Savannah Pope is a generational artist, a belter whose powerful pipes have been compared to Ann Wilson and Janis Joplin, but whose grand vision is singularly her own. “I just don’t think I’m the kind of person that anyone wants to package as the next whatever, the next Olivia Rodrigo,” the proudly independent art-rocker jokes, but she doesn’t need to be. Because she is the Next Savannah Pope.

Pope’s latest opus is her most ambitious and personal to date: the Sean Beavan-produced concept album Pandemonium, a 12-song journey through her battles with mental illness with Pope emerging triumphant on the other side. Pope recently sat down with me to discuss how her struggles with mental illness and outdated, debunked stereotypes of feminine insanity informed her new opus, and how she came to discover her true voice.

LYNDSANITY: I had the luxury, privilege, and thrill of hearing your album Pandemonium in its entirety live a few weeks ago at the Gibson Showroom. It was this grand theatrical event, as all things you do are. Your parents were there and you talked a lot about what some of the songs were about, and I know it’s a very fun and celebratory album, but there’s deep stuff and heavy stuff there. It’s a concept album of sorts. I’m all about concept albums, so I guess I’ll just give you the floor and ask: What is the concept behind Pandemonium?

SAVANNAH POPE: That performance in general was just such a birth. It was an art show, it was a rock show, it was so many things in one. It was great.And in terms of the actual record Pandemonium, you’re correct. It’s definitely a concept album. What I love about concept albums is that they give space for there to be a lot of nuance and change while always coming back to the same central theme — which for me, for this record, was my history with mental illness and facing the stigmas that surround it from other people, and also that I had internalized. I started writing the album after a friend committed suicide, and I was in the middle of a very horrid period of mental health at of my own at the time. And the person who I lost was the last person I would have imagined losing to this disease. It became very clear to me that the silence surrounding it and the shame surrounding it is ultimately what kills a lot of people, and I didn’t want to fall prey to it myself. I just felt like this was the most direct, cathartic avenue that I had access to in order to process that and try to work through that stigma for myself, and then hopefully in the process help with other people as well, to feel like they’re not alone in that feeling.

The stigma surrounding mental illness still very much here, unfortunately, but I do feel it has lessened recently. A lot of very high-profile celebrities, everyone from Lady Gaga and Katy Perry to Prince Harry, are now talking about their struggles. Even in the last maybe five years, I’ve noticed this more. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, or if you feel like you’re part of a growing movement of being more outspoken.

I definitely think that there’s been a significant amount of change in terms of just the dialogue surrounding it. I remember when I was a kid trying to bring it up to several people, and that’s where the first track on the album is called, which in Spanish means “This We Do Not Speak,” which is a term I learned when I first learned Spanish. I just thought it was so beautiful and encompassing in terms of what I had experienced as a kid surrounding mental illness, which was like, “Don’t talk about that. It’s too scary. Nobody wants to hear that.” And now I think, yeah, it’s made a huge difference to hear people speak about that openly and to know that there are people who have done really cool things and that are leaders in different avenues. I think that’s very inspiring and helps break down the stigma. But we’ve all internalized it in our own way, any kind of stigma. And like you said, there’s a long way to go and a lot to learn. And so yeah, this was sort of my way through it.

I’d love to talk a little bit about your childhood and that journey that has led to Pandemonium. I mentioned your parents were in the audience at your show, and they seemed thrilled for you and proud of you, and you guys seemed very close. But I imagine you went through some struggles maybe just because of them not knowing what to do. We didn’t know as much back then about mental illness and how to recognize it and how to treat it, what to say or do or not do. Didn’t your parents send you to some kind of a school similar to the schools that Paris Hilton or Kat Von D have talked about, like a bootcamp for wayward kids?

Well, I don’t think I went to one quite as HQ as Paris Hilton, but yeah, they’re all within the same family of this very broken industry. And yes, I was at the camp for a couple of months and then I was at one of the schools for about two years. Very, very abusive, very scary places. That school has gone now because a couple kids died and enough lawsuits came up that it was shut down. But the bootcamp place, the wilderness place, is still around. It’s really upsetting to me … But in terms of my experience, it was just very abusive, physically, emotionally, in  virtually every way. And you were very isolated and couldn’t really talk about it. They really knew how to break you down as a kid and make you secretive about certain things because if you weren’t, it would get worse.

