On Music | Interview with Niko Stratis

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.

Amy Keating: Hi Niko! Thank you so much for your time. I must be a fangirl first and let you know I’ve been following your work for some time and I am thrilled to be talking to you today. There are so many exciting themes in “Dad Rock” that I want to ask you about! Though, I’m going to begin with a bit of a bummer question because lately I am so often thinking about grief and mental wellness amongst my peers. When you discuss Jason Molina’s Farewell Transmission in your essay We’re all Supposed to Try, you capture your own memories with the song and you also present bits of Molina’s story. But I was moved by how careful you were to discuss his life and work without overly romanticizing his struggles, while still acknowledging the reality that he lived with alcoholism and ultimately died quite young.

Thinking about this in any political climate is difficult. Can you speak a little bit more about this in the context of 2026?

Niko Stratis: You know, it’s interesting. That essay was a late addition to the book. When I finished the drafting process, I was asked for one more essay. Of course, I wrote like, three. I was thinking about Jason Molina and realized it was surprising that I hadn’t yet included him.

Often when people died the way he did, and create the work they do they are given this one-note read. We think oh it’s very sad because we know they struggled with addiction or mental health problems. We read them through this lens rather than through the work they made, so we can easily lose track of what they are trying to do and say about the world around them. Farewell Transmission is often read as a sad song because Molina is gone, but the lyric is “we’re all supposed to try.” It’s about trying to learn and keep going, how to survive in the world. It’s actually a hopeful song written by someone who just happened to have died.

I was thinking about how these ideas have been exasperated in the year since the book has been released. More and more people are edged further out of society by tech oligarchs and capitalism. But, we’re all supposed to try. We’re here to fight and push forward.

And – we’re not here to be read as the surface-level things people want to put upon us, you know? Like, I am so often seen as a trans woman before anything else and I don’t want that to be the case. When we do this, we write people off. For Molina, we diminish him to being sad or an alcoholic. When actually, he died because of a lot of systemic issues. He died because sometimes that’s what happens. But the work he created exists in this world and can be used as lessons to interpret our lives, communities, and relationships. We can look at this and say: we’re all supposed to try.

AK [already struck for words]: Absolutely.

NS: Part of the “Dad Rock” of it all is to capture the lessons people leave through their work to help you better understand the world. But it’s not here to hit you over the head, it’s there to guide the way, because they have also walked down a similar path. The role of the dad exists outside of gender: its somebody who uses their experience to give you an easier way through.

I also keep thinking of this line in my head: just because they died doesn’t mean they failed. It doesn’t mean Molina’s work pushing against the system was a failure. It just means his time came. People unfortunately die, sometimes way too soon. That doesn’t mean that what he was trying to do didn’t work.

AK: I love that very much. I have witnessed a lot of very wise and sensitive artists struggling recently. Pushing back is part of their strength even if it doesn’t appear “successful” in a typical sense. I also think about this a lot and how we value the work of artists and creatives. Writing and music are quite connected for me. What is your writing process like and do you incorporate music somehow? Do you have specific songs or genres for particular stages in your process?

NS: For writing, music definitely helps! For the songs I use in the book’s essays, I made a long playlist and went out for walks with my dog or whatever. I would listen to the songs, if they were conjuring strong mental images, I knew they worked. Often they are like ciphers back into my past. I need them to be visceral reminders in order to work.

I will listen to music as I write but it has to be something I know quite well because I can’t be drawn out by a new song or hook. It’s usually something like skate punk records from when I was a teen in the 90s or maybe its 70s Japanese Jazz, which I’ve been getting into lately, or videogame soundtracks, something that’s atmospheric and helps me focus because my ADHD meds haven’t kicked in yet. I write in the morning because I have a lot of creative energy for doing so.

AK: I really appreciate how music can transport us and take us back into these charged or emotionally rich places, especially when we bring up those songs we’ve listened to time and again.

NS: You know, I’m not a very good artist, but I feel like if you put some watercolours in my hands and I’m listening to the right song, I could accurately paint the living room in our house from the late 80s. After my sister read the book, she texted me and said “I haven’t thought about the way our living room looked in 20 years. But you perfectly, accurately described it.” Because when I am listening to certain songs, I can see it.

The book opens with an essay about Fisherman’s Blues by the Water Boys and I chose that because when I listen, I can see how the world used to be. It creates such a vivid memory. I could tell you every detail of that living room: what it smelled like, where the sun was coming in through the window.

