November 11, 2025
The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman, by Niko Stratis
“Dad rock is a guiding principle more than a sound or a guitar tone. Dad rock is comfort in the darkest part of ourselves.”
Niko Stratis’s The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman is a memoir and a mix tape, an essay collection that weaves music writing and autobiography to tell the story of how songs can be the lights that guide us home—or sometimes just one headlight, in the case of The Wallflowers. I only knew about a third of the songs that inspired the essays in this book, and wondered if I’d be that interested in the essays about songs that were unfamiliar to me, but it turned out that I burned through the whole book like a fire. Each essay is not only about the song that inspired it anyway, just like dad rock is not really about dads, except that sometimes it really as, as Stratis writes about growing up in the Yukon and learning the art of mix-tape making from her dad, along with the glass-making business that would eventually become her trade before she came out as trans in her 30s, and so much else in her life changed.
But before that, she was a kid growing up, watching the world around her to learn what men were, what women were, how gender was performed, how each understood the other. The gendered divisions of labour in the grocery store where she found her first job would eventually come to inform her understanding of all of this, plus her understanding of music as well: “It’s easy to poke fun or mock grocery store radio rock but to me and my heart it always feels like home. Songs live and breathe in stores like this, contain all the breadth of their emotions played through shitty speakers hidden away in the ceilings. The music that moves around bodies as they search for something, lost in thought, walking through the world…”
Like the best mix tapes, this collection is full of wonderful twists and surprises, along with the mainstays—such as what a line like “I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face” might mean to someone who is coming into an understanding of their gender identity. Other connections are less straightforward, and all the richer for it. This is a book with which to broaden your horizons, musical or otherwise.
