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LAURA JANE GRACE navigates a whirlwind of life-changing events and creative bursts in her latest album ‘Hole In My Head,’ capturing the essence of living fast and embracing the chaos. Check out our latest Upset cover story.
Words: Alexander Bradley.
Photos: Bella Peterson.
Laura Jane Grace has been making up for lost time. Living fast and getting older. “It’s been kind of fucking crazy, to say the least,” she admits and smiles. “But it has been good.”
She got engaged over Thanksgiving following a good, old-fashioned, head-over-heels whirlwind romance with the comedian Paris Campbell. Married by Christmas. Followed by a honeymoon. Then she played some shows in Greece. Recorded a song with two members of the Greek punk band Despite Everything. Then, a car accident later that week back home in the US. She got a couple of tattoos. Recorded an EP in Mississippi. Jammed with Dinosaur Jr and members of Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill and Patti Smith Band for a project. “Just wild fucking times,” she adds while reeling off the list of events.
What else? Well, she was also given the keys to the city of Gainesville, Florida, and she had a whole day dedicated to her in October. And she caught Covid for the fourth time, too.
Despite the odd drunk driver and bout of Covid, though, there is no stopping her at the moment. The car crash did have her momentarily considering whether it was the universe telling her to reign it in a little bit, but there seems to be a kind of runaway train energy behind her at the moment.
The music is already back piling and so when it comes to catching up to discuss her latest release, the “new” album feels stuck in the past tense. It’s been about a year since ‘Hole In My Head’ was finished, but, as detailed, she’s lived a life in the last 12 months. Still, while choosing not to bitch too much about the glacial progress of her record label in getting this album out, Laura assures that she still recognises herself on these songs.
“It is still representative of me,” she begins. “I think maybe it also demonstrates to you what you see is not always reality and that there’s more depth than if you’re just following someone’s life on social media.
“But, yeah, definitely a lot has happened since recording it,” she concedes.
The album started to take shape in 2021 and was written on the road while taking on those first tentative solo shows that followed the pandemic. It was finally recorded in St. Louis, a city new to Laura but a city that she quickly felt at home in and, in her opinion, imbued itself into the bones of the album.
Written in middle-of-nowhere hotels, unmemorable backstages and airport lounges, much of this album has already been tested live on audiences around the world. In fact, some tracks for this album have spent almost three years cycling in and out of Laura’s setlist. It’s a reverse from the norm, but for Laura, it takes a lot of the pressure off.
“It is a good feeling when you’ve written a record on the road and already know how all the songs work live and to feel confident in them in that way. That’s the best feeling when you’re releasing a record, as opposed to worrying that, ‘Oh, I hope these songs work live’. It’s like, ‘No, they’re all good’. They work live. So I just hope people like the recordings of them,” she says.
“I don’t feel like my brain is my friend most of the time. It says terrible things to me”
Laura Jane Grace
Those recordings are the snapshot of Laura Jane Grace navigating the post-pandemic world of 2021-2022. She documents a miserable 42nd birthday on ‘Tacos & Toast’ where she sings about getting a line tattooed through the name of an ex. She sings about opening up to find love again on ‘Cuffing Season’. She sings about the hard feelings she’s got on ‘Hard Feelings.’ It’s a song about “how you get to a point in life and the choices you make kind of become you, and there are certain things that happen within your brain chemistry that are just pathways to get wired, and that’s life,” she explains.
It does come with a very snappy chorus, though. A chorus which attributes her addled brain to having spent her youth addicted to alcohol, weed, porn and cocaine. While not one to “party” anymore (as she puts it), the consequences have taken their toll.
“I wish a lot of the time I wasn’t having the thoughts I was having. My brain is fucking trash. My brain is… I don’t feel like my brain is my friend most of the time. It says terrible things to me and tells me to do terrible things. And it’s like a daily exercise in impulse control,” she admits.
“But I think that’s most people, too.”
It’s an album that has similar dark moments, but they’re often dressed to sound upbeat. It was definitely a conscious choice to make the record sound more optimistic, Laura explains. “I wanted the record to make you feel good when you listen to it; even if the lyrics are heavy sometimes, you can still work through your issues and have it be fun and, in that way, turn a negative into a positive.” She points to the rebellious, ‘I’m Not A Cop’ which features a cheeky shout of “pig pig pig” in the background – her punk heart still beating strongly.
