Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's going to be a great week here on the show. We have some Broadway conversations planned. Tomorrow, we'll speak with some of the cast and creatives behind two Tony-nominated plays. John Proctor is the Villain and Good Night, and Good Luck. Later in the week, chef and entrepreneur Dominique Ansel will join us in studio to talk about his new bakery. Writer Carl Hiaasen will be here to talk about his new novel, Fever Beach. It tackles white supremacy, far-right extremism, dark money, billionaires, our polarized culture, and, of course, it takes place in Florida. That is in the future. Let's get this hour started with the life-saving power of dad rock.

[music]

Alison Stewart: If you're a certain age, chances are that a mixtape plays an important role in your history. It does for writer and cultural critic Niko Stratis. In her new memoir, she takes us on a mixtape journey of her life. We learn about her childhood in the Yukon, how she worked in construction, how she struggled with alcohol, loneliness, her gender identity. Above all, it's about the transformative power of music. It's titled The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. Niko Stratis joins me now to discuss. Niko, welcome to All Of It.

Niko Stratis: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Niko will be talking about her book tonight at 6:00 PM at Rough Trade, where she'll be in conversation with Maris Kreizman. For more information, head to roughtrade.com. How did you come up with the title of the book?

Niko Stratis: It came to me. It was one of those things. I had written it down on a piece of paper on my desk. When I was trying to think of the book that I was going to do because I had been asked to pitch this book for the series, and I remember just coming across this note that I must have written really early in the morning and thought it was funny. Then it was one of those things that just haunts you and follows you around. I kept coming back to it and then, eventually I was like, "Well, that's it right there." I don't know how I came up with that. I just know that I did at some point.

Alison Stewart: Well, how do you define dad rock?

Niko Stratis: It's funny. When I made the book, one of the first notes that I got back when it was done was they said, "Do you want to really clearly define what dad rock is in the book?" I said, "No." Then of course, now, people are very curious. I should have expected that. To me, I tried to create a modern definition for myself of what I thought dad rock was because so often is used as a pejorative. People are talking about it. They're talking about these things that they're making fun of in whatever way.

I wanted to steer it away from that. The best way I can describe it is this idea of a dad as somebody who is not trying to tell you how to live, but he is trying to, or they are, because I also tried to divorce it from gender. They are trying to tell you, "This is the road that I have traveled. These are the mistakes that I have made." Try to not fall where I have fallen. I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just showing you how you can live if you choose to live that way. That is part of it for me is this teaching through failure, which is a lot of how I learned in a lot of the jobs that I had.

Alison Stewart: That teaching through failure, explain that a little more. That's interesting.

Niko Stratis: I worked in construction for a really long time. I worked in my dad's glass shop. I started working for him when I was a teenager. I became a journeyman in my early 20s. A lot of the work was learning to be unafraid to fail. You can imagine working with glass with your hands for a living. Failing can mean a lot of dangerous things, but you also learn a lot.

From my years of doing that sort of work, I've got a lot of scars. I have pain issues. I have all of these things. Each one of them is a lesson and each one of them is, "Okay, so here's a thing I did wrong," because maybe I was being too careless or maybe I hadn't planned through what I was going to do. Maybe this is a lesson that I can store in myself and I can refer to later when I'm going to approach a similar thing later.

I think a lot of how I learned to do a lot of jobs was pretending I knew how to do them. When I started being a writer, I just pretended I knew what to do, and then I would eventually figure it out. I think I have now because I did a whole book, but I don't really know. A lot of it is just being willing to fail. If I do, knowing that that's going to teach me something about whatever I'm trying to do when I try to do it again.

Alison Stewart: Yes. It's interesting because a lot of your book is rooted in labor, right?

Niko Stratis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You worked with your hands. Your dad worked with his hand. He's a man of few words.

Niko Stratis: He is, yes.

Alison Stewart: How did working with him help you understand him?

Niko Stratis: My dad was one of those people that he was at work a lot. I didn't really get to know him terribly well, because when he was at home, he was at rest. He was recovering from long work days or whatever. Being able to work with him, I got to see him in an environment I never really knew was real, which was him at work, him talking to customers, solving problems, figuring things out, explaining his processes, knowing how my dad likes coffee.

