The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

De: Niko Stratis

Narrado por: Niko Stratis

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.

©2025 Niko Stratis (P)2025 Highbridge Audio

Sad but Sweet

Part memoir about the traumas of growing up in a rough hometown, part tribute to the place, family, music, and partners that made her who she is. The interlacing of discussion about music(ians) through stories made them easy to connect to, despite having a very different life from the author- perhaps due to being the same age, and therefore having a very similar soundtrack to those same stages of my life. The author’s reading of her stories made this an easy listen, even when the subject matter wasn’t so easy.