A Memoir Shows Us How Music Can Change Our Lives

• The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman
• Niko Stratis
• University of Texas Press (2025)

[Editor’s note: This story contains depictions of physical violence and abuse involving young people.]

We’re on the eve of a federal election in which anti-trans rhetoric has been a conservative talking point and used as a cultural wedge issue. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s rigid views on gender seem to go hand in hand with his ongoing fixation with women’s biological clocks.

Transphobia and misogyny shape each other. They seem to overlap in contexts where people fear what they might lose if things change.

Niko Stratis grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon in the 1990s. Her youth was marked by violence rooted in contempt for both queer folks and women. There was the staff member who choked her in the aisle, and later beat her up in the stock room of the grocery store where she worked as a teen. The kids who jumped her by the Yukon River while she was walking home from school. And the everyday, normalized violence she witnessed among the adults who formed her community.

“I was always told the Yukon was where the men were men, and the women were too. I knew what I was supposed to be, and I knew the version of myself lying in secret, this screaming pit inside me where I threw the queerest parts of my soul to hide away,” Stratis writes in The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman, publishing May 6.

“I wanted to believe that I could be tender and soft and edging on sappy, and I wanted someone to show me that was possible.”

Stratis’s memoir offers a bold vision for tenderness, healing and hope. The latest in the American Music Series of non-fiction books about pop music published by University of Texas Press, Dad Rock will be a balm for anyone who has felt at odds with their circumstances and found a way to survive them through music.

Organized like a mixtape, the book’s essays explore the early chapters of Stratis’s life against the backdrop of the songs, specifically the dad rock that shaped them.

Dad rock is an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek descriptor applied to bands like Wilco, REM, Built to Spill, The National, Pearl Jam and more — bands whose best days may now be behind them, and whose music may now be principally enjoyed by older listeners, specifically dads. Their lyrics and compositional approaches to rock music evoke nostalgia among listeners for their tenderness and sensitivity. Stratis’s essays follow her youth in Whitehorse, her young adulthood as a journeyman glazier and more recent years in Toronto, where she now lives.

Why dad rock? It’s a smart way of poking holes in the cool kids’ club that has, in some circles, come to define music journalism. Stratis, to her credit, refuses to be part of it. And dad rock lends itself to an extended meditation of what a man can be, which Stratis weaves across her writing that explores her trans identity.

Of her own father and dad rock, Stratis writes, “He shows great love with tender actions when I am unaware I need support to hold the walls of my heart in place. He has lived a life that has seen hard and difficult corners but arrived with a spirit tempered by survival.”

“Dad rock,” she adds, “exemplifies this ideal, an earnest spirit made quiet and calm, finally able to breathe out and share words of gentle encouragement on how to keep going.”

‘Music and the sound of the world can haunt you forever’

It might be easy to underestimate dad rock, or tempting to make fun of the cultural touchstones that one might assume are the domain of people barbecuing in the suburbs or driving their trucks across rural highways. But Dad Rock is all kinds of interesting because it invites readers to consider the social, economic and political forces that shape our tastes.

The emotional range of the music that defines the dad rock canon offers an expansive view of masculinity, one that chips away at and provides a counterweight to the social norms that create the conditions for patriarchal violence and queerphobia. Stratis’s writing is a reminder of why the best music journalism is, at heart, always about more than the bands.

Critically acclaimed dad rock forerunners like Songs: Ohia, the Mountain Goats and Bruce Springsteen appear in the book. But the genius of Dad Rock lies not in its coverage of celebrities like The National’s Matt Berninger or Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, though there’s plenty of great material for fans of both and more; it’s in how Stratis invites readers to revisit and rethink what they know.

In returning to her youth in Whitehorse, she turns to songs that have been on mainstream radio for years and have found a home in the cultural consciousness of people across North America. Singles like Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” and The Wallflowers’ “One Headlight.”

“This is where I first fell in love with the way that music and the sound of the world can haunt you forever,” she writes of The Wallflowers’ breakout 1997 single, which she first heard on the speakers of the grocery store where she stocked shelves. “The work would often feel soul crushing, and banal, and demeaning. But if the right song came on at the right time, your day was saved, even just for four minutes.”

The most affecting scenes in the book are the ones that follow Stratis at work. Her writing offers incisive reflections on class, jobs and the forces that shape our relationships to work, rest and substance use. Following the footsteps of her dad before becoming a writer, Stratis worked as glass cutter for years.

One standout essay finds Stratis in her car on a cold October morning in Whitehorse. She’s parked in the empty lot of a shopping mall, early for her shift at a clothing store called Men’s World. She is drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette and listening to “Fake Plastic Trees” from Radiohead’s 1995 album The Bends.

“I was about to leave high school and had only just started to make friends,” she writes of that time. “I never let them see the real me, the me sitting in this car smoking cigarettes when I knew no one would see me, listening to Radiohead and feeling like I was building a lie that I could not maintain forever.”

The brilliance of The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman rests in how it makes space for kids like young Stratis to feel seen. Many might see themselves on a cold morning like that, contemplating the disconnect between who they know they are and how they are known by those around them.

This is a time when we’re seeing increasing hostilities towards trans people. Several Canadian musicians have cancelled their 2025 tour dates in the U.S. in response to Donald Trump’s updated visa rules that recognize only two sexes, and only the sex that someone was assigned at birth. These changes are taking place alongside a rapidly cratering media landscape. Stratis’s work, and culture writing more broadly, is becoming an increasingly rarified yet necessary discipline.

This is work and a livelihood that deserves protection and support. Culture writing helps us see ourselves and those around us more clearly. The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman demonstrates how critically engaging with music offers us a path towards understanding each other better by making space for the pop culture that offers a window to our souls. In a political context that can and will erode the soul, this book is a welcome reminder of how music can change your life.