“Fight for Your Life”: Montreal Blues and Gospel Singer Hagiel Turns Her Hardest Battles into a Powerful Debut EP
Hagiel’s very first memory is a dance. She was a little girl wrapped in her mother’s arms, swaying around the living room to whatever happened to be spinning on the radio or the record player. That moment sparked a lifelong love affair with music, and it reaches its fullest expression yet with I Am Enough of a Woman, the Montreal singer’s debut EP, led by the soaring new single “Fight for Your Life.” Born in a small French village near Quebec City and now based in Montreal, the Black Canadian artist, also known as Analoga, blends blues, rock, and gospel with her Caribbean and African roots and a generous dose of French-Canadian flair. Across six songs, she sings about survival, faith, heartbreak, and freedom with a voice shaped by years in one of Montreal’s most celebrated gospel choirs.
“Fight for Your Life,” cowritten and produced by award-winning songwriter Mark Zubek, comes from the hardest stretch of her life. “The single ‘Fight For Your Life’ was written after I was exhausted by all the hospital stays and literally fighting for the life I wanted and the truth after having a physical sickness, violence and always being considered a mental case,” Hagiel says. “I just wanted my freedom and to heal. I have been forced to stop all my projects many times, like music, video, film and acting so many times. I just found it unfair.” The song turns that exhaustion into a rallying cry. “Fight for your life, the struggle is real,” she sings, before landing on one of the EP’s most hopeful lines: “And no, my dreams were never put on hold / They were only put on pause for a while.” The title track goes back even further to the end of a toxic relationship in 2003, and the project almost carried a different name until a songwriting teacher heard something special in one line. Faith runs through the record too, with the gospel stomper “Praise Your Way Out” born in a hospital room after listening to Dr. Juanita Bynum’s testimony. That song made the semi-finals of the 2024 Unsigned Only competition in the Christian category and reached the semi-finals of the 2020 International Songwriting Competition. Hagiel has been performing professionally since 2009 and calls her years with the People’s Gospel Choir of Montreal transformative, having sung backing vocals on Nadja’s Christmas album, added vocals to a song for Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block at the Bell Centre, and been chosen as one of just 140 singers from more than 5,000 hopefuls for the blind auditions of La Voix in 2012. “I am concentrating on music because it has always been natural, less harsh as a process. I often sing instinctively. It is a visceral need,” she says. With I Am Enough of a Woman, Hagiel is living the words she keeps close to her heart from the film Mademoiselle C: “You are the artist of your own life.”
‘I Am Enough of a Woman’ Track Listing:
“I Am Enough of a Woman”
“Turned Around Me”
“Fight for Your Life”
“Born to Rock Like No Morrison”
“Survivors”
“Praise Your Way Out”
Courtesy of
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