AK: Oooh! That’s beautiful. That’s like—that’s the writer-artist in you, too! Being able to bring out those moments.

NS: Otherwise, I don’t remember much at all. I have a decently bad long-term memory because I drank so much for a long time. You know, that creates a lot of potholes in your memory. Luckily, music helps me claw my way back there.

AK: Music is magical that way.

I am considering the importance of memory as someone who writes about your personal life – growing, making mistakes, hurting others, being hurt. How do you grapple with when it feels appropriate to publish something?

Simultaneously, there are a lot of demanding issues that require people to speak out about them – especially regarding queer and trans rights. How do you manage these disparate time-frames? How do they effect what and when you decide to put something into the world?

NS: I want to know I’ve properly processed something before sharing it with strangers. I don’t want feedback to get to me. If something is raw and I share it and someone has a visceral reaction, good or bad, that feels like a lot. I’m processing my own stuff, I don’t want to process someone else’s feelings about it at the same time.

Nothing in the book is very recent because I liked having that distance – knowing that I’ve thought it through and now I am willing to share. When my ex-girlfriend saw my book coming out, I said to her “oh yeah, I guess I should have told you I write about you.” She said she figured I would have but wasn’t upset about it. So I constantly check in on my relationships: Is this right? Will this hurt someone else? Will it hurt me? If people react negatively will I feel really bad?

It also depends on the story, too, you know? If something has some sort of prescience because of what’s going on in the world, sometimes I respond more immediately. Sometimes its fairly innocuous, sometimes a bit more heavy-handed. But it’s always kind of a gamble talking about the world right now, especially with queer and trans issues. So often we’re expected to perform our trauma so they can see how “bad” our life is; but how come nobody every wants me to perform how good my life is?

So often we’re asked to farm our real-world experiences just to get a headline so we can make—what? $174 on an article that doesn’t really mean anything? What does this change for anybody? Who is this helping? Who is this serving beyond some website that’s going to make a bunch of money from the click-throughs on your piece.

There are many factors at play: am I traumatizing myself for money? Will this hurt someone else too?

I’m constantly checking in with myself, even after a book is published. Did I include all the stories I should have? Should I have taken stuff out? Should I have pulled some punches? Or hit harder? How do I make myself multi-dimensional? How do I present myself as something more than trans or, you know, an alcoholic? How do I take this fluid idea of a person that grows and changes over time – I’m 43! I’ve been a lot of different people – how do I represent that in a way that feels real?

Sometimes, I don’t recognize myself in my memories anymore, so I can’t write them because they don’t feel like mine. My partner and I went back to my parents in the Yukon a few years ago. I had left some things there and we took it to the dump; at one point my partner looked at me and was like “it’s like your brother died and we’re finally cleaning out his apartment.” Because it was all this shit I didn’t want anymore because I had no connection to it. It was somebody else’s life and I was finally getting rid of it. Things that were once so important to this person—to that person, they’re gone now.

AK: I mean, it gets really existential.

NS: Oh, yeah.

AK: I think about some stages in my life in similar ways. Sometimes I’ll go back home to visit my parents and someone from my past won’t recognize me. It feels disjointed. And then I leave parts of myself at home, too.

NS: Yeah, or people from your past will talk to you like they’re talking to an old version of you that isn’t there any more. I don’t go home all that often, but then I’ll run into someone talking to the person I was 20 years ago, it’s just like, well you’re talking to a ghost, pal! Hah! Like, I don’t know who and what we’re talking about—I have no responses to any of this.

AK: While thinking about different parts of self, I’m also reminded of the ways identity shows up in the music industry. In “Dad Rock” you write about a few artists I was personally thrilled to see in the book. Neko Case, especially. She is one of my all-times.

NS: The Best.

AK: The kind of poet, songwriter and storyteller that speaks to your soul. I’ve always found her to be quite cheeky and pointed when it comes to her experiences of being a woman in the industry. Some of her lyrics show a complicated relationship to femininity and power and making her way through a misogynistic landscape. Yet she never lets anyone reduce her to being a “Woman in Music.”

I had the joy of seeing her at Massey Hall this past October! I’ll never forget how she spoke in awe of a younger generation of artists who are trans and non-binary and women and they inspire her to like, take no-shit, in ways maybe she couldn’t early in her career. We’re tired of a generic “women-in-music” conversation. But honestly – the artists with diverse genders end up being inherently more interesting to me. How can we honour this conversation with the complexity it deserves? I know this is a BIG question.

