Singer/songwriter Leslie Jordan announced her new album The Agonist last December. Today (January 23), American Songwriter is proud to premiere the album’s lead single “The Fight.” Listen to the touching track below.
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“The Fight” is a chapter from a much larger story. The Agonist is a concept album taken from the writings of Jordan’s late maternal grandfather Robert S. Gott. He left his family when Jordan’s mother was very young. As a result, neither knew anything about the man except for the stories they heard about him. Those stories included him walking away from his family and his love affairs with alcohol and his brother’s wife.
Leslie Jordan Discusses the Inspiration Behind The Agonist
“I think I received the photocopied poetry from my mom back in 2016. And I was just curious because I never met him. I never really knew much about him because my mom didn’t, really. He was always sort of painted as the villain of the story. He made a lot of mistakes, was an alcoholic, and left his family. He had very few redeeming qualities,” Leslie Jordan explained. “So, when I received that binder full of poetry, I felt like I started to see a different picture. I really felt compelled and moved by his work,” she added.
Before long, the idea for what would become The Agonist started taking shape. “Sometime within that first year of getting that binder I thought, ‘Gosh, this would be really cool as a concept album.’ That was 8 or 9 years ago,” Jordan recalled. “It has taken me that long to get to a place where I was ready to make it. Partly, that was because of the season of life I was in and I also wanted to do his work justice. I didn’t want to just verbatim say what he said but I wanted to dive more into his story and put myself in those positions and invite other writers in,” she explained. “So, there was an evolution from where it started versus how it ended. It’s been a really beautiful process for me and for my mom,” Jordan added.
Solving a Family Mystery
Jordan had a binder full of poetry to work through and her mother kept Gott’s journals. So, the two would discuss his poems and cross-reference them with his journal entries to see what he was doing or experiencing when he wrote them. This process helped both women get to know their late relative in a new way.
“I feel like there is a relationship there that didn’t exist,” Jordan said about the result of creating The Agonist. “And I know that seems strange to say about someone who is gone that I never met. But I think as intimate as a journal can be, I’ve read his thoughts and his wrestling and longing,” she added.
Leslie Jordan Discusses “The Fight”
“The Fight” is a beautiful Americana tune with a gritty vintage feel. Leslie Jordan co-wrote the track with her longtime friend and collaborator Sandra McCracken and Brittney Spencer provides background vocals.
“It came from a piece with the same name,” she said of the song’s origin. “A lot of his writing was in that kind of beatnik style where they’re real succinct short-form poetry. But this is one of the pieces in that collection that is more long-form. It’s still broken up into shorter sentences but it’s a full short story in poetry form. I remember the first time I read it, it took my breath away,” she recalled.
“It’s in third-person but, really, it’s the point of view of a mother. She is grappling with a decision she made. When her son hits her, she loses her temper and hits him back. So, she’s going through the process of every emotion from anger to regret to shame to justifying it to embarrassment. She runs the full gamut,” she said of the protagonist of the deeply emotional song. “But you see the love in the middle of all of it. It’s never devoid of love and it comes full circle at the end where she notices that as the boy grows up something’s missing from his eyes,” Jordan explained.
Adapting “The Fighter”
“I spent a lot of time with the piece,” Leslie Jordan said of the writing process. “When I was contemplating if I should bring a songwriter in on the piece with me or who to bring, I immediately thought of my good friend Sandra McCracken. She is no stranger to writing songs with a lot of feeling and she’s also someone I’ve lived a lot of life with. It seemed like an easy song to bring to her and say, ‘This feels like a pretty vulnerable piece. Would you help me find a way into this as a song?’” she added.
Both Jordan and McCracken are mothers of young boys. As a result, both the song and the poem impacted them deeply. “Our sons are a couple of years apart in age and they’re friends. We both found ourselves choked up and in tears at different points while writing it. We ended up talking about the implications of the decisions we make as parents,” she recalled. “It feels like a pretty special song for me.”
The Agonist drops on April 25.
Featured Image by Wonderfilm
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