When Sharon Jones recorded “Retreat,” the first song off her new album, “Give the People What They Want,” out Tuesday, the singer intended it to be about a done-wrong lover declaring her freedom from a bad relationship.
But now, six months after the 58-year-old New Yorker began chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, the song has taken on a very different meaning.
“When I did ‘Retreat,’ I was telling this guy, ‘Don’t you mess with me, I’m coming in all strong,’ ” says Jones, who underwent her final chemotherapy session Dec. 31. “Now, it’s like I’m telling the cancer to retreat.”
The soul singer, who brings her band, the Dap-Kings, to the Beacon Theater on Feb. 6, considers herself lucky to be alive.
It all started when she developed back pains — during one concert, it felt like someone suddenly punched her. A medical checkup revealed Jones had bile duct cancer, which led doctors to remove her gall bladder, part of her pancreas and part of her small intestine.
Hoping surgery would resolve the issue, the musician instead was told eight days later the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes — and the diagnosis was changed to Stage Two pancreatic cancer.
“I really thought I was gonna die,” says Jones. “Pancreatic cancer is aggressive.”
She moved in with a nutritionist friend, who established a healthy diet for her, including a “green drink” that Jones consumes twice a day, despite not knowing what’s in it.
“Everything I’m eating is homegrown. It’s all organic,” she says. “I know where my eggs come from. Each time I eat a piece of steak, I know which farm and which cow it’s from.”
Jones also began weekly chemotherapy treatments in June. With that now winding down, she is excited about returning to the road.
“I’m coming back on stage a whole different person — a new Sharon,” she says. “The effects of the chemo. . . my hands turned black, my feet are black, my fingernails and toenails look bruised.”
At an October rehearsal at her label’s Daptone Studios in Bushwick, Jones showed that, no matter how worn down she is, her brilliance still shines through.
“When she came into the studio, there was definitely something frail and smaller about her. You could tell she was really sick,” says Gabe Roth, the Dap-Kings’ bassist and co-founder of Daptone Records.
“We started playing music, and the second she opened her mouth, you closed your eyes and you knew that she was unstoppable.”
Jones, a late-life success who recorded her first album in her mid-40s, now talks of retirement, saying that in eight or 10 years, she’d like to stop making music and revisit places she’s seen on the road as a tourist.
Another thing on her to-do list is seeing “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in which Jones and the Dap-Kings appear as a wedding band. She hasn’t been able to see the movie yet due to her illness.
“Martin Scorsese is a big fan of ours. I wore my gold dress that I wore at the ‘VH1 Divas,’ ” she recalls. “Jonah Hill was funny. He came in like, ‘I love you guys,’ and he grabbed the guitar and started to play for me. Leo [DiCaprio], you don’t talk to him when he’s doing a movie, because once he gets into character, he stays in character.”
Jones’ immediate concern is getting out on the road to perform the new album. In concert, she won’t wear wigs, so for a time, fans will see her bald from the chemo.
“I didn’t wanna lay around at home another nine months or year until I look decent,” she says.
“Being a musician is like being an athlete. You have to keep that muscle active . . . no matter what, I’m ready to go back out, and not to do it by myself, at home, hiding. I want everyone to see what I’m doing.”