NS: No, I mean, I love it. First, I’m jealous of seeing her at Massey Hall, what a treat that would be. I’ve never actually seen Neko perform live and I would love to.

You know, it is a very misogynistic creative industry. It’s in music. It’s all over. But like, the “women in music” trope… How do we create an industry that lets people exist outside of these archetypes? How do we give these artists space to be creative and free without being reduced to women in music or trans in music?

I always get annoyed by PR pitches for an artist that says they’re trans before they say anything else. That becomes all you see. Maybe the thinking is this will make it through an email filter so that their identity stands out. But I want to know about the music! We need a landscape where identity doesn’t matter and yet we still get opportunities. In order to do this, we have to dismantle the already existing patriarchy. Until then, we have to have things like annoyingly gendered categories for awards. Otherwise, guaranteed most of the nominees would be men! They created the “women’s” category so we can begin this work so eventually people don’t have to lead with their identities. But unfortunately now we are forcing everybody to perform identities to such a degree because that becomes the wedge that opens the door.

AK: It feels like an unintended consequence of considering the importance of how identity shapes our experience of the world. It’s also quite tokenizing.

NS: And so often marginalized people are held to an impossible standard, right? Because they become the paragons of their identity categories or whatever. When they fuck up, society is harder on them than they would be for a white guy who fucks up and gets a softer hand.

You know, we need to create a better system where people can fail! It all comes back to this idea that we’re all supposed to try! Trying inherently involves failure, and then it’s like, well who is actually allowed to fail? We always focus on creating equal opportunities for success, but we need to create opportunity for people to fail, to know that failure is not the end! Failure won’t cast them aside entirely!  Until everybody can equally fail, not everybody can equally succeed!

AK: Yes! Its the creative process. The mistakes you make, the bad draft…

NS: Totally.

AK: Singing badly.

NS: I worked with glass for a long time and you end up with a lot of cuts on your body when you work with glass. For a while, I couldn’t cut my hand with a regular knife because my skin had become so tough. I just no longer bled. But – I had to go to the hospital! I was stitched back together a lot of times! It involves a steady process of failing to learn how to get through, to circumvent the danger, to know the path forward.

Giving people an opportunity to fail is the only way they’re ever going to learn how to succeed. We need to focus on that!

So I guess that’s my sermon on failure! But, I do think about it a lot. Failure is an integral part of being alive. We don’t celebrate it nearly enough. I’m a moderate success by a lot of standards, but I am also like, a massive failure. And I think being a massive failure is important. It makes every body a better person.

AK: It really does! Failure is the process.

I also want to say that I resonate with some of your experiences growing-up in a working-class family. With my toe very slightly and very tenuously in the academic sphere, for better or worse, I notice such a stark difference in my upbringing, especially when it comes to etiquette or professionalism—this is knowledge that is taken for granted if you grew up around white-collar professionals or people with money. How does this show up for you?

NS: You know, I think about this a lot. I’ve been writing about this in my newsletter lately and I’m sketching out a novel about my time in glasswork. You know, writing is still working-class work. It’s just very different.

My dad is in his 70s and still works at a glass shop. My grandfather worked in one until he died. My mom is also chronically ill and hasn’t worked since the 90s. I grew up in a single-income working-class family, which informs everything I do. I didn’t graduate from high school or go to college. I went to trade school and was a journeyman by the time I was 21 years old, that’s the extent of my academic background. I read a lot, you know. I could read and write before kindergarten. But people expected differently from me because I didn’t have a family who was intellectual or came from money. The expectation for me was lower. I see a lot of this now. Because I didn’t go to college, I didn’t have connections when I started writing.

I still have to fight my way through the door because people like me aren’t supposed to have jobs like this. We’re supposed to fix your window and be big stupid grunts that can work with their hands but aren’t good for much else – because of the way we have perceived people that work with their hands. Often they would tell me if I didn’t perform better in school, I would “end up” like my dad. Well, my dad could support an entire family? So how is that a bad thing? His job was dangled like a carrot on a stick against me.

AK: Mmmm.

NS: I never told him that. But that was often the case. So I think about my responsibility now, as a writer talking about working class stuff.

People like me don’t often get the opportunities that I have. I am fortunate to have what I do. The right people saw my work at the right time and that has changed my entire career. Because we get cast off as though we don’t deserve this work, right? We didn’t get an education, didn’t have the right connections, or right families. We didn’t deserve to do, what my dad calls “soft-hand work.”

