Home MusicIAN FISHER Shares “In Her Hand” – Realizing the True Power Of Love Amidst Life’s Hardest Goodbye
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IAN FISHER Shares “In Her Hand” – Realizing the True Power Of Love Amidst Life’s Hardest Goodbye

by Rey Roldan
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With the release of “In Her Hand,” singer-songwriter Ian Fisher invites listeners into one of the most intimate corners of his life: the heart-wrenching yet transformative final days spent with his mother, who passed away in 2023 after a 26-year battle with cancer. The single is the latest offering from Fisher’s forthcoming album, Go Gentle (out February 7, 2025), a deeply personal collection of songs that grapple with grief, love, and the resilience to find light amidst darkness. “In Her Hand” captures the tender revelation that love (in its purest form) is a soft, gentle embrace that nurtures, while hate is a firm grip.

“In Her Hand” is a poignant meditation on the power of love and how it has the ability to counteract anger and division. Fisher recalls a moment of clarity amidst his mother’s final hours. “In the days leading up to my mom’s death, I felt more rage and confusion than I have ever felt before. I remember throwing my phone against the ground and punching walls in the hall while listening to her death rattles through her bedroom door. Then I’d go back in and hold her hand. With my hand in hers, I realized that you can’t make a fist. It’s a simple realization, but it’s one that I think we would all benefit from if we remembered before taking sides in anger and rage. Love holds and hate closes a hand. Love holds and hate closes a heart. Love holds and hate closes a society.”
IAN FISHER
Photo credit: Talitha-Lahme (hi-res)
Cathartic and heart-wrenching at times, Go Gentle makes the case for absorbing and not shunning the grief that follows death. 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. His previous single, “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. Over the album’s 10 tracks, Ian 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 stasis and paralyzing fear of moving forward while mourning the death of a loved one from a lingering illness, and recent single “Growing Pains” that masterfully threads personal grief into universal truth.

Reflecting on the current start of affairs around the globe, Fisher acknowledges that it feels like the entire world hurts right now, “like our insides have been hollowed out and the cold winds of this new year come whipping in through each opening to echo in the confused darkness of us all.” Instead of wallowing in the tepid times, he’ll be shining some much-needed light with the live shows in support of the release of Go Gentle. Circling around the eastern half of North America before heading to Europe for an even more extensive run of shows, Fisher will be bringing along some catharsis on both a personal level and on a larger scale. Buzz-heavy Australian singer/songwriter Anna Smyrk will be direct support with assorted local artists opening the show.
Ian Fisher & Band – “Go Gentle” North American Tour 2025
*With special guest Anna Smyrk
2025 Tour Flyer (hi-res)

02/06 – Ebb & Flow – Cape Girardeau, MO (US) *
02/07 – Off Broadway – St. Louis, MO (US)♠︎*
02/08 – Watertower Winery – Ste. Genevieve, MO (US)*
02/09 – Dee’s Lounge – Nashville, TN (US)♥︎*
02/12 – Zanzabar – Louisville, KY (US)♣︎*
02/13 – The Shack at Reggie’s – Chicago, IL (US)♦︎*
02/16 – Burdock – Toronto, ON (CA)★*
02/18 – P’tit Ours – Montreal, QC (CA)Ω*
02/19 – Folk Alliance International – Montreal, QC (CA)*
_____________________________________
Support Acts:
♠︎ = Meramec
♥︎ = Linda McRae
♣︎ = Ian Able
♦︎ = Ashlyn Sisco
★ = Sarah Hiltz
Ω = Sam Krüger
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.”
Go Gentle tracklist
Album artwork (hi-res)

1. The Face Of Losing
2. Growing Pains
3. Take You With Me
4. Tigress
5. Somebody Loved
6. In Her Hand
7. Underneath Your Wing
8. Mother Please Forgive Me
9. Independence Day
10. Box Of Dust
“In Her Hand” is self-released with distribution through Symphonic and is available now. Ian’s upcoming album, Go Gentle, will be released on February 7, 2025.
“In Her Hand” lyrics:

She says “I love you” in the morning
She is tired but she’s true
I was thinking about staying
but I know I’m leaving soon

So I tell her that I love her
and I’ll write her when I land
I put my hand in her hand
and go

Out the door there is a taxi
and out the taxi is a plane
Look out the window see tomorrow
Waving away

I’d been chasing the horizon
To the promise of a land
With nothing but the feeling
of her hand in my hand

Hold me through the unraveling
Through the darkest hours of the night
and I’ll hold you close as a memory
In the corners of my mind

When I landed feeling stranded
Finding everything I planted overgrown
That I’d blame it on somebody
but there’s no one left when you’re alone

Just that helpless angry freedom
of time’s overthrow of plans
I make a fist but am stopped
by her hand in my hand
I make a fist but am stopped
By her hand in my hand

Now I hold you close as a memory 
When I make a fist and am stopped
Rey Roldan
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