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For Leslie Jordan, it was the hymnal, not the radio, that soundtracked life in rural Tennessee.

“There was so much comfort in those old songs,” says Jordan. “I’d sing them out loud with the congregation on Sunday mornings, and then softer to myself on the weekdays in between.”

With that comfort, though, came conflict. Growing up gay and Baptist in 1960’s Tennessee was challenging, to say the least, and while the Emmy Award-winning actor ultimately left the church as a teenager, he held onto those timeless hymns like a lifeline, clutching them close to his heart every step of the way on his unlikely path to Hollywood stardom. Now, at 65, Jordan is breathing new life into the music that raised him, teaming up with an all-star cast of duet partners including Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, Brandi Carlile, Chris and Morgane Stapleton, TJ Osborne, and Katie Pruitt, among others, to release his debut album, Company’s Comin’. Helmed by Nashville songwriters/multi- instrumentalists Travis Howard (Miranda Lambert, Dierks Bentley) and Danny Myrick (Tim McGraw, Jason Aldean), the collection is a joyous affair, playfully mixing righteous gospel, classic country, and vintage soul as it celebrates the power of song to bring us together and make us whole. While many of the tracks here are more than a century old, the arrangements are modern and vibrant, fueled by loose, spontaneous performances from a powerhouse band whose ecstatic energy serves as a perfect complement to Jordan’s boundless effervescence. Bold and gleeful, it’s a debut album a lifetime in the making, a feel-good collection all about love and trust, hope and faith, consolation and community, delivered by an artist coming full circle on his own personal journey of self- discovery and acceptance.

“Singing these songs, it felt like I was recapturing the joy of what this music meant to me as a kid,” says Jordan, “but without all the baggage. When I was growing up, I wanted so badly to be a good Christian, but I knew that the church would never accept me for who I was. It’s liberating now to come back to these hymns, completely at peace with myself, and sing without any hint of the guilt or shame I felt in my youth.”

Best known for his breakout role as Beverley Leslie on the iconic sitcom Will and Grace, Jordan has appeared everywhere from American Horror Story and Desperate Housewives to The Help and RuPaul’s Drag Race (you can currently find him starring in the new FOX sitcom Call Me Kat), but a life in show business was the last thing on his mind growing up in Chattanooga. In fact, it was horses that captured Jordan’s heart as a youngster, and his small stature and slight frame led him to initially pursue a career as a jockey.

“I rode horses my whole life,” Jordan explains, “and I found work as an exercise rider after I left Tennessee. I did that for years and years until one day, suddenly I was 27, and I realized that I couldn’t just keep riding horses forever.”

So Jordan returned to Chattanooga to enroll at the University of Tennessee, where he stumbled into the drama department in search of an easy A. Instead, he found a calling, one that would lead him to a new life in Los Angeles and a critically acclaimed three-and- a-half decade career on stage and screen. The road wasn’t always smooth—Jordan wrestled with drug and alcohol abuse for years—but the ups and downs eventually led him to a deeper understanding of himself.

“I got sober when I was 42,” he explains, “and I remember when I started going to meetings, it felt like going back to church without all the judgment. It was in recovery that I realized that shame was the basis of my substance abuse issues. I grew up with a lot of internalized homophobia, and it wasn’t until I got clean that I was able to begin the healing process and become comfortable with my true self.”

While Jordan’s larger-than-life personality and instantly recognizable southern drawl have always managed to shine through in his various acting roles, it was social media that enabled fans around the world to get to know—and fall in love with—the real Leslie. After joining Instagram, Jordan’s popularity on the platform skyrocketed, particularly during the pandemic, when his hilarious slice-of-life videos helped him rack up more than five million followers in a matter of months. Profiles everywhere from the New York Times to the Washington Post followed, along with raves from CNN, Buzzfeed, and countless more. The New Yorker called him “the ideal quarantine companion,” while the BBC dubbed him “a lockdown Instagram hit,” and The Today Show described his videos as “a beacon of funny in the darkness.” As the pandemic stretched on and the news seemed to worsen with each passing day, Jordan returned to the music that had brought him so much solace over the years, and, with a little encouragement, began sharing his performances with the world via social media.

“My dear friend Travis Howard and I would get together on Sundays to sing these old hymns just because we loved them,” says Jordan. “Somewhere along the way, my business partner, Mike Lotus, took a real interest in what we were doing and started looking up and learning about every old Baptist hymn he could find. I think he realized, like we did, that the songs held something brilliant about the human condition and were a deep comfort to anyone who heard them, religious or not. He started posting our performances online, and the response was just incredible.”

Soon after, Jordan and Lotus were in Nashville, watching in amazement as Howard and Myrick led a crew of the city’s finest players through raw, electrifying takes on a mix of vintage gospel tunes and brand new originals written just for the occasion. For Jordan, whose only previous musical training was a stint in the Chattanooga Boys Choir, the experience was both thrilling and intimidating.

“The first time I got into the vocal booth, I started freaking out,” he says with a laugh. “I got so nervous that I was overthinking everything. But eventually, we realized that we just needed to get me back to the basics, singing for the fun of it in Travis’s house like we did on Sundays. Once we set up there, I started feeling loose and comfortable, like I could be myself again, and everything just fell into place.”

That comfort is key to the appeal of Company’s Comin', which radiates down home warmth and sincerity from the moment Jordan opens his mouth. While some of the tracks were tunes Jordan grew up singing (like “Sweet By & By” and “This Little Light Of Mine”), others were brand new to him, and his delight in discovering the songs is palpable.

“Leslie’s voice is the voice of my homeland, of deep Southern ancestors long gone,” says Howard. “Leslie, Danny, and I all grew up going to church three times a week, and the singing lasted as long as the preaching most services. After enough years of that, you learn the language of that music even if you don’t know a particular song. It’s in your bones. And if you give Leslie a safe environment, he finds those memories and brings them right back to life all on his own.”

Jordan ad-libs throughout the album, calling out between lines and delivering each tune like he’s singing on the front porch with an old friend. His performances here are infused with a joy so infectious that each of the album’s special guests can’t help but reciprocate when it’s their turn in the spotlight. Brandi Carlile lights up the room on a soaring rendition of “Angel Band;” Chris and Morgane Stapleton raise the rafters on the uplifting “Farther Along;” Dolly Parton dazzles on a stirring performance of “Where The Soul Never Dies;” and Tanya Tucker elevates an exhilarating rendition of “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.”

“One of the things I love most about this album is the kinship I feel with everyone who sings on it,” says Jordan. “Everyone has a similar story to me in some sense. Maybe they didn’t all grow up gay in the South, but they know what it feels like to not be accepted for who you are.”

Like Jordan, they also know the simple joy these hymns can bring, their ability to conjure a world in which peace and brotherhood reign and misfits and outcasts are welcomed with open arms. They offer light in the darkness, warmth in the cold, hope in the face of despair. For more than a hundred years, these songs have guided listeners through struggle and hardship and war and depression and yes, even global pandemics. They’re the soundtrack to the human experience, and as Leslie Jordan has found, there’s nothing more comforting than that.