Singer-songwriter Ron Pope will be back in Pittsburgh on Saturday, and it should be a more pleasant time than his most recent, albeit unintentional, stay.

Pope joined several artists on Feb. 16 in Morgantown, W.Va., to record an episode of “Mountain Stage” for NPR radio stations, but weather conditions axed his original flight home from Pittsburgh to Nashville.

“There was a snowstorm and a bunch of crazy wind, and so we got to Pittsburgh and our connection home got canceled,” Pope said last week. “We ended up having to fly to Dallas and then from Dallas to Nashville. We ended up hanging out at the airport from about eight in the morning until about four in the afternoon or so. … It was a bit of a ride, but we made a nice day of it at the Pittsburgh airport.”

This time back in the area, Pope is playing Mr. Smalls Theatre on Saturday as a part of his Neon and Glass world tour, with Andrea Von Kampen opening. His new album, “American Man, American Music,” just came out on Feb. 14 on his own label, Brooklyn Basement Records, with a mix of songs ranging from Southern rock to “back-porch bluegrass.”

“I would say this is a pretty good estimation or approximation of what my music sounds like in my head right now,” he said, “which I guess really all you can hope to do as an artist is figure out what it is you want to make in any given moment, what you want it to sound like and then hope that you can translate that into something that you can create in the world and other people can hear because otherwise it just lives between your ears.”

Pope, who first shot to fame on the Internet with an early viral hit, “A Drop in the Ocean,” in 2007, will be bringing a smaller group instead of his usual “pretty gigantic” band.

“For this tour, I wanted to try something that sort of bridged the gap between the solo shows and the big ensemble. I put together this really incredible quartet where everyone is a multi-instrumentalist, everybody sings,” he said. “So you get the big dynamic stuff that comes from the larger band. We have songs where there’s drums and electric bass and electric guitar, and they feel really big and full. And there’s other really delicate arrangements where we’re all playing acoustic instruments around a single microphone. It kind of gives you the full breadth of what I do, but with less people than are usually in my band.”

In a phone call from Nashville, Pope discussed the meaning behind a few of the new songs, the impact of “A Drop in the Ocean” on his career and harnessing social media:

With a song like “The Life in Your Years,” does that show off your changing priorities as you get older?

Certainly. I went out on the road when I was a kid. I’ve been touring pretty much the whole of my life and when I was young and I started, it felt easy and natural for me to be on the road. I didn’t feel bound to any particular place. I didn’t have a real sense of home. I’m from New Jersey, and then I moved to Georgia when I was 11 and I spent the rest of my time growing up there. So I never really felt like that sense of place that makes some people yearn for home.

And then I met my wife, and that’s changed everything. Now I feel that gravity, that pull of home, and we have a little girl, she’s six years old. And so increasingly I feel more and more of a sense of home surrounding my family. When I’m on the road, I do feel that pull, the pull of my people and the place where I’m supposed to be. So “The Life in Your Years” is kind of a prayer that I wrote for my family while I was away to tell them that I’m always on my way home to them. I’m always pointed in that direction.

And also to say that I am proud of the life that I’m living. I didn’t expect to end up where I am. I’m a blue-collar kid from a very regular family. The idea that I would go out and write songs that people would sing all over the world, that would be as crazy as saying I was going to become an astronaut or cure cancer. It just didn’t feel realistic. But that happened for me, and so I’m very grateful for my family allowing me to have the latitude to go out and chase this dream and pursue making music, so all of that is baked in there. It’s just a reminder to my wife, my daughter, my mother, all the people that I love, that I’m always on my way home.

You mentioned your wife and she’s obviously an inspiration for a lot of your songs. Does she ever say enough, write a song about something else?

Well, on this album there’s a pretty broad assortment of topics within the music. There’s songs about my relationship with my wife, which has been an ongoing topic running through all of my solo albums since I started as a solo artist. It happened to be right when I started to date my wife that I was in the midst of writing what would become my first solo album, “Daylight.” And so from that moment all the way through to today, there is this through-line following the journey of our lives from being two kids, figuring out what we meant to each other and where the journey is going to take us, all the way to today where we are married — and we have been married for many years — and we have a child, and we’ve lived half of our lives next to each other and intertwined with each other.

But on this album, there are songs about my beginnings as a guitar player and a songwriter heading out on the road with my friends and traveling, and it’s just coming of age and trying to figure out who I am in the world and how I can share my music with people. I think in the beginning when you head out on the road, you just know that you want to play music. I just wanted to be a guitar player in a band. I wanted to sing my songs and so you start out like everybody does. You go into a bar and you’re playing songs for people who don’t care, and so there’s moments of that on this album, like “Nobody’s Gonna Make It Out Alive.”

“Mama Drove a Mustang” is another one of those where I’m trying to figure it out. So there’s songs about that part of my life. And “The Queen of Fort Payne, Alabama,” that chorus talks about the point in my life where I was in a band already, but I didn’t know that I would go out and try to make it. I was just making music because I was hanging out with my friends and it was something that we did because we love to play music. And all of those songs kind of transition into the part of the story that is the life that I’m living now. So it’s a little bit of everything.

