When E.R. Fightmaster pings onto my computer screen, my eyes can’t help but roam over the home studio behind them, looking for clues. Bathed in California sunlight, a drumkit sits under colourful posters. What appears to be a Tree of Life tapestry hangs high – dark, russet leaves float around a strong centre. Verdant and life-giving.
It’s a serious, tranquil environment, and dear reader, when you hear the debut FIGHTMASTER album, Tolerance (out June 5), it will make sense why this is the room of its birth.
E.R. Fightmaster is an actor, musician and model who makes music under the name FIGHTMASTER. And before you ask, yes, that is their real name. After releasing two consecutive EPs with 2023’s Violence and 2024’s Bloodshed Baby, Tolerance is their debut full-length album that sees the heartthrob asking, what is it like to grow old in a queer body?
Before they hit the road, touring with Lucy Dacus and Lord Huron, as well as performing headline shows across the U.S., Cold sat down with E.R. to go behind the scenes on their songwriting process, their relationship with their younger audiences and how they’ve learned to write about exes with kindness.
The Cold Magazine (CM): So the album is complete, but the tour is yet to begin. You’re on the precipice of something new here. How’s it all coming together?
E.R. Fightmaster (ERF): It’s going really well. We have so many different shows to prepare for because the timing is kind of bizarre. We’ve got singles coming out while we’re on the road, a couple before we leave, and then the album actually comes out during the final leg of the tour on June 5th.
The dates supporting Lucy Dacus have a completely different running order from our headline dates, and those are completely different from Kilby Block Party, which is different again from the Lord Huron shows. So we’re relearning everything – the old songs, the new album, some covers – trying to be ready for whatever the crowd needs. It’s fun.
CM: How does it feel knowing the album will come out while you’re still touring it?
ERF: It feels nice knowing the album will be out for the Lord Huron dates. When we play Red Rocks, the album will finally be out, and we’re excited to play the new stuff properly.
We’re never phasing out the old songs – I don’t have a big enough discography for that yet – but we are getting to phase in the new material. Playing somewhere like Red Rocks feels like a summit in our minds. It feels like we’re ramping towards something.
CM: The album feels incredibly personal, and almost confessional. Does performing the songs live before release soften the vulnerability of finally putting them out into the world?
ERF: It’s weird because at live shows, people aren’t necessarily hearing every lyric. If I see an artist for the first time, I might not fully catch the words at all.
And one of the things I really love about this album is the lyricism. I want to give people sneak peeks, but I also want the songs to mean as much as they can to folks. So I’m trying to find that balance between wanting to play them immediately and wanting them to really land.
CM: The lyricism is so intricate and revealing, here. I normally cover literature for Cold, and honestly, I approached this album almost like a collection of short stories.
ERF: That’s the cool part. I co-produced almost everything on the album, but production isn’t really the fun thing for me to talk about. Production feels private, like everyone wants to see your tattoo, but nobody needs to know how long you sat for it.
But lyricism continually fascinates me because lyrics often beat my own processing to the punch. So I will be feeling something out loud long before I actually understand what it means.
There’s a song on the album called “Move Through”, and at the time I wrote the song, I did not feel that enlightened about learning to love someone where they’re at. But now that the song is out, it;s become a mantra for me.
CM: “Move Through” was one of my favourites. Tell me more about how your relationship with that song has changed since writing it.
ERF: It was a strange song because it came together in fragments. Some songs spill out all at once, but this one took time. I had all these separate chunks of writing that didn’t fully make sense on their own.
I had this line – “How many ways can we set each other free?” – and every time I sang it, it didn’t feel honest. Because there’s grief in setting someone free. There’s grief in losing control.
Eventually all these separate pieces started fitting together like puzzle pieces. The song ended up feeling honest because it reflects different stages of grieving and loving someone truthfully.
CM: You’ve said before that you know a song is good when it hurts a little bit. Is pain your marker for honesty?
ERF: Yeah, because hurting is so specific. I was watching an Instagram video today where a baby said their first word, and I do not know this baby, but it hurt my heart. I immediately started to cry.