Already a fan favourite, ‘Dysphoria Hoodie’ is another of those songs that take a lighthearted look at life’s hardships. Traditionally more prevalent within the trans community, the song is about the protection clothing can offer on those days when you don’t want to be seen by the world. It’s a chance to switch off from gender and sex and being perceived by a world that fixates on binary coding and heteronormative constructs. Well, that’s mainly its job for Laura, anyway. It’s a feeling that has been with her almost her entire life and doesn’t show signs of going away.
“I don’t have to think about my body,” she explains. “It’s just somewhere under this hoodie, and this is comfortable, and if I need a little more protection,” she throws up the hood to demonstrate, “I can go like this, and if I need even more, I can go like that,” she says as she dips her mouth and nose into the body of hoodie and pulls the drawstrings tight leaving just a small gap to see through. “You can swallow yourself up into it,” she mumbles from within her haven. “It’s like it’s armour,” she adds while retrieving herself from the depths of the garment.
It’s a deep song, but within it has this shanty-like power, especially when performed live, but it also connects the dots from the ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ penning singer of 10 years ago with the continued mental battles known by many transgender people.
That same ‘True Trans Soul Rebel’ of a decade ago is still going (in case you were wondering) as ‘Hole In My Head’ kicks off with its title-track. While lyrically nodding to the physical undertaking of facial feminisation surgery but disguised as a sub-two-minute punk romp, Laura wanted this song to be the album’s mission statement.
Thinking lyrically, it came down to how she would set the tone for the record in the very first line. She explains, “The first thing I wanted the record to ask you was, ‘Do you want to screw?’ Because that felt like the best opening statement for a record. ‘Do you want to screw? Do you want to fuck?’” she laughs.
“The first thing I wanted the record to ask you was, ‘Do you want to screw?’”
Laura Jane Grace
You get a sense of the shape of this record from just that opening. It’s a chapter of her life that is typically warts’n’all. It’s life, the good and the bad. Some of it is reflective, and some is hopeful for what is to come. ‘Birds Talk Too’ conjures great memories for Laura of being tattooed in Amsterdam, while ‘Punk Rock In Basements’ is an anthem for all those who cut their teeth in the sticky-floored, urine-soaked dives of the world. The track was written to be a duet with Joan Jett that sadly didn’t come to fruition. The Reddit threads and social media comments had the ‘I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll’ singer joined Laura in singing the track’s final line of “Punk is dead!” would have been a sight to behold. “But how amazing would that be?” she speculates, lamenting the missed opportunity to piss off a lot of people.
On the flip side, she looks ahead hopefully on ‘Cuffing Season.’ “I wanna learn to trust the fall,” she sings. Spoiler alert: she fell hard.
There is a lingering question of what ‘Hole In My Head’ would be if it was written now in the eye of the storm of Laura Jane Grace of the last six months. Would there be sunshine and rainbows? In short, no.
“It’s a hard state for me to be in, of just being like, ‘and now happily ever after’. That’s not realistic. It will never be me. I’m too young for it to be happily ever after, and the world is too fucked up for it to be happily ever after,” she reasons.
But, when it came to getting back into the studio last December to record another six songs, all written around the same time as ‘Hole In My Head,’ something had changed. Settling in to record with Matt Patton, of Drive By Trucker’s fame, on bass and her soon-to-be wife joining on most of the songs too, there was an extra magic to what came out.
“They sound completely unique to that session, and the emotion behind them feels totally different than a ‘Hole In My Head’ even if some of them were written around the same periods of time,” she admits.
“So it kind of goes to show you how much of the studio environment or the recording process plays into what you’re hearing on the record in that way and the performance of it that is captured.”
Quick to stop getting too far ahead of herself, she adds, “But I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re ever going to get the record out of me that’s about puppy dogs and rainbows. I’m not interested in those things. I’m always going to write about the darker edges of life and the darker experiences and question everything.”
It’s been about rolling with the punches for Laura Jane Grace. It’s been that way pretty much her whole life. “Life keeps moving, and new complications arise,” she philosophises. Sometimes, it’s the prolific writing sprees and slow-moving record label. It’s the drunk driver hitting your car the week after your honeymoon. Nevertheless, Laura Jane Grace continues on. ■
Laura Jane Grace’s album ‘Hole In My Head’ is out now. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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