(Reybee) Ian Fisher has shared his new single "The Face Of Losing", a heartfelt tribute to his mother, who lost her 26-year battle with cancer last year. "My mom passed away in the spring of 2023. It took me 'til the summer before I could start writing about it," says Fisher, recalling the moment when grief transformed into creativity.
"To be honest, I didn't really want to or intend to write about it. I had been back in Missouri to visit her the last week she was alive, but I couldn't get away from Europe, where I had been living, until three months later."
"In the immediate aftermath of my mom's death, I remember feeling like a planet had been removed from the solar system," he explains. "Everything looked the same, but gravity was different. The orbital pull of things had been altered." The acoustic song, punctuated with an affecting pedal steel guitar, is as much a song of mourning as it is a comforting ballad that inspires us to live more fully and embrace life.
He sings, "Nobody can tell me how to feel / I know what is real for me," with such emotion wavering on pain and strength. "'The Face of Losing' acted as my armor from other people's well-intended, but often unhelpful or distracting advice," he explains. "This song has some type of mantric power to protect me from the pressure I put on myself to conform to a society that doesn't honestly offer space for death and grief. It allows me to float inside my heart and mind to process these changes and the truth of our mortal nature. I hope it can give at least a little of that to others as well."
"Death is something that we conveniently shove to the side and don't address very often. It can be unhealthy because it creates a situation where we think we'll live forever," Fisher says. "But everyone we know and have around us is going to die eventually. It's a miracle that we even have this moment right now."
Fisher is a Missouri-born artist, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Germany who considers Toronto, Vienna and Missouri all "home", and excels at making a style of music that Rolling Stone has described as "half Americana and half Abbey Road-worthy pop." "Growing up in a small town in Missouri in the '90s limited my options. I was raised on the country music that was on the radio and my dad's collection of classic rock vinyl," he says of his upbringing. "The boredom gave me nothing better to do than write songs and my dissatisfaction with being there made me dream so much of the world outside that it acted like a slingshot pulling me back till it released me and threw me to the other side of the world. Musically, my folk roots come from Missouri, but my time abroad made it more urban than country."
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 quipped his music as "a world traveler's perspective on American folk-rock," while PopMatters applauds 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."
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