My brother-in-law worked in the glass shop for a summer before he and my sister went away to college. He would come back into the shop and my dad would be like, “Soft-Hands is coming in, better be careful!” You know?

I think about that all the time as writer, like, Big day at the Soft-Hands Office.

AK: Haha! To exactly this point, my friend in grad school once commented on a new philosophy student who was quite timid and when they shook hands my friend thought: “now those are the hands of a thinker.”

NS: That’s true! And so often the perception of working-class people is based on how we are portrayed in media: the working-class person becomes a real person if he’s got a folded novel in his back-pocket, or whatever. I noticed this while watching Moonstruck for the first time with my partner a couple years ago. Nicolas Cage’s character is a working-class bread-maker but he also gets this beautiful apartment and loves the opera. It’s never presented as shock that he likes these things, but you so rarely get that.

So now, as a writer and creative person, often it is expected I like certain things. But I still like stuff that is “low-brow” and it doesn’t make me any more or less smart than someone else. I don’t need to constantly quote philosophers to prove my intelligence. Often there is an expectation for us to perform our intelligence to validate my work. I can do all this stuff without much of an education to speak of. I didn’t learn anything useful at school, I learned from reading books. Most of my teachers didn’t teach me shit. I had a French teach who tried to tell us “vegetable” in French was “LE VEGETABLE,” so like, what did I actually learn there?

Sorry to say this to an academic–

AK [Already nodding in agreement because you can trash academia to me anytime you want]: Please!

NS:–but every now and then academics talk down to me in funny ways, reminding me that I worked a labor job before I became a writer. I don’t hide that I am a glassworker by trade—I wrote a whole-ass book about it! I’m pitching a second one now! You see me differently because I don’t have this station. I don’t have additional letters after my name. I’ve just got the letters I put there.

Somebody told me once they can see the mistakes in my writing, but they know I don’t have the education to tell me otherwise. It’s like, well, no. Sometimes those mistakes are intentional. Sometimes I want run-on sentences! I fuck around with form and style because I don’t know the rules and I don’t care to follow them. I know the rules to be published. But I also want to break form and that’s okay!

Another woman emailed once saying “you write essays like a poet.” She was trying to tear me down a bit, but I was like “well that’s the nicest thing you could say, who wants to write essays like an essay?” Even though, yes that is my job—look! I failed high school and still somehow chose essays as a career, but still, I want them to be interesting!

AK: Yes!

NS: My favourite writers are the ones who do that.

AK: Me too, playing outside of what’s “proper” or expected in order to be more lyrical or enjoyable or evoke the feeling of hearing someone talk or an inner monologue. There is so much more to grasp onto.

I want to ask about music again, though. In the book, you talk about moments when you listen to mixtapes or songs while in a vehicle, driving or moving across the country, down from the Yukon, to Toronto. Something about the movement you capture reminds me of musicians on tour. I also think about the communities in these places and their relationships to art and music. Do you see a connection here?

NS: I think music sounds different in movement than when you’re still. I don’t have a vehicle now, but I used to like driving around and listening to music. It feels different and your relationship to the song can change. I have specific relationships to songs; like, there are songs that are best for listening to while driving around in the dark and then rain because that’s when it feels real. That’s when the song hits.

Music also tells the story of where you’ve been and where you’ve gone. It helps you to bridge these places. I also think it helps create stories in those places. We so often forget about the smaller towns in this country. People live in these places and they have a lot of stories. Music gives places a form, in some way or another. It can be through a local band’s sound or through a song that reminds you of a place.

I am extremely fortunate to have seen a lot of the country. Music connects me to those places. It tells the stories of people you might never consider at all. Once somebody said they could tell I really liked John Sampson’s work through my writing. That’s what John does with songwriting. He gives stories to all of these small places and people; the towns you drive by and never consider. We can create a lasting memory of these places so they can continue to be real.

When I think about musc in Canada, I don’t just think about Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Saskatchewan is also real and I perceive it through the music I have listened to when I’m there. We live in a strange, vast place. So often we are only seen as the East Coast, Toronto, and then Vancouver…

I also can’t imagine doing a drive and not listening to music the entire way. It creates the memory of that too, whether its a road trip with friends or you’re going somewhere with purpose!

