Q: iMessages tries connecting to old iCloud account

I had an email account get deleted that was associated with my iCloud account.  I had gone through and changed my email address for the account and everything seemed to be working fine for a few months.  For some unknown reason, now iMessages won't work on any other device, and my phone is trying to connect to my iCloud account associated with the old email address.  The iCloud setting on my phone are all updated to the new account, but for some reason messages keeps trying to connect to the old one.  There's no way that I can tell to change the email address, just to input the password.  I put in the correct password to the old account, but that doesn't work.  This would happen when I would I would turn iMessages on & off, and I also signed out of my iCloud account but without any luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated it– it seems like an infuriatingly simple problem to fix, but at this point I can't.

Thanks.