Wanting to Be Made New

Marissa Lorusso interviews Niko Stratis about her new book, “The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman.”

By Marrissa LorussoMay 12, 2025

• Music

• Memoir & Essay

IN 2007, A PITCHFORK review of Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky labeled the album with a new, snarky epithet: “dad-rock.” The term—describing the album’s “unapologetic straightforwardness” and singer Jeff Tweedy’s “direct and domestic” lyrics—stuck, and then was retrofitted around a very particular canon. Typically applied to artists like Steely Dan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Tom Petty, it has come to encompass the inoffensive, easygoing soft rock you’d picture blaring from the radio in a white, suburban, middle-American family’s station wagon while someone’s father waxes poetic about the good ol’ days and how they really don’t make ’em like this anymore.

Growing up in Whitehorse, Yukon, in the 1990s, Canadian writer Niko Stratis didn’t get that kind of musical preaching from her father. He kept to himself, she says, listening to music quietly on headphones if at all. Still, over time, music came to play a crucial role in her life and her self-definition—even if the options it offered her didn’t quite feel natural at first. When it came to music and culture, “my earliest lessons were always from men,” she writes in her new memoir, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. “Men I was eager to emulate in order to find some secret path to understanding myself as a collection of men’s parts and pieces gathered into a body that felt all together unbound.”

Eventually, Stratis fell in love with music that taught her important lessons about identity, embodiment, and relationships—and the gentle, nondidactic instruction she found in these songs is central to the cheeky, gender- and genre-defying definition of “dad rock” from which her book gets its title. Each chapter of her wide-ranging memoir—which chronicles her decades working as a journeyman glazier; multiple cross-country moves; bouts of depression, addiction, and heartbreak; and her eventual coming out as a trans woman—is rooted in one such song, comprising a lifelong mixtape of Radiohead, HAIM, R.E.M., Songs: Ohia, and more.

Ahead of the release of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, I spoke with Stratis about the importance of local record stores, Bruce Springsteen as a lesbian icon, and the cultural sea change around trans visibility in popular music.

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MARISSA LORUSSO: When I first heard about your book, I expected it to be filled with the most dadish of “dad rock”—and certainly you do have artists like Fleetwood Mac and Wilco in there. But your definition of “dad rock” is pretty expansive. How did you come to that conception?

NIKO STRATIS: I had the title first—I thought it was funny, and I have this weird tic with my work where if I think something is funny or, at first glance, kind of stupid, I will be like: okay, now I want to dig into it and see what is actually happening here. (That’s why I wrote about Jackass a bunch of years ago for Bitch.) So I wanted to do that for “dad rock.” I knew that people were going to be like, Oh, so you’re going to write about Steely Dan, or whatever. So I wanted to create a metric for myself of what I think dad rock is. I didn’t want it to be tied to gender or genre, so I thought: How do I break that up? I started thinking about this criteria, and I made long playlists, and I listened to them when I was walking my dog in the morning, and I made this framework for myself.

How would you describe that framework?

When I wrote about the Replacements, and I was writing about their definition of “dads” versus “fathers”—that difference comes up a couple of times throughout the book. So I was thinking: What makes a dad? And thinking about my own dad, and other dad figures that I’ve known, I had this flash of, like—a dad is never telling you what to do. He’s telling you: Hey, I have seen some shit. I have lived a chunk of life, and I have made a bunch of mistakes; I have been a bad person, and I have been a good person. I’m going to tell you where I’ve been; I’m going to show you a road map, and I’m going to point to all the spots in the map and say, “This is where I stumbled and fell.” And then I’m not going to tell you, “Don’t fall there.” I’m just going to show you where it happened, and hope that you have the skills when you reach those same stumbling blocks.

That’s the really loose definition I came up with. When I think of dad rock, this is what I’m thinking of: it has something to teach you but isn’t outright telling you what you should do.

Each chapter in the book focuses on a specific song and a specific slice of your life. What was the process like for choosing these particular songs?

Well, I made a really long playlist and then I started whittling it down. My process was really just that I would listen to these songs when I walked my dog, and if they weren’t conjuring a really vivid memory in my mind, I knew that it wasn’t going to work.

