-songwriter produced by Sturgill Simpson, to a London duo with a flair for mesmerizing harmonies It's a scene that feels miles way from the struggle and faith-testing search for purpose that Pope describes in the title track from his new album Work. The gentle acoustic number unfurls an evocative narrative that was seared in his memory well before he was leading sing-alongs in Scandinavia: cold pre-dawn days of breaking his back for an hourly wage, a teacher who was convinced he'd wind up in prison, and eventually fleeing in search of something else. He still sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, relieved that he didn't buckle when things weren't working in his favor. Sandy Bull E Pluribus Unum Zip on this page. 'I had a nightmare that I didn't do all these things, that I just gave up at any of these points along the way and decided that it was enough,' says Pope.

Listen to songs from the album Ron Pope & the Nighthawks, including 'Southern Cross', 'Ain't No Angel', 'Hell or High Water', and many more. Buy the album for $9.99.

'That's the thing that I find the most terrifying. The thing that haunts me is the idea that I could have given up at some point and I could have ended up somewhere other than where I am.' Instead, through some combination of persistence and ingenuity, Pope and his wife (who also serves as his manager) have fashioned a successful DIY operation with his Brooklyn Basement Records – an outlet for his guitar-forward Americana rock, as well as a handful of other artists. Earlier in 2017, he participated in the tribute to Aretha Franklin at Carnegie Hall, but he's been racking up victories like that one for some time.

Pope's songs like 'A Drop in the Ocean' and 'One Grain of Sand' are streaming giants, with a hundred million Spotify plays between them. Pope has been releasing albums in some form or another for nearly 15 years, initially with his band the District and now in his solo singer-songwriter iteration, a deep catalog that has proven to be a blessing in the on-demand age. 'My project is kind of tailor-made for streaming because I had put out a bunch of music and I had a number of popular-on-the-internet tunes,' he says. 'Without any global media exposure, those songs were big but they hadn't saturated the world – they hadn't reached all the people they might reach. [When] Spotify took off in Scandinavia, someone might say, 'Have you heard this song? 808 Keychain Camera Driver. ' And somebody would say, 'No' and they'd go to Spotify and they'd check that song out. And if they liked that song, they could listen to me for eight hours at that point.' Ntsys Pc 2.1.