All of these things became really important to my understanding of him. Now, he is a much more fully-realized person. I don't think I really figured out exactly how well I knew him until I started working on the book and realizing all of the lessons that I took away from my time working with him that have informed a lot of how I work now as a writer. A lot of the things I picked up from him in my younger years, I still approach my life that way.

I think just being able to be engrossed in an environment with him, wherein we became dependent on each other was a really fascinating way to get to know him because labor was so much part of his life. He started working in his dad's glass shop when he was 13. He's 71 years old now and he still works in that industry. I get to see him in the world that has shaped him.

Alison Stewart: What's something you learned working with him in the world of labor that you use now as a writer?

Niko Stratis: My dad has this thing he calls the "white shirt theory," wherein he wears a white shirt to the glass shop when we were more actively working in the shop. He doesn't do a lot of physical work anymore. He would try to stay clean all day. What that was was him trying to be intentional about everything that he does and trying not to rush and trying not to be sloppy or careless. Look, it is hard to have a white shirt stay clean when you're working with glass all day. Some days, you would do it. Some days, that's a real triumph. I think about that a lot of like, "Okay, try to not make so many mistakes today that when I get home, my shirt's the same color that it was when I woke up this morning."

Alison Stewart: Your book is dedicated to your parents, yes?

Niko Stratis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Have they read it?

Niko Stratis: My mom has. My dad, I'm not sure. My mom told me that when she was reading it, my dad said, "How do I come off in the book?" My mom said, "Really good." He laughed and said, "That's surprising." [laughs] By proxy, he's read it, I guess, but I don't know if he's poured into it yet or not.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking to Niko Stratis. Her memoir is titled The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, explores identity, music, and transformation. Each title draws from a different song. Some of my favorite songs are in this book. What inspired you to use the structure of a mixtape to lay this out?

Niko Stratis: I'm of the perfect age where making mixtapes was a formative experience for me, or getting mixtapes or stealing them from my sister because some guy made my sister a tape once. I think about that tape to this day. I know exactly the song that cut off at the end of Side A, which was Professor Booty by the Beastie Boys. I know exactly where that song cut off because the tape run out of time. Those things were really important to me because I have a very bad memory. I'm in my 40s. I've got a lot of trauma. I had years of alcohol abuse, so sometimes my memory is fuzzy.

A mixtape is a thing that binds a bunch of songs together in memory. Sometimes when I hear specific songs, I still hear the song that's supposed to come next because it was on one tape I had in 1998. To me, it was a way of taking all these memories and stringing them together in a way that felt cohesive and that it was trying to tell a story, because when I was making tapes so often, whether it was to myself or somebody else, I was trying to tell a story with the songs that I was collecting and putting through there, right? Did you have that experience?

Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh, yes.

Niko Stratis: When you're making playlists for yourself now, do you feel the same way?

Alison Stewart: I definitely feel the same way. When I think about mixtapes, I think about having something to wait for the song to come on the radio first of all. I'm there. I'm ready.

Niko Stratis: Holding the "Record" and the "Play" down just in case.

Alison Stewart: Just in case.

Niko Stratis: I know.

Alison Stewart: When I think back on them, I think of them like collages a little bit. Also, I have a memory of young love. It's like you made a mixtape for someone. It could be a friend.

Niko Stratis: Sure.

Alison Stewart: Your best friend, or it could be a boy--

Niko Stratis: That's still love.

Alison Stewart: It's about love when I thought about it.

Niko Stratis: My partner, Alicia, who is listening, who is here in the green room with me, who came down this trip to New York with me, she has a binder that is a collection of every tape that she ever made or was made for her. It's a track list and it's all these things. It is a collection of love. Whether it's platonic or romantic or whatever, it is a collection of stories about the people that you have loved.

Alison Stewart: Did you have songs that you knew you wanted to write about and you picked the titles and you wrote something with them, or did you have your feelings and then you went and defined the songs to fit those feelings?