I’m so sorry.

Thanks. I mean, it is what it is. I mean, it makes a great story. I think I’m going to turn into a rock opera eventually.

I was going to ask you if you were ever going to do a rock opera, like turn Pandemonium into a rock opera! If there’s anyone who should or could do a rock opera, it’s you.

I think that would be phenomenal. It’s something that I’ve wanted to play around with for years and I’ve never quite delved into, just because it’s so different from everything else I’ve done. I’ve generally done music or art or I’ve never really sat down and come together with a fully cohesive. I think as soon as I’ve officially given birth to this album. I’m like, ready for an elective C-section of this motherfucker! I want it to be the ‘60s and I wake up in six months and a wet nurse is taking care of your child, and you’ve been on tranquilizers the whole time. But yes.

I want to go a little bit more to your mental health journey leading up to this birth, or rebirth. Did you know from an early age that you were different from other kids or perceived and processed the world differently?

I knew I was a weird kid. I always knew that I was strange. It’s funny, I was going through my parents’ things and I found this story that I wrote when I was probably 5 or 6. It’s this picture of a lizard in the snow, and the story is like the most Russian novel darkness. It was about how the lizard got caught in a storm and then a trap closed on its legs, and then it was all alone. … So, I mean, I definitely always had a flare for the dramatic! As a little kid, I loved Shakespeare and medieval imagery and all of these things that were definitely not “normal.” In terms of the mental health aspect of things, there were a lot of things that I could tell from an early age where maybe I felt like I moved through the world with less ease than a lot of people that I saw. And I definitely was always very drawn to glam-rock and art-rock in general from a very early age, because it was sort of about people who felt like aliens. And I always felt like the mothership had dropped me off and then forgotten to pick me up I think it took me a long time to be able to understand what certain things were, the OCD, what the depression was, what the anxiety was — especially when you’re really young, because everything’s inherently a little angsty at that age anyway. I mean, I think almost everyone’s completely insane from 13 to 17. You’ve got some sort of demon working its way out of you. But yeah, I had very traumatic adolescence and then by the time I got to about 19 or 20, it became very clear to me that I was dealing with stuff that wasn’t affecting everyone else around me.

Is the traumatic adolescence you speak of what we already just talked about, with the boarding school?

I think that was a big part of it. I mean, wrote that story when I was 6. I needed to see the underbelly of the world. I needed to touch every hot stove. I was in a lot of scary situations before I was an adult. And then by the time I was an adult, officially an adult, I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. All I’ve done has been terrifying this whole time. I am not ready to actually be a person.”

How were your parents handling all this? Were they freaking out the time, but now they sort of understand you more? What was that family journey?

I think they did the best that they felt that they could at the time/ I think it was a really, really terrible decision [to send me to boarding school] and I would not make it personally, but people do their best and they had a lot of their own issues and things going on as well. I just don’t think they had the capacity to really address it. We were not close for a long time. I was really angry for a long time, because like I said, those places really break you down and then build you back up. It’s very ‘60 cult-style, very intense psychological manipulation. It took me several years afterwards and then just having a total mental health breakdown to understand what had happened, to even begin to understand what had happened. And then I was just really angry for a couple of years. But I guess I just realized at a certain point that they had a lot of their own trauma and they basically were raised by wolves and they were like, “We don’t know how to deal with any of this.” And also, I think I realized that being angry after a certain point is just so corrosive to oneself. It doesn’t help anything. One of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to be like, “OK, I’m letting go of this.” And like I said, they had a lot of their own issues and I’ve seen them grow a lot as people and work on a lot of their own issues with mental health and all of that. People change over time, and I’m very grateful to be able to have witnessed that in them, and vice versa.

When did you start doing music? Because it’s my impression that maybe you didn’t even know until a relatively late age that you could sing in the Ann Wilson-esque way that you can. I’m going to assume that you getting into music was part of your overall healing journey.

