The call came between recording sessions. “They were using words like malignant, which scared the hell out of me. Those second tracking sessions were more emotional for me, personally,” he says. The artist – who has dueted with Lucinda Williams, been profiled in the New York Times, performed on NPR World Cafe, and seen his songs covered by Keith Richards, Irma Thomas, Levon Helm, and Todd Snider (in Hard Working Americans) – is talking about his throat cancer diagnosis during the making of unapologetic rock & roll record The In Between, his seventh album and his first full-length since 2018’s acclaimed Tilt & Shine. With guitars, drums, and bass completed for most tracks but vocals for only one or two, the sessions had to go on indefinite pause while Gordon underwent radiation and chemotherapy. Rolling Stone called him a “juke joint professor” while its sister webpage Rolling Stone Country termed his music “gripping.” Associated Press has called his music “brilliance… mesmerizing.” The Nashville Scene and Premiere Guitar both opined that his last album Tilt & Shine may have been the best album out of Nashville, TN in 2018. The New York Times, in a full profile under the headline “A Musician Or a Poet? Yes to Both,” characterized his music as “an often harrowing tour of the back-roads South,” a theme that continues on the new album The In Between. Now cancer-free and with his voice miraculously unchanged, the songs and performances on the album crackle and spark with life.