I’m the main character in all the songs on this album, except for one. There’s a song called “I Gotta Change (Or I’m Gonna Die),” and I wanted to write a song about the opioid crisis, from the perspective of my friends that are in recovery, because I was furious and I wanted to write an angry song pointed at the drug companies. But I realized that anger is not at the center of the story. Hope is at the center of it. Everybody that I know that’s in recovery is so hopeful. So I wanted to write something that honored the journey of those people and took my own ego out of it, because it’s not my story to tell. So there’s a little bit of a lot of things sprinkled in this record in terms of narrative.

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When you tell the stories behind the songs, do you think that creates a better opportunity for the listener to understand what you’re trying to express?

I don’t know that it really matters what an artist is trying to do, because art is so subjective. So if you hear a song or you look at a painting, if it feels like it’s about your mother, it’s about your mother for you. It doesn’t matter if I made it and I think that it’s about my daughter, or I think it’s about a journey that I took when I was a little boy, it doesn’t really matter that it means that to me, because your experience with it is so personal. And so I tell the stories behind the songs because I think some people are interested in them and hearing me talk about them is part of how they experience music.

But I would say, once you hear the music, it’s yours. It’s about you. I made it for me, but I put it out into the world to connect with other people. And so I want it to feel like it’s about whatever you want it to be about. And the best experiences that I have had with my music going out into the world, those songs, they’ve found people and then those people have really stuck their own meaning to it. And so songs that I’ve written that’re about my heart getting broken, some people use them as the first dance song at their wedding and songs I’ve written about falling in love, people have played at their grandmother’s funerals. It is a wild experience to make something, and it means one thing to you, and then individual people out in the world take it and they make it mean a whole bunch of other things. So that’s one of my favorite parts about releasing the music is seeing what meaning other people will tag onto it.

With “A Drop in the Ocean,” how are you still feeling the impact from that song all these years later?

When you’re a little kid and you start making music, you dream about one day growing up and making a hit record. And when you do it, it is surreal. It is terrifying at points. It is funny. It can be embarrassing. It can be uplifting because before that moment in my life, people didn’t have any notion of what I was creating. And so it didn’t mean anything to them when you said my name. And so I could make anything with no judgment baked in from people outside. Nobody thought, ‘Oh, this is what he makes. He makes something that sounds like this, or it goes like this. It’s this kind of song or he’s this kind of character.’ So I could make anything.

That felt really very free in a way that I didn’t realize until I crossed this invisible line where people knew who I was and knew that I had made something that they either liked or they didn’t like, but they knew what it was. They’d heard it before. It’s a powerful thing, making something that goes out into the world and reaches so many people, especially I was so young and so I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to make and so I had to figure that out under the the spotlight that comes from having made this song that went out and made all these friends all over the world. It’s been a blessing. It’s been a really interesting experience, and I wrote the song with my best friend Zach Berkman. Zach and I have gotten to experience this together, which makes it a little bit more normal. It’s like a regular part of our lives because we did this — I think he was 20 when we wrote the song and I was 22 or something like that — so it was a thing we got to experience together and that has made it a little more manageable because it’s happened to the two of us, not just me.

You first rose to fame with MySpace, so how have you done with navigating all the different social media apps, and are there any that you miss or are glad that they’re gone?

I started out on social media before it even had a name. Before they were saying social media, I was doing it. My brother John is really into tech stuff. He’s an early adopter of any new thing, so he’s always keying me in on stuff. He still is to this day. He told me about MySpace super early, so I got on MySpace in the beginning, and it was a really incredible way for me to spread my music and connect with people.

It was the wild west days of social media where you could send an individual person a message and say, ‘Hey, I saw that you like these two bands and you got this song on your profile. I’m not a robot. You’re wearing a green cowboy shirt and holding a brown dog in your photo. So I’m really a person. Will you listen to my music?’ And then some people would write back and be like, ‘Yeah, I like it.’ Or ‘Yeah, I listened and I hate it.’ But they were real people. It was a real interaction.

That was a magical time for the spread of my music. And I was sort of in that first class of people who went out and got popular on the internet. Luckily we saw from the very beginning that everything on the internet is constantly evolving. People are going to move from one spot to another spot, so it’s important to constantly kind of have your ear to the ground and see where it is that people are going and how you can live within whatever space it is. From the beginning, we made a Facebook and a TikTok and before TikTok, we did Twitter and Instagram and we’ve done them all. Snapchat and YouTube and YouTube shorts.

It goes on and on and on, you just keep making stuff and then something goes away and then they put a new feature on, and it comes back. I’ve just always tried to continue to pay attention and keep making things wherever it is that people are living their lives, because that’s the magic of the internet. If you are willing to learn to navigate these new spaces, you can share your art in a place where people are already going to live a part of their lives and where they’re already pointing some of their attention.

I think for a lot of musicians this feels like a burden, but for me, because I was already doing this at the very beginning of what became my career, I was existing in these spaces before I had any fans, it doesn’t feel like a burden to me. It just feels like a regular part of my life so I’m happy to navigate the new spaces, try something new and try to figure out how to make stuff that makes sense to people within the context of whatever new place they’re living without allowing that to change the art that I’m creating. I’m gonna make my music the same way regardless of what social media platform we’re utilizing this year, and then I’m gonna figure out how do I turn this into a TikTok that people might want to watch, or how do I explain this on BlueSky or Twitter.

… The internet has continued to bless me, but yeah, sometimes I don’t want to learn to use another social media app. (laughs) The one that I’d say I miss the least is Vine. I never was able to make any Vines that I was like, ‘Oh, this feels like an expression of what I want to create as an artist.’ It felt too restrictive.

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