Actually, when I was at that school, they had a few guitars, and I had a friend who taught me some chords and I started writing music there, just as a kind of processing tool. And I grew up singing along through records because they just helped me to feel seen more than anything else. And I’ve always been a very sonically inclined person. I’m one of those annoying people that if I hear an accent, I have to repeat it. I have to keep doing it.

Is that part of your OCD?

Maybe, but I just also love sounds, a Henry Higgins-esque obsession with where noises come from and the way that they move and recreating them. So, I think it was a very cathartic thing to sing along to records, and I think that probably just changed my voice. And then, not long after all of that officially becoming an adult, l had a just total mental health breakdown. At the time, I was painting a lot. I was very certain I was going to be a painter. That was my feeling on life. But I was so depressed. I hadn’t left my apartment in probably a month. And a friend dragged me out to this open mic thing that our friend was playing, and it was one of those pretty much anyone can go up if you so choose. And I just had this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, like, “I want to change the state that I am in. I want this feeling to change.” So, I just went up and sang this song that I had been working on, and the response was so incredible. And it was just kind of like a light switch went off. I was just like, “OK, there we go.” I definitely think in terms of healing, it gave me a sense of purpose, because without that, it can be very easy to be aimless and just stuck in your own brain.

Is my Ann Wilson comparison something you get a lot? Was Heart an influence?

I mean, she’s phenomenal. It is so funny, but I actually was not well-versed in Heart at all until I started performing rock. And then I started getting a number of different things that I’ve been compared to since. I got way more into Janis Joplin after I started performing. Like I said, was very much a glam-rock/dark pop kind of kid. I loved Nick Cave and Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. I liked these sort of dark voices. And then David Bowie and Joni Mitchell. I was very much sort of in the wrong era in certain ways. But once I started performing and having to compete with a band vocally… that’s just the natural evolution of my voice in terms of playing with other people.

It’s kind of a funny question, but given that you have such a powerful instrument and didn’t really have any formal training, and it was kind of this open mic thing that kind of pushed you onto the public stage, was there ever a moment where that voice came out of your mouth and you were like, “What the hell?” I mean, it would startle me if that kind of voice came out of my mouth when I was just having a lark onstage.

Well, I think I always had this voice. There was one moment when I was in high school when I got cast in the play Grease and I got cast as Sandy. … I’m sure I was terrible as an actor, but as a singer, I remember performing and actually curating my voice for a performance for the first time. I had really kept to myself the last couple of years of high school, because after I got out of that place, I was keeping my head down. I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to kidnap me again…

Wait, were you actually, literally kidnapped?

Oh yeah. They come and get you in the middle of the night and you don’t know. It’s terrifying. But regardless, I remember going up onstage and singing in front of everybody, and again, the reaction was like, “Where did that come from?” And then I remember getting through the night and being like, “Wow, that was from me. That was from my body. That’s really cool.”

So, then you started to make this a real career. And you’ve always gone the indie, DIY route. All the music, all the visuals, are all you; it all comes from your brain. Pandemonium was completely independent, crowdsourced on Kickstarter. I’m just wondering if you tried to go the major-label route and were either were discouraged because you didn’t fit into the box of what mainstream pop or rock is supposed to be in modern age, or if you just were like, “Nah, I’m going to do it myself so I can call the shots and not have someone muzzling me.”

I think it’s a mix of the two. I think I’ve had some label offers that I didn’t feel were great deals, so that was my issue at the time. I’m totally open to being on a label, though. I think maybe at first that wouldn’t have been something that I would’ve considered, but now I’ve gotten more and more skilled at working with other people and collaborating with other people,  which probably at the very beginning was just not something I had space for.

How come and how did that change, or why did that change?

I don’t know. Maybe just all felt so personal and I wanted to control it. But now the more that I collaborate with people like Sean being a great example — Sean Beavan, who’s the producer on the album. That was such a fantastic experience, and I had some co-writes on this album. It’s been very expansive artistically. I think one, I started to get some treatment for OCDs, so I didn’t need to obsess quite at the same level as before. And then two, I think I saw how much creative expansion can lead to. That being said, I just don’t think I’m the kind of person that anyone wants to package as the next whatever, the next Olivia Rodrigo.

