HighBridge Audio

Skip to Main Content »

Category Navigation:

Search Site
This site will be sunset soon. Please visit our new site at https://rbmediaglobal.com for continued access and updates!
 

The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Social Sciences
Unabridged   8.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 05/06/2025

NEW! Now Available

The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Digital Download ISBN:9781696619240

Summary

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

Be the first to review this product
Email to a Friend


Product Description

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

When Wilco's 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as "dad rock," Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad's glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock's emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.

In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe's allusions to queer longing, Radiohead's embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen's very trans desire to "change my clothes my hair my face"—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis's own who embody the tenderness at the genre's heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.

Reviews/Praise

"In a gentle voice tinged with strength, humor, and vulnerability, [Niko Stratis] shares stories as a kind of "soundtrack of my life," weaving commentary on popular music with her experiences as a trans woman." —AudioFile

Author Bio

Niko Stratis is an award-winning writer from Toronto by way of the Yukon, where she spent years working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as trans in her thirties and being forced to abandon her previous line of work. Her writing has appeared in publications like Catapult, Spin, Paste, and more.