If you met Cassadee Pope on The Voice a decade ago, then you would probably label her as a country singer. But her hardcore fans know she started her career in the pop punk band Hey Monday — and for her new album, she’s going back to her roots.
Pope, 34, quietly returned to the genre a couple of years ago, but her new album, Hereditary, finds her diving back into the sounds that she first fell in love with as a teenager. While her country albums always had a rock flair, listeners will find that her new tracks would sound more at home on the Warped Tour than at Stagecoach.
“I never was super down the middle country, it was always a bit more pop-rock country,” Pope exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of Hereditary’s Friday, July 12, release. “I think my whole career, if you look at it and you really listen to the music and you see the branding and even how I dress or how I used to dress, I never fit into one genre or style.”
Fully embracing Hereditary as a rock album, however, allowed Pope — who won season 3 of The Voice in 2012 — to write more candidly than she had in the past. “Three of Us,” for example, is about the heartbreak of watching someone close to you struggle with addiction.
“Having loved ones who struggle with substance abuse and addiction, it’s not something that I’ve ever felt like I had the verbiage to talk about,” she explained. “In country music, I just couldn’t find a way to write about it in a way that made sense in the genre. I’m sure so many people can and have, but for me, it just wasn’t clicking, and so once I was able to strip all the barriers of country music songwriting and what would work and what wouldn’t work, it just opened my mind up to so many different subject matters, and this was one of them.”
Working outside the framework of mainstream country made Pope feel more at home in her songwriting, both because of the external pressure to produce a hit and the internal realization that her own beliefs didn’t align with those of the powers that be. It’s a sentiment that’s been spreading among several contemporary country artists, many of them women — recall Maren Morris’ 2023 declaration that she no longer wanted anything to do with the industry. (In 2022, Pope was part of Morris’ famous feud with Jason Aldean’s wife, Brittany Aldean, who came under fire for a social media post referencing gender identity.)
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“It was mostly a societal thing and what country music has historically deemed appropriate and inappropriate, but I think some of it was internal,” Pope told Us of leaving country behind. “It’s hard to be in a genre where you know you don’t believe all of the things that made it what it is. Maybe I’m not Christian, and I’m not sure that you should no matter what say ‘family first’ because some people’s families aren’t great and they’re abusive. There’s just some things about the genre and just culturally that I haven’t ever aligned with, so when writing I was self-conscious about that.”
Cassadee Pope on “The Voice” The Voice/YouTube
Pope said that she tried not to let those feelings affect her past songwriting, but it happened anyway.
“So when I left the genre … it felt freeing,” she recalled. “I wasn’t trying to overcorrect or write anything that was just so outlandish that it felt like, ‘OK, who is she trying to be and what is she trying to prove?’ I just felt very free. It definitely felt creatively stifling sometimes in country music … if I wrote something that felt a little bit left of center, like sassy or inappropriate, I would know deep down like, ‘Country radio is not gonna play this, and it’s not gonna probably do what I would like it to do, success-wise.’ So, yeah, it affected me for sure.”
When Pope started working on Hereditary two years ago, she didn’t set out to make a specific kind of record — or even an album at all. But as she started writing with her collaborators, “it became more clear” that she was headed in the right direction.
Cassadee Pope performs onstage during Daddy’s Dogs Drive In concert on May 29, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee Danielle Del Valle/Getty Images
“I was not feeling confident or in a good place with anything musically, so I went into it not thinking about genres or what people might like or if it was radio-friendly,” she recalled. “I might have said at some point like, ‘Let’s write something in the rock space because that’s how I’m feeling, a bit angsty, and I’m feeling a bit sad, so maybe we write something in that vein. … It just went in that direction without it being this super-calculated thing. Once I got the demo back, hearing myself in that way gave me the confidence to keep going in that direction.”
Pope is happy to have come back to rock after her time in the country world, but she’s supportive of artists who’ve gone the other way — Beyoncé and Post Malone, for example. She also hopes that more industry decision-makers embrace the “fluidity” of genre in the same way that artists and listeners have.
“It would be easier for everyone to just accept that artists have a lot of different influences,” she told Us. “They probably didn’t sing the kind of music you’re hearing them singing now back when they were in their bedroom singing into their hairbrush. It would be wise for everyone to just open their minds to the fact that music should just be enjoyed and not categorized.”
Hereditary is out now.