Niko Stratis: I had a bunch of songs that I knew I wanted. I made a really long playlist that I started whittling down. It was kind of 50-50. There was some where it was, "Okay, I want to tell this specific story. What do I know that fits into this category of dad rock that I have created? What songs do I think fit in that?" For some, I would choose a couple, and then I would listen to them. I would take my dog on walks early in the morning and I would listen to all the songs. If it didn't work in my head, if it didn't conjure a specific memory, I would cut it away. It's this long process of making playlists and slowly removing songs from them. There were some that I was very particular about wanting like The Waterboys, Fisherman's Blues, it starts off.

Alison Stewart: Love that.

Niko Stratis: That was a big song for my dad. I was like, "That is how this needs to start." I knew that from the get-go. Others, they changed over time like when I chose Man on the Moon by REM. Initially, I was going to do Nightswimming, which I think is an easier option, but then I was like, "Man on the Moon is really the song for me, so I'm going to change this and I'm going to figure out why." It turns out it made more sense to go that way, but it was a little bit of that process.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of R.E.M., Man on the Moon, and we'll talk about it on the other side.

[MUSIC - R.E.M.: Man on the Moon]

Tell me, are you locked in the punch?

Hey Andy are you goofing on Elvis?

Hey, baby.

Are we losing touch?

If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon.

If you believe there's nothing up my sleeve, then nothing is cool.

Moses went walking with the staff of wood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Newton got beaned by the apple good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alison Stewart: Why was that song important to you?

Niko Stratis: I really like how it is both kind of dark and somber but also whimsical and cheeky. It was a song that, from what I understand, Michael Stipe struggled to find the lyrics for at first. It took him a little bit to arrive at what it was about, which I understand as a writer sometimes. Sometimes I would have this essay that I was going to put in the book and I knew what it was about, but I couldn't figure out how to start it.

The story that I understood about him writing Man on the Moon was being around Seattle and having the bed tracks and walking around listening to them and then eventually just comes into focus. I think that is really key to, at least, my practice. Again, I'm making up that I know how to do any of this at all. I really like this idea. I just love this Automatic for the People that that song is on. So much of that album is about this transition into adulthood. It's about loss and it's about all these ideas. A lot of it is very dark.

Man on the Moon is kind of dark in its own way. The Andy Kaufman story that it references multiple times is dark and whimsical and strange all at once. I love that all of those things exist because I think a band like R.E.M., you can look at them and write them as they're these self-serious art people, or they're sad or they're whatever. I think they contain so many multitudes. I think Man on the Moon is such a good snapshot of the multitudes in their work.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Niko Stratis. Her memoir is titled The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. You grew up in Canada?

Niko Stratis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: In the Yukon Territory. How did that shape your relationship to music?

Niko Stratis: It was all I had. When I tell people I'm from the Yukon, most people know the Yukon as a term they use when they want to describe being in the middle of absolute nowhere, which is almost true. There's not a city that's close to that I could drive to. I lived there. Music was a portal for me into worlds that I wanted to believe could possibly be real if I ever got old enough that I could leave, or that if I survived long enough, I could maybe go see like coming to New York City. This is my first time in New York. I'm 42. I don't know. I'm in my 40s.

Alison Stewart: Well, welcome.

Niko Stratis: Thank you so much. When I would listen to songs and listen-- Look, New York is storied in music. It allowed me to envision it and imagine this idea of this place and wonder like, "What if?" There was all these things that I knew about myself that I was scared of and hiding away. Those were real, or at least the possibility of them were real in songs.

You could envelop yourself in these things and say, "What if these were real enough to sustain me until they can become real?" A lot of it was just allowing myself to live in these worlds that I created through listening to. I was a very introverted, very awkward kid. I would just keep my headphones on and listen to music and allow myself to believe that I could be real someday.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the chapter, Want to Change My Clothes, My Hair, My Face.

Niko Stratis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Page 177. It's a lyric from a Bruce Springsteen song. You write that lyric followed you from room to room.

Niko Stratis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did that song say to you?

Niko Stratis: I love Springsteen so much because I love that he has this juxtaposition of the idea of him, which is the machismo, the Americanism, excuse me, the nationalism of them all. Especially on the Annie Leibovitz cover of Born in the USA. Dancing in the Dark is this perfect snapshot of Bruce as a man who had a lot of yearning. In the book, I call him the gayest straight man in the world because there is a lot of desire that doesn't feel very heterosexual to me.

