The last half of 2017 may have been a terrible time in Cassadee Pope's life, but it was a great time to make music. The singer says she poured all of the emotions born from personal and professional breakups into songs that she's eager for fans to hear.

Pope's new single "Take You Home" is a vibrant, optimistic, strong-but-still-vulnerable love song. It's the start of a new chapter but, "There was a really dark time," she admits.

Specifically, she's talking about her departure from the Big Machine Label Group, but that news started to leak within days of Pope sharing news that she and longtime boyfriend Rian Dawson had broken up. This is why you didn't see very much of her last summer, fall and winter. She pulled back, stayed away from the media, reevaluated her music and music-making team and decided to go all-in on herself as an independent woman and artist. It was as hard as you'd expect. During live shows, she often felt disconnected.

“I stepped away for social media for … about a month," she says. "I didn’t trust myself to post something and it not be obvious that I’m going through something. But I guess it’s hard because as an artist you want to be transparent … but you also don’t want to make people sad and make them depressed with you."

"Take You Home" was written for a guy, the 28-year-old Season 3 winner of The Voice says. "That's kind of why I gravitated towards it ... it's rare you hear a girl kind of take charge and be like, 'I wanna take you to where I'm from and show you around and show you what made me who I am.'"

Pope's inner rocker (remember, she started fronting the rock band Hey Monday) also loved the production values, but in large part it was the right song at the right time. Others were written and recorded amidst the pain and before she started dating Nashville actor Sam Palladio. A timeline and format for a larger project has not been decided, but there are songs out there that were inspired by heartbreaking personal experiences. There's a lot of revealing happening, if she chooses to reveal.

"People are going to understand what I went through better from hearing these songs, which is the goal," Pope says.

"The sad songs in this batch that I just recorded, you can really feel the emotion. The happy songs such as ‘Take You Home,’ it helped me escape the sadness during that time."

"Take You Home" is available at digital retailers now. April is a big month for Pope — on April 3 she'll start a three-episode return to The Voice, advising Kelly Clarkson's team during the Knockout Rounds.

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