I think there’s more space in current pop for someone like you than there was a few years ago. Look at the success of Chappell Roan, for instance.

And I’m psyched to see more of that happening. For instance, the Last Dinner Party is one of the new bands where I’ve been like, “Oh, thank fucking God!” There’s some great weirdos out there making really interesting, strange music, and people are falling into that and really falling in love with it, and that’s great. I also think that that hasn’t been as present in the music space over the last 10 years as it maybe was before. I think it’s interesting to see that begin to shift.

But there are detractors out there than when music, particular music made by a woman, is “weird” or theatrical, they take it less seriously. They think the theatricality is detracting from the music and making it less legitimate. They only think, say, Lady Gaga is credible when she’s doing her jazz thing or sitting at a piano in jeans and a T-shirt. What are your thoughts on that mindset in general?

For me, I just think that was a very natural evolution. I was a visual artist, and that was a huge part of expressing myself. I went from just writing these little folk songs for myself to being like, “Oh, the art of performance is so incredible and such a huge part of why I want to do this.” It just became a natural amalgamation of those things for me. But I get the same feedback quite a bit. I’ve definitely had meetings with people where they’re saying that, and it always comes with a lot of other caveats. They’re like, “Straighten your hair and lose 30 pounds and sit in front of a guitar and don’t talk too loud.” Yeah, it’s just not me. By the way, I love doing acoustic performances. I love stripping down the music and having fun that way. But I also love the full theatrical performance because it’s an experience. And that’s what I want from art. I want it to feel immersive.

Tell me about the visuals connected to the Pandemonium project.

I’ve always got my swirls, which has always been a central theme of my visual aesthetic. I felt that it really tied into the record in a special way as well, because you’re dealing with complexity, and to me a swirl is such a great example of that. It’s not a straight line. It’s not easy, something of its own, and it’s a little hypnotic and a little trippy. I was also dealing with themes about mental illness and sort of the way that it’s mistreated and misdiagnosed and stigmatized, so I liked bringing in these themes from the 1960s in terms of institutionalization and the campiness of it — the sort of just drugged-up housewife notion, which to me was always such a great visual representation of keeping it under wraps. And I think also a lot of what I dealt with in the album and just surrounding mental illness in general, for instance, like “Melancholic Goddess,” was the experience of you have a layer. You have a layer of “I deal with mental illness,” and then you have another layer of “I’m a woman.” And beyond anything that I’ve dealt with mental illness, everything I’ve ever felt has been gaslit to a certain degree. Anything I’ve ever expressed that was in any way not pleasant, deemed unpleasant to somebody, whether I was angry or sad or “too much,” “too scary.” And I think a certain amount of the aesthetic around it was around themes of feminine power and reclaiming feminine insanity. For instance, the apple, the snake, the institutional madness, the hysteria, being able to sort of reclaim that in a way as well. Because again, I also feel like a lot of the female experience is equated to insanity.

I think every woman has had some moment where they were basically told the way they were acting was “unreasonable” or “hysterical.” So, it’s a relatable concept, unfortunately.

And I think it’s so baked into the basic ethos of everyday society, especially when you get to religion and any kind of major institution of power. And so that definitely tied to what I was working through with the album and also the visual side of things. That was a very fun concept to play with visually. I was using the album to work through stigmas around my own mental illness and also just stigmas around being told that I was crazy because of having a feeling.

You mentioned misdiagnosis. Were you misdiagnosed in the past?

Oh yeah… especially when I was a kid, oh my God. I feel when it comes to child psychiatry, it can be a very ethically gray area. There’s definitely a lot of that feeling of like, “We just don’t want you to be difficult.” And most of it is completely incorrect and really reactionary and ridiculous. But I also think it also takes time to figure out what’s going on with your own brain and understand it to any degree. And then also, most mental health treatments are new. Think about it: People were administering lobotomies just 50 years ago.

Yes, there was shock treatment, putting people in straitjackets, throwing people in padded cells…

Which is what they did with me when I was a kid. It’s not dissimilar. Treating [mental illness] with abuse has been so commonplace through most of history, and I am glad to see it becoming a topic of conversation, absolutely.