And the initial playlist was, basically: here’s every important dad rock song in my life?

Yeah, or like—what is a song that feels like it’s tethered to a moment in my life that I would wanna write about? I think it was 64 or 65 songs, and then I just slowly whittled it down. And then eventually, when it was close, I thought, Well, I want to sort of make it as a tape. I thought about when I used to make mixtapes, and I wanted this to be the specific length of a tape. So then it was just about making very judicious cuts.

Throughout the book, it becomes clear that it’s not just the songs themselves that impacted you; it’s also how and where you first encountered them. Sometimes that’s on the radio, or on a mixtape, or on a long highway drive. How did you think about that interaction between place and format when you were writing?

I really love that idea, because we’ve kind of lost this thing now, that where you encounter music is really important to how you attach yourself to it. You know, I grew up when the radio was really important—we didn’t have the internet yet—and so the radio and record stores were really important to me, and they’ve created a lot of really foundational memories for me. When I was trying to write through memories that were sometimes hazy, being able to ground them in, This is the store where I first bought one of their CDs, or, It was on this day that I first heard it on the radio—those things are really important to grounding those memories in reality.

I think it’s easy to take it for granted now, because it’s like: Oh, it came up on my Apple Music playlist, or whatever. That feels different from It was on the radio, or, Somebody made me a tape, or This person told me that I should listen to it.

There’s so much context about the artists that you love in the book; as much as it is a memoir, you’re also weaving in, for example, the backstory of several Mountain Goats records, or how Sharon Van Etten made Tramp (2012). How much research went into this book, and how much was just you drawing on your own long-term personal investment in these artists?

Kind of fifty-fifty. Some of them I knew just from, like, obsessive fandom—some artists that you’ve just been in love with for so long, you just know this backstory. And even if the backstory you know isn’t 100 percent true, you’ve told yourself this backstory.

So a lot of it is just, like, okay, this is what I think about this thing—and then, of course, you suddenly have 30 tabs open when you’re writing. But when I was formulating the outline, a lot of it was just drawing on: This what I know to be true—which is how I also wrote about my own life … and eventually I will ask someone else to corroborate.

You write about how, one day at work, you heard “I Wish I Was the Moon” by Neko Case on the radio—and then, years later, that experience is part of why your name is Niko. What was it that you heard in that song that was powerful enough that you wound up wanting to make it part of your identity?

I was inside of a vehicle covered in glass shards, kicking a windshield out, when I first heard that song. And her voice was the first thing that really hit me. I mean, she’s got that incredible voice—I feel like it’s a powerful weapon that is always being held back, just a little; if it was to fully let loose, it could destroy the world, and instead, she chooses to use it to make beauty. I couldn’t shake it, and I thought about it all day—like, I wrote [her name] down on my arm in Sharpie, and went home and thought about it.

And Neko Case became a part of my life so quickly afterward. I make a lot of seasonal playlists, and especially, growing up in the Yukon, shoulder seasons are important—because they only last for an afternoon before it’s winter again. And so many of her songs are key songs for a changing season. So I would think: Spring is coming up; I’m going to put this one Neko Case song on. She became a part of my yearly routines.

When I was trying to choose a name, it was a name that just spoke to me. I never really liked the name that I was given at birth, and saying “My name is Nico” was the first time I was like, Oh, this is a name that I’m supposed to have. She had just been such a part of my life for so long.

What about her music makes it so perfect for a shoulder season?

To me, shoulder seasons are sort of a breaking of habits—especially when you’re moving out of winter. Winter in the Yukon is extremely dark and cold and difficult, and when you move into summer, it is such a moment of breathing out, of relief. I think a lot of her music holds that same feeling—it’s dark and foreboding and sad, but it is also beautiful; it’s always yearning for something in the future. Even in sadness and somberness, it’s full of desire. I think that helps with trying to break out of yourself and move into the version of yourself you’re going to get to be for four or five months of the year.