There’s this chest pain that happens when something is deeply honest. I don’t want to get too woo-woo about it, but I think that feeling is a direct line to your inner child. When I’m writing honestly, that’s who I’m writing through.
So if I open up and it hurts, or if I hear it and it hurts, I know we’re on the path together
CM: What made you want to go so deep and personal for your first full-length album?
ERF: Well, I don’t really know what else there is to write about.
Songwriting is the quickest way to get to the truth with yourself. I’ll be alone in my studio, playing some chord progression, and suddenly I’ll feel that pang. Then the stories come out. It feels like therapy for me.
Even a song like “Glide”, which is honestly just me being horny while playing a cool bassline, still came from instinct. My whole process is me sitting alone for a long time an dplaying music until a truth pours out.
CM: So at what point do you know that a song is finished?
ERF: That’s a good question. This is actually a production note. The way I know a song is finished is when I find the right harmony, and I always save harmonies for the very last day.
I’m not trying to be a music dork about this, but I’ll sit there for hours trying to find the one harmony that suddenly makes the song click emotionally. Once I hear that missing note, I know the song is done.
And to be fair, some of them really are bizarre. My poor keys player has had to learn all these harmonies for these songs and he’s like, “you’re a freak.”
CM: Between songwriting and production, when does making an album become a communal effort?
ERF: I am a little controlling about the music. When I write a song, I’ve already heard it. It already exists.
That’s actually why I learned production for this album. I really wanted to go to producers with more than a voice note, and it was really rewarding because the people that I worked with on Tolerance had a very clear vision of what I wanted. All the producers I worked with, I really love their brains.
But I think I have to protect the idea first, because there is like an energy to each of these songs that can really quickly slip away from you if you let it. But for me, the songs were too personal to let them slip.
CM: What song was the most slippery? Which one kept trying to get away from you?
ERF: “Press Release”, I think. I made it with Gabe Goodman, and, you know, Gabe and I were finding our flow and Gabe was adding all these cool components to the song.
But something wasn’t working for me. We let that song sit for like five months and I just got avoidant. But I eventually went back to the recording that I made in this little room and found this little bass riff that was so prevalent in the demo.
And I called Gabe, I played him the bass riff, and then we put it into the song,and then, suddenly, I liked “Press Release.”
CM: So many artists would agree with you, I think. You can stay in the edit forever, but you always end up going back to the original thing you wrote in a fever in your notes app.
ERF: Yeah. I like that a lot.
CM: This album does have that sense that it’s been ripped out of your Notes app, but in the best way possible. There’s a real tenderness to the way you write about relationships.
ERF: The older I get, the more responsibility I feel to honour stories with kindness.
I never want an ex, or a friend or a lover to listen to a song and feel that I’m communicating aggression.
The confessional nature of my writing is much more about how I feel, while trying to balance the fact that how I feel is not the only story.
“Quicksand” makes me cry all the time because it really does honour both sides. It’s full of admissions like, “we tried our best, but we’re selfish; we’re missing each other; we’re fighting past each other.” I think it’s like one of the more honest pieces of art I’ve written.
CM: Your previous projects, Violence and Bloodshed Baby, feel very different to Tolerance. Even just the titles ring such different tones. What made you go for such a different title for your debut?
ERF: Ageing is cool.
Violence was written while I was falling in love, and you can hear it. There’s aggression and sexuality and playfulness there that I don’t think I’ll ever replicate exactly. But I was not at the peak of my maturity.
And then when I was writing Bloodshed, I was finally feeling safe enough as an adult to really delve into some like long-standing personal grief. That album is so angry and grief-stricken, but ultimately brave, I think.
And now Tolerance is about self-discovery, and figure out which things I cannot tolerate because they’re destroying me, versus what I’m refusing to tolerate because I don’t want to grow.
I’m getting older and I’m getting more soft, I think.
CM: Kindness and softness are often dismissed as boring or unsexy ideas to tackle in art, but this album shows how emotionally complex, and radical, these themes can really be.
E.R. Fightmaster: I really appreciate that.
