For Leslie Jordan, the story didn’t start with a song—it started with a cardboard box.
Inside were decades of forgotten words, penned by a man she barely knew. Her grandfather, who left her mother as a child and died without much of a legacy, had left behind a trove of journals, poems and scribbled thoughts. It was the kind of thing most families might quietly file away.
Jordan turned it into The Agonist, her first solo album since stepping away from All Sons & Daughters in 2016.
“I really feel like this is a co-write,” Jordan says. “He didn’t get to share his story. This is me doing that for him.”
The album isn’t worship music. It’s not Christian radio-friendly. It’s something different—an Americana concept record rooted in poetic fragments of a broken man’s life.
But for Jordan, The Agonist is as spiritual as anything she’s done before.
After nearly a decade on the road, she stepped back from the spotlight and into something slower. In 2016, she launched The Fold, a Nashville-based nonprofit supporting songwriters through retreats and community. Then came motherhood and seven years of co-writing behind the scenes.
“I knew I would come back eventually,” she says. “But I also knew it had to be for something deeply meaningful.”
That meaning emerged when her mother unearthed her estranged father’s writings after his death. What began as curiosity soon felt like a calling.
“Every little piece of poetry he wrote had a title that screamed ‘song’ to me,” Jordan says. “And the more I read, the more I realized: This man—flawed as he was—had something to say.”
She didn’t flinch at the messy parts. That was the point.
“He was an alcoholic. He abandoned his family. There’s darkness here,” she says. “But there’s beauty too. There’s redemption, even if it’s only posthumous.”
The title of the album came directly from a short story her grandfather wrote, where he referred to himself as “The Agonist.” It was a name loaded with ambiguity.
Was he the hero of his own story? The villain? Or just a man trying to make sense of a life defined by longing and regret?
“That word haunted me,” Jordan says. “It gave me a character, a framework. It opened up this whole world to explore who he was—not who we wanted him to be, but who he actually was.”
Jordan was deliberate in making the record feel cohesive, like a memoir set to strings and steel. She’s a self-proclaimed record purist who asks listeners to start at track one and go straight through.
“If we don’t love all the songs, why make an album?” she says. “This is a story. You’re meant to sit with it.”
The story took shape across years and continents. One pivotal moment came at a songwriting retreat in Northern Ireland, in a manor where C.S. Lewis allegedly wrote parts of The Chronicles of Narnia.
There, Jordan brought out the binder of her grandfather’s writings and paired up with songwriter Drew Kennedy and producer Davis Nash. They wrote “All Things,” which became the album’s final track and emotional core.
“That song became the anchor,” Jordan says. “From there, I knew—this is really happening.”
Over the years, she wrote 23 songs for the project, eventually narrowing it down to 10 for the final tracklist.
A companion book is set to release alongside the album, curated with her mother’s help. Each chapter includes the original writings that inspired the songs, alongside lyrics and family photos. Her mother even penned the foreword, which includes the poem her father once wrote for her as a child.
The process wasn’t just healing for Jordan—it was liberating for her mom.
For years, she had struggled to find a way to tell her own story, shaped and scarred by her father’s absence.
“She told me it felt like something dislodged,” Jordan says. “That now, she might finally be able to write her story too.”
This solo effort might be Jordan’s first in name, but she’s quick to point out she’s never been alone. Her collaborators—many of them close friends or writers from The Fold—helped shape the project’s direction.
“I’ve had a lot of really sweet companions along the way,” she says. “Their enthusiasm lit a fire in me to make this record happen.”
Compared to her earlier years in a duo, this season has been more stripped down and intentional. She’s not touring extensively. She’s not outsourcing the business side. She’s doing the work herself—because she wants to understand what that kind of labor really means.
“So many artists I know are doing it independently,” she says. “I didn’t want to forget what that takes.”
She already knows what’s next. A B-sides release featuring songs that didn’t make the final album is in the works. She’s also already writing for her next record.
She’s sticking with Americana—a genre that gives her space to explore stories that don’t fit into tidy boxes.
“Christian music was beautiful, but this feels like the right path for me now,” she says.
If The Agonist has a thesis, it’s this: Your story matters, even if it’s complicated. Especially if it’s complicated.
“Good art isn’t about being polished,” Jordan says. “It’s about being obedient to the truth.”
She pauses.
“My grandfather never got to share his story in public. But now, in some small way, he will. And maybe someone out there hears it and realizes their own mess isn’t the end. Maybe it’s just the beginning.”