AK: This is all so resonant to me. Right now I am based in London, Ontario and its frequently looked over. Often we hear about artists or writers who chase more metropolitan cities in order to find artistic success. But there is a community of artists and musicians here that is quite remarkable. And we’re proud of our shitty city—said with affection!

There are cool people here working to cultivate our own culture and celebrate the artists we have right here. We gotta share art across communities but also develop our own niche styles and sounds. Because punk music from London sounds different than Peterborough or Sudbury or Whitehorse.

NS: My partner who lives in Toronto, and plays in a band called By Divine Right, grew up in Saskatchewan and started booking shows there. Now and then she finds this treasure trove of forgotten Saskatchewan bands that were big in Saskatchewan, but not anywhere else. It’s always so fun to listen to that stuff. As you say, there is a specific sound. I worked in the music industry in a former life and you know, often we would get bands from Toronto, or people who wanted to sound like a band from Montreal, when Montreal was really hot, or the heyday of the East Coast and Halifax scene. But your sound is unique to where you live! Often it’s a class thing. Punk rock is working class, so what are the working class people in your area making and how are they living there? How is this reflected in the media and art that makes it unique? THEN you start to paint an accurate portrait of this country.

I lived in Alberta in the 2000s and Alberta punk-rock sounds so different to me than Vancouver or the Toronto punk scene at the time. There are disparate little scenes that paint a vivid portrait of the people who live here. If we celebrated all of this stuff the way that—well, even look at the US! And the UK. They both celebrate the regionalist differences across local cultures. We often talk about Canadian music – well no! Bands in Manitoba sound different than they do in Alberta, than in Nunavut, than in the Northwest Territories!

We have to let our regionalism be loud and be proud of, as you say, our shitty town. Like, yeah, I’m from that shitty town! I hate it. But if somebody says anything bad about Whitehorse, I’m like well, fuck you! you’ve never been there, we have two McDonalds and I can tell you which one is the good one! Yeah it sucks, but it’s my place!

AK: It’s my home and that’s where all my friends hang out! And they make cool art and sometimes shitty art too!

NS: Yeah sometimes its sucks, but at least it’s of a place. Good or bad doesn’t matter! Does your art reflect a place? Or are you just trying to be good enough to go to Toronto? You gotta try building a local scene. The more people do that, the better the industry gets! There’s a regionalism to that.

AK: When I first moved to London for school I learned the university campus and the core of the town are quite siloed from one another. So my first year here, I didn’t know what to explore and I hated it. But then, I slowly found all of the artists, townies, queers, and punks. Once I did that I realized oooh okay! There are cool people everywhere, sometimes you just have to look for them! All of my friends here take pride in making our place just a little bit better to be in.

NS: Yeah if you don’t involve yourself in your community, big or small, it will never feel like home! Because it doesn’t belong to you. It only belongs to you by being involved or finding something that speaks to that. Music is such a big part of that. Music builds community, and community builds place!

AK: It really does! And musicians and artists are like queer and trans people, we’re everywhere. Look for each other you can usually find one another, we don’t only exist in Toronto.

NS: But if you’re in a small town and you’re trans, you know, the one other trans person will definitely know who you are. When I came out in Whitehorse, there wasn’t another trans woman. I was the one.

AK: No one else.

NS: So you know, it was easy to find me, because you knew where I was.

AK: Haha! This reminds me of how I noticed in your acknowledgements you give thanks to Ivan Coyote.

NS: Yeah, sure! Hah! Well Ivan’s the other trans person, yeah.

AK: They’re someone who has spent some time in London, too. I have had the pleasure of seeing them read a few times. I’m a big fan, they’re also a role model for me!

NS: They’re incredible. So good. Yeah, I had a little acknowledgement to Ivan. In their book Care Of, I’m the last letter. It’s a book of correspondence and I’m the last letter in the book. Ivan had been reading it to me as they were working on it. Reading me the letters and their responses as they wrote them. They were like, oh I need one more letter and then I said, what about a letter between me and you?

It’s different there now, since I left but.. yeah, we’re like the two trans people from the Yukon.

AK: When someone asks if you know the other transperson you have no choice but to say yes, you do.

NS: Yeah, we’ve got the Yukon covered. We got the whole collection.

AK + NS: laughing.

Amy Keating

Amy is a settler feminist educator, writer, musician and arts researcher situated near Deshkan Ziibi (Antler River) originally from Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, ON). They endeavour to collect stories and compose songs, poems, and essays about the art and music of queer life/lives across Turtle Island.