Your chapter about Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” coincides with the moment of you coming out to your girlfriend. I think the average reader wouldn’t necessarily understand “the Boss”—this symbol of classic American masculinity—as such a perfect conduit for transfemininity. But those concepts really overlapped for you.

I’ve always thought of Springsteen as, like, the gayest straight man in the world—“Dancing in the Dark” especially. A lot of his early work is about searching for yourself in something. It’s funny, because he is always seen as this pillar of masculinity. But I think within that pillar, he has built this idea of, What if a man is strong and can fix a car and can drive on a highway, but he really yearns like a lesbian? Like the song “Drive All Night”: “I will drive all night/just to buy you some shoes”—that is not what a straight man would ever do for a woman! You know?

But I think just this idea of, If I’m going to be this picture of masculinity, how do I challenge that within myself? What is my perception of the self?—I’ve always felt that in Springsteen. There’s a lot of him looking at himself in the mirror and asking himself, Is this who I want to be? Who am I, and how do I exist in the world? Who am I onstage? And I think a lot of that comes out in “Dancing in the Dark.”

You know, he is a man of common misconceptions—including my own. When I first saw the cover of Born in the U.S.A. (1984), when I was a kid, I was like, Well, this is going to be terrible; there’s an American flag on here! It’s so over-the-top. And then when you listen to the music, you’re like: Oh yeah, you’re going through some shit. It wasn’t until I was a lot older that I knew what he was going through. When you think about him writing Nebraska (1982)—it’s so desperate for something to change, and to not always have to be the architect of that change, but just wanting to be made new—it’s such a visceral feeling.

When you were growing up (and to some extent, when I was growing up too) we were not hearing or seeing trans or queer musicians in the mainstream. And so you end up finding these slivers of identification: in the subtext of a song, or in mapping something unrelated onto your own experience. But today, young people can just go to Spotify and queue up a playlist entirely of queer artists. And that’s largely true of books, of TVs, of movies. How do you think about that cultural shift when you’re thinking about the music that raised you?

I think it’s great that kids can go into Spotify and type in “gay music” and they can get a bunch of really great playlists of queer artists. I think that’s fucking great! Because when I was a kid, that was not an option, for a thousand reasons. I think about when Sleater-Kinney was outed in Spin in 1997 and the fallout from that—queerness, any sort of otherness, in music was really looked down on when I was growing up. So sometimes all you have is whatever subtext you can find and you can build whatever map you want off of that. But we weren’t really given an opportunity to feel reflected in a very pointed way.

So, for young people now, they have queer artists; they have artists that talk about mental health struggles, or class struggles, that they can recognize in themselves. It is such a beautiful changing world—for as much of the ill of the internet and the algorithm and all these things, I do think it’s really great that kids have such an easier time going online and finding themselves. It means they don’t have to build a world that they’re not sure is ever going to be real, like I had to when I was younger. My nieces are all teenagers, and when I talk to my sister, she will always say, They don’t have to deal with the stuff that we had to deal with. They’re going to have an easier time. I think that’s really beautiful.

The more we give people who come from different backgrounds, the more we elevate trans artists and artists of color and queer artists—I think that only helps. I know we’re in a very challenging time for artists right now who aren’t easily slotted into a norm. But it is just such a beautiful thing when you see artists who are able to break through and find their audience and get to use their voice.

In the book’s final chapters, you’re living in Toronto, you’re walking your dog, you’re talking to your loved ones. It’s an incredibly peaceful place that we find you at, at the end of the book, especially given everything that you’ve described going through, and it’s soundtracked by the National and Waxahatchee. If we stretched out the timeline of the book a little further, hypothetically, into this current season of your life—the book-writing and book-promoting season—what song would form the backbone of this chapter?

Oh, that’s such a good question. Wow, would it be? You know, it’d probably be the Lemonheads. I don’t know why I’m saying that. That’s just the first idea that comes to mind. And I wrote the book on a lot of first thought, best thought! [Laughs.] That question is going to haunt me, though.

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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 such as Catapult, Spin, Paste, and more. She’s a Cancer, and a former smoker.

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Featured image: Photo of Niko Stratis by Alysha Haugen.