So, you said you were trying to figure out your own brain. In writing Pandemonium, what did you learn about your brain or about yourself?

It was very intense. I think one thing that I learned both about myself and the way that I interact with the world and the way that the world interacts with me was that being honest about something like this doesn’t take away from the value or the legitimacy of someone’s creativity. In fact, when I started coming forward with it and presenting that as a huge part of what the album was going to be about when I crowdfunded it… I just grew up with a lot of reassurance that if people saw that part of me, that they wouldn’t want to invest time or money or space in me because I was a “problem.” And this was a really incredible reversal of that. And so that was definitely something very interesting to learn. I learned a lot about writing. I generally dealt with most of the trauma in my life in terms of allegory before, because that felt the safest and most accessible way for me to work through something. And with this album, you still want to show not tell, but I got more direct with it. I would write these lyrics out and I would just go, “Oh God, am I really going to say this out loud? This is so personal!” And I think it changed my willingness to deal with very difficult things in a more direct way.

You learn a lot about what you actually feel and how you’ve actually processed certain events in certain times in your life. I definitely think it revealed a lot of things that I didn’t even know that I felt about things, until I wrote them down, until I was able to express them in that way. And then also,  working through it in the studio was really intense. Sean lives up in the mountains, and I would go out there for two weeks at a time for months and months. I was going out there for a couple of weeks at a time and  there were no real distractions other than digging into this record, so it really was like therapy. It was just vomiting out just the most personal aspects of your life and letting someone else work on them with you. That’s the scary, vulnerable thing to do.

And then, how did it feel for finally perform these song live? Scary? Cathartic?

It was both. It was great and terrible. It was scary and overwhelming, but also very healing in a lot of ways. It was a lot. I think most shows that I’ve done, and most performances that I’ve done, don’t require that much of myself. But I had designed this [record release showcase], because of the crowdfund and how much people had been involved in making this a possibility, to really just go all out and do a full-blown immersive art show concert, bring people inside of the mentality of everything that was involved in creating this body of work. … It was definitely an intense show. I don’t think the next time I perform it will feel going that raw, but I think the material will always feel very raw to me. But that’s the reason I did it in sort of a private space. I knew I wanted it to be this intimate experience the first time I put it out there.

For me, Pandemonium is anchored by the outsider anthems “Melancholic Goddess” and “Live Your Strange.” Can you tell me a bit about those songs?

It’s fascinating to me that people connect with different songs in completely different ways. That’s very cool to me. “Melancholic Goddess” is one of my favorite songs on the album, so I love when people connect with that. That song was a fucking fever dream that came to me in the middle of the night. I woke up covered in sweat and wrote it down, and I’ve never had that experience before in terms of songwriting. It’s generally been I sit down with my guitar or my keyboard and see what comes out, but this one, it just needed to be there. And it summarizes so many things that I have felt and not been able to find the words for and for such a long time. So, I love that song, and I think it’s very layered and goes a lot of places. And like I was saying before, that song is largely about the feminine experience. I guess I would say the reappropriation of power and the reappropriation of negative imagery and thoughts surrounding the ways that women actually have to access power. And then “Live Your Strange” to me was almost like a re-parenting thing. It was me writing a song that I would’ve loved to hear when I was a kid. It says everything that I really wanted to know for certain when I was young, which is just, “You are inherently valuable and loved, and what is different about you is only enhances that rather than detracts from it.”

I imagine you’ve already gotten a lot of feedback from all your fans, that they’re grateful that you’re saying this stuff.

Yeah, I’ve gotten some really, really amazing messages from people so far just on the songs that have come out. Just, I mean, obviously I want to keep it private because I don’t want to break anyone’s anonymity, but there’s lot of, “I was working through this or I was going through this at the time, and this helped me feel very seen. I’d never heard that put in a way that was so close to how I felt.” Things like that. I’ve had a couple people reach out to me and say that just the fact that I made the album was really helpful for them, because they were feeling very suicidal and they didn’t feel that they had any space to talk about it, and it was very helpful for them to know that somebody that they looked up to creatively had dealt with that and was working through that on their own. And so that was really wonderful to hear. That was exactly, exactly what I was hoping some people would get out of it.