Ian Fisher has today released his new single titled ‘Take Me With You’ from his upcoming album ‘Go Gentle’ dropping February 7th. While feeling the loss of the ones we lost, we are reminded, by those thoughts, that they are never totally gone. They’ve become a part of us and who we are today. A transcendence from one relationship to an eternal one. That somber smile and tear in the eye knowing they’re physically gone but still with you. And, after having said that, makes all the more sense that ‘Take You With Me’ has such an upbeat tone. Death can’t beat us down because it forces us to remember those good times and fond memories that shaped us in the now. Time is not an predator, but a companion. Holding our hand on our individual journeys and reminding us of how precious it is.
What makes Ian Fisher’s songwriting so damn good is that he can take our deepest emotions and feelings and put such memorable soundtracks to them that his music becomes that same companion.
About ‘Go With Me’
“I gotta take ‘em with me, everywhere I go – through everything I do,” Ian Fisher sings on “Take You With Me,” the newest single of his upcoming album, Go Gentle (release date: February 7, 2025). 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 and, at times, heart-wrenching album, both for artist and audience, and makes the case that death and the grieving that follows, shouldn’t be shunned. Instead, it should inspire us to live more fully.
Despite its heavy subject, Go Gentle (produced by Fisher and Jonas David), is not a dour record. For instance, “Take You With Me” is an upbeat track that 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 who have passed on. “They become a part of us, and we travel with them.” Recalling the first time he encountered death, Ian relates this story: “Wade Lurk was a friend of mine. We used to do stupid small-town shit together in high-school. One night when we were sixteen, he drove into a lake. It was the first time I was conscious of death in all its true color. I remember looking at the same horizon we had looked at together and feeling (and knowing in my soul) that he was now looking through my eyes with me. The only way for him to stay alive was for me to keep him in my heart and mind. And he’s still there. He’s there with everyone I’ve loved and who has passed. Now my mom is with me. She’s writing these songs with me. She’s speaking to you with me right now.”
Over the album’s 10 tracks, Fisher bravely confronts his own complicated views on mortality. The songs range from comforting ballads, like the previous singles “The Face of Losing,” to the cathartic “Independence Day,” which offers solace in a somber time and touches on the dichotomy of mourning the death of a loved one from a lingering illness.
About Ian Fisher
Born in Missouri, Fisher excels at making a style of music that Rolling Stone once described as “half Americana and half Abbey Road-worthy pop.” He’s done his share of traveling, moving to Europe — about as far away as he could get from his Missouri hometown — when he turned 21 and is now a dual citizen of the U.S. and Germany who considers Toronto, Vienna and Missouri all as his “home.” 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 open for others who want to enter and, maybe, if we’re lucky, we could start to heal together.” He concludes, “If people are going through hard times or something similar to what I experienced, then I hope these songs will make them feel less alone.”
A prolific songwriter (he is rumored to have written nearly 2,000 songs) with over a dozen released studio albums, Fisher has caught the ear of the music world at large. Rolling Stone describes his music as “a world traveler’s perspective on American folk-rock,” at the same time, PopMatters applauds it as “captivating,” and No Depression describes it as “simple, yet emotionally complex meanderings… His voice is a hoarser Jim Croce, with pen ready to strike a la Billy Bragg meeting an old Johnny Cash notebook.” Glide adds, “folk-rock sentimentality with imagery that would be at place in an old Ray Price song, Fisher taps into a sound that is at once moving and different.”
“Take You With Me” is self-released with distribution through Symphonic and is available now. Ian’s upcoming album, Go Gentle, will be released on February 7, 2025.
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