There is a lot of yearning. There's a lot of questioning of yourself. Dancing in the Dark is a perfect song for that of, it is this self-doubt brought alive. It is this idea of every time I see myself reflected, I don't know who this person is. This was very real to me as a person who started to really disassociate when I would look at myself and reflections of myself. This was at the time that I'm writing about in this essay. My alcoholism was really getting to a bad place.

When I would see myself in the mirror, I was often swaying like a boat in murky waters. This idea of want to change my clothes, my hair, my face, that spoke to me in my trans heart very clearly of, "Oh, there's other people that feel this way. Bruce Springsteen feels this way." If there's anybody who should never be worried about how good he looks, it's Bruce Springsteen at any age. Especially Bruce Springsteen Born in the USA era, come on.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You said in other interviews that this is not a trans memoir. Why is it important for you to say that?

Niko Stratis: Partially, I think the trans memoir is so easy to-- you want it to be this not a self-help thing, but you want it to be this satisfying thing of, "I was sad, and then it transitioned, and then I was fixed. Look how great I am." I don't think that's real. I always talk about transition and getting sober as being parallel lines, wherein there were both things I did that I thought this would be the thing that fixes me. It turns out it wasn't.

It, in fact, allowed me to face reality in a way that I-- Nobody really wants to ever face reality. Let's be real. It forced me to look at reality and say, "Okay, if I want to survive, I have to start dealing with these things." I'm still dealing with them now. I've been out as trans for almost 10 years. I'm still dealing with a lot of realities about myself. Same as I've been sober for six-ish years and it's the same thing with that. I wanted to reflect all of the things that built me to the point that I was at.

I intentionally made the transition happen very late in the book because I think my experience in labor, I grew up lower, middle-class, working-class people. All of those things were very important to me and they were very real. They're almost more real to me than being trans. I'm lucky right now where being trans is not a thing I have to think about all the time. It is a thing that I have done, but it is not a thing that is all-consuming to me. My experiences in labor, my experiences growing up poor, my experiences growing up in the north, all of these things really inform who I am almost more than being trans. I wanted to incorporate all these ideas into one and think, "Well, how can this be multifaceted?"

Alison Stewart: Why did you decide to get sober?

Niko Stratis: Because it was becoming a problem and it wasn't going to allow me to be alive anymore. I write about it a little bit in the book. The day that I decided to quit, we had had a welcoming party for me at a house I was living in at the time. It was a fantastic night, great night. Woke up the next morning, wanted to die. I thought, "I can't keep living like this. This is untenable." Eventually, this dark thought that I wake up with will win.

I need to fight against the darkness here a little bit. I decided that morning that I was going to quit. I walked down the street and got a tattoo. I smoked three packs of cigarettes and listened to Dwight Yoakam [laughs] and I decided, "Okay, I'm going to see how far I can walk this road." I've been doing it for six-ish years now. It was just this desire to, "What if I don't wake up and think about dying every morning?" I sometimes still do. This is the hard part of like, look, some of that was just my brain, but some of it was exasperated by this thing that was just pushing me to the edge. I thought, "Well, what if I try to intentionally keep myself back a little bit?"

Alison Stewart: Can I see your tattoo? Is it on your arm?

Niko Stratis: It is on my arm. It's funny. I have a lot of them. It is on my arm. I'm just going to take my jacket off here.

Alison Stewart: Oh okay, cool.

Niko Stratis: Radio listeners, I'm removing my jacket.

Alison Stewart: Niko Stratis is removing her jacket.

Niko Stratis: I have a harpy on my right arm who is self-obsessed and looking at a vision of herself in the mirror.

Alison Stewart: Oh, she's beautiful.

Niko Stratis: She's really nice. I got it on a morning in Toronto, where I live now, by a trans tattoo artist in Toronto. My family heritage is somewhat Greek. I wanted to have this. A lot of my tattoos are silly and I thought, "What if I have a more real one, something that's more grounded in reality?" That's what that is.