I was actually talking to a friend recently about whether audiences respond more to positivity or negativity. I was explaining that like I feel really reclusive right now because I’m about to go on tour and I feel such a responsibility to my audience to give them as much of my joy as I can. And she was very kindly like, “You don’t need to do that, audiences respond to negativity all the time.”
But even when I’m singing songs about rage or grief, I want them filtered through joy. If I’m singing “Bloodshed Baby”, and I’m taking about war and defending queer community against fucking transphobes, I’m experiencing joy with my audience still because we’re talking about fighting together.
I’m not trying to give people rage. I’m trying to give them community.
That takes processing .I feel when I’m in private, I’m very quick to anger. But, publicly, as a very visible queer person, I’m trying to actually relay an alternate option to anger.
CM: You speak a lot about responsibility, especially towards younger queer audiences.
ERF: I’ve been performing live comedy since I was 19, so I learned a lot about audiences through that.
But now, when I’m on stage, I’m constantly watching the crowd, especially young queer people, trying to figure out what they need. And when I can give that to them, I do feel high. I feel very accomplished.
Sometimes kids come to the shows alone, and afterwards, when I’m meeting them, I’ll be like, “is this your friend?”
And they’re like, “it is now!” That’s part of the high.
CM: A lot of artists reject labels like “queer artist”, but you seem to embrace it completely. Were you ever reluctant to attach that label to your music?
ERF: I love this question because I hate that shit.
I hate when artists say, “I’m not a queer artist, I want a wider audience.”
I want a queer fucking audience.
If straight people that are awesome show up, that’s great, and they’re more than welcome to be there, but my first priority is the queer community.
I’m a queer artist. I’m a non-binary trans person. My priority is serving my community responsibly, giving them representation that they can watch on TV, writing TV shows for them where my voice is infused in a way that makes them feel like they can see a version of themselves.
I love them, and serving them is the thing I get to do that I am most proud of. So I am a queer artist first.
CM: That’s beautiful, and so refreshing to hear. Often, when artists say these things about appealing to a broader audience, it does feel like a rejection
ERF: And for what? Who are you pandering to? An audience that doesn’t want you to be a queer artist?
CM: Exactly. You’ve also talked about becoming a “queer elder”, or at least beginning to see that path ahead. Talk to me about that.
ERF: A lot of queer people my age talk about the lack of queer elders because of what happened during the AIDS crisis and because we have higher rates of death, for lack of a better way to say that.
And so I think the folks in my age range are taking on more responsibility than we might have normally if we had a greater wealth of queer elders. I think that takes an element of recklessness out of it.
I’m not going on stage as a white boy recklessly saying whatever I want and doing whatever I want and being like, “fuck the law.”
Even if I’m the same age as some of the folks in the audience, I’m maybe one of the first queer people they ever got to see on TV. And whether or not that makes me old enough to be an elder, it still puts me in a position in their mind of authority, even.
Yeah, so I have to approach that with a level of responsibility that maybe is not sexy, but I do feel precious about it
CM: Do you have queer elders you look up to?
ERF: Absolutely. Some of first real queer people that I had access to in my life were in Chicago, studying gender studies.
The first people that I was falling in love with being like, “whoa, these are the coolest people on earth”, were butches in Chicago with their like big fucking belts and their big wide hips and their cuffed jeans and their shaved heads.
The first queers that I saw were the ones that were like outside of the last dyke bar in the city, and those are still my heroes. I still want to make them proud.
Abby McEnany is one of those people. She ended up getting a show called “Work in Progress” on Showtime and it was the first time I’d ever seen a butch like Abby on TV.
CM: Finally: what do you hope people take away from Tolerance?
ERF: Outside of the real assholes and abusers, most people are trying very hard to love themselves and each other with the measure of gracefulness that they can afford.
And usually that appears very graceless. I think we would have a better world if we could look at each other’s gracelessness and see in it the attempts at grace.
Because there’s so much to love about so many people, and there’s so much to love about the people even that we lose, whether it’s a breakup or, whatever else.
You learned something about them and yourself, you loved something about them, and that really is the whole point.
It’s a gift that you can never take away from each other.
That’s what I hope people take away.