“Nobody can tell me how to feel/I know what is real for me,” Ian Fisher sings in “The Face of Losing,” the opening song of his new album, Go Gentle. The Missouri-born songwriter, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Germany, is keenly addressing something at once highly personal and yet, to a number, universal: death and grief.
Go Gentle was shaped by Fisher’s experiences following the death of his mother in 2023 after a 26-year fight with cancer. It is a cathartic album, both for artist and audience, and makes the case that death, and the grieving that follows, shouldn’t be shunned. Rather, it should inspire us to live more fully.
“Death is something that we conveniently shove to the side and don’t address very often. And that can be really unhealthy because it creates a situation where we think we’re going to live forever,” Fisher says. “But everyone we know and have around us is going to die. It’s a miracle that we even have this moment right now.”
Despite its subject matter, Go Gentle, produced by Fisher and Jonas David, is not a dour record. While Fisher bravely confronts his own complicated emotions over the album’s 10 tracks, the songs range from comforting ballads, like the “The Face of Losing,” to the upbeat “Take You With Me,” which imagines us riding along with the loved ones we’ve lost.
“Instead of them being gone forever, I view it as a change in the way they exist,” he says of those no longer here. “They become a part of us and we travel with them.”
Fisher, who excels at making a style of music that Rolling Stone once described as “half Americana and half Abbey Road-worthy pop,” has done his share of traveling, moving to Europe — about as far away as he could get from his Missouri hometown — when he turned
- In writing Go Gentle, he realized that his decision to roam was itself motivated by death.
“The recurring theme was how much my mother’s cancer diagnosis affected me. I had grown up with this fear of losing one of the people I loved the most my entire life, like being raised under this Sword of Damocles,” he says. “The song ‘Mother Please Forgive Me’ on the album came from the guilt of being a son who moved to the other side of the world to escape the reality of their mom being sick.”
It’s those hard realizations that make Go Gentle such an instantly moving album, and Fisher has already had fans approach him teary-eyed after his concerts. But he didn’t conceive of Go Gentle as a roadmap for grief. He was simply telling two stories he knows by heart: his own, and his mother’s.
“It’s a realistic documentation of what happened, like a documentary you’d watch,” Fisher says. “I tried to write about my personal experience, but pose it in a way that’s open for others who want to enter and maybe, if we’re lucky, we could start to heal together.”