Alison Stewart: Niko Stratis. Her book is called The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. She'll be speaking tonight at 6:00 PM at Rough Trade. For more information, head to roughtrade.com. Did writing this book change the way you felt about any of the musicians or any of the songs?

Niko Stratis: It deepened my connection to a lot of them, for sure. I wrote about Neko Case in the book. Part of where my name comes from is from Neko Case. It really gave me a deeper appreciation for her. Her memoir was announced after I had finished writing the book entirely.

Alison Stewart: It's such a good memoir.

Niko Stratis: I haven't been able to read it yet because I hadn't read it by the time I wrote the essay that features her. I thought, "Oh no, what if I got something wrong?" I didn't know because I hadn't read this book yet. I think she's just such a brilliant and beautiful writer. Reading more about her life and the stories that had informed her work were really formative. Sometimes I would read these things as research. I would just sit with them for a while.

This was the nice thing about being able to have the time to work on a book like this is you do just get to-- As a person who works and worked in labor for a long time, now, my job seems fake most of the time. Part of my job is just researching things and looking at the internet. That should not be real. It was this beautiful thing of like, "Well, I'm just going to read about the mountain goats for 10 hours today because I need to in order to be able to write this 6,000-word essay about them."

Alison Stewart: If you were growing up today, what current music or musician do you think would have had this kind of power over you to transform you?

Niko Stratis: If I was growing up today? That is a really good question. [sighs] Somebody like Chappell Roan, I think, is really nice. My nieces are really starting to get into it. I have three teenage nieces, which is great because I get to know what kids are listening to. I say "kids." They're teenagers. Somebody like her, I think, is just so fascinating. Somebody like that when I was younger would have been so helpful. Somebody that was so direct in the way that they speak about things that feel important to me. There wasn't a lot of that.

There was a lot of posturing when I was younger. I was a teenager in the '90s, and then I was in my early 20s in what we called the indie sleaze era for a couple of years there. A lot of posturing in those areas, right? A lot of subterfuge. I love a lot of the directness in a lot of artists now like even a Taylor Swift, who I've often described myself as Taylor Swift agnostic. I think a lot of the endearing nature of her and the earnestness in a lot of that work, I think, is really important and informative for a lot of people.

Alison Stewart: I've come around on Taylor Swift.

Niko Stratis: I think a lot of pop music is so fascinating now because a lot of it is really earnest. When I was a kid, pop music was big and bold and boisterous. Now, it has become this thing where you're selling this earnest idea of yourself, which I find very fascinating.

Alison Stewart: It is yourself and you're selling it. It's what you are.

Niko Stratis: Sure. It's exactly what I'm doing as a person who wrote a memoir, right?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Niko Stratis: I'm selling the idea of myself and the earnestness of myself.

Alison Stewart: Last Friday's show, we had the playwright, Sarah Ruhl, on to talk about her book, Lessons from Teachers. Listeners called in to shout out the lessons the teachers gave us. We got this text and I wonder what you think about it. It says, "My sixth-grade teacher had us analyze the song American Pie as literature. It taught me the meaning is found everywhere. I've carried that lesson with me throughout my life." Why do you think people find meaning in songs?

Niko Stratis: Not everybody does, which is sad. Sometimes when I talk to people about some songs, they will be surprised that there was anything to be read in there at all. Even Man on the Moon, people are surprised sometimes that there's something to be read into that. American Pie, same thing. American Pie is a song that really incorporates and talks about a lot of different things. A lot of them are dense texts that actually leave a lot of things for the listener to take off and decipher.

When I was a kid, when I was really into something, I would go ride my bike down to the library. I would take out books and I would read about them. I would become obsessed with them. I think a lot of it is inviting the listener or the audience to become invested in something and to make it their own and create that personal connection. I think in order to do that, you do need to start finding layers and depths and texture in these things that become your own, so that when you're talking to people and trading facts like currency, you have these things that you know and believe about this music. That stuff, I think, is really important.

Alison Stewart: I have been speaking with Niko Stratis, the author of the new book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman. You can see more of Niko tonight. She'll be talking about her book with Maris Kreizman at 6:00 PM at Rough Trade. For more information, head to roughtrade.com. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Niko Stratis: Thank you so much for having me. What a lovely time.