Laura Jane Grace felt conflicted.
At the close of 2017, the 38-year-old Against Me! frontwoman just finished a two-month tour which capped off a cycle of shows and press that coincided with the release of her band’s seventh album, Shape Shift With Me, and her tell-all memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. The book, album and even Against Me!’s previous record, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, spoke candid, inspiring and vulnerable truths surrounding Grace’s life in punk rock and as a transgender woman undergoing personal changes in a very public way.
Grace was exhausted. And she thought her fans were, too.
“I felt like maybe people were burnt out on me,” Grace says. “A lot of what I’d been doing wasn’t necessarily music focused, like the book or doing interviews about trans related stuff. We needed to take a break from being in people’s consciousness, myself being burnt out on it, too. I understood if people were like, ‘No, we’re not interested.’ That made sense in my brain.”
