New Memoir: "The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman"

Summary

All Of It: Episode Summary - New Memoir: "The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman"

Host: Alison Stewart
Guest: Nico Stratus
Release Date: May 12, 2025
Podcast: All Of It by WNYC

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Introduction

In this episode of All Of It, host Alison Stewart welcomes writer and cultural critic Nico Stratus to discuss her new memoir "The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman." The memoir delves into Nico's personal journey, intertwining themes of identity, music, transformation, and the profound impact of her relationship with her father.

Overview of the Memoir

Nico Stratus introduces her memoir as a "mixtape journey of her life," exploring significant moments from her childhood in the Yukon to her struggles with alcohol, loneliness, and gender identity. The memoir emphasizes the transformative power of music in shaping her experiences and personal growth.

[01:00] 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 Nico Stratus."

Defining "Dad Rock"

A central theme of the memoir is "dad rock," a term Nico explores to describe the music and life lessons imparted by her father. When asked about the origin of the book's title, Nico shares:

[02:02] Nico Stratus: "I don't know how I came up with that. I just know that I did at some point."

Regarding the definition, Nico clarifies that "dad rock" is not meant to be pejorative but rather a positive, mentoring force. She defines it as a way fathers share their life experiences without dictating how others should live, emphasizing teaching through failure.

[02:32] Nico Stratus: "It's the idea of a dad as somebody who is not trying to tell you how to live, but he is trying to show you, through his own experiences, how you can live if you choose to."

Teaching Through Failure

Alison Stewart probes deeper into this concept, and Nico elaborates on her experiences in construction and how embracing failure became a learning tool.

[03:37] Nico Stratus: "A lot of it is just being willing to fail. And 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."

This philosophy not only influenced her approach to work but also her writing, where willingness to fail allows for growth and refinement.

Understanding Her Father Through Work

Nico discusses how working alongside her father in his glass shop provided her with a new perspective on him, revealing facets of his personality and work ethic that she hadn't fully appreciated before.

[04:55] Nico Stratus: "Being able to work with him, I got to sort of see him in an environment I never really knew was real... and now he is a much more fully realized person."

This hands-on experience deepened her understanding and appreciation of her father, integrating these insights into her memoir.

The White Shirt Theory

One of the memorable lessons Nico learned from her father is the "White Shirt Theory," which symbolizes intentionality and mindfulness in daily actions. Her father’s attempt to keep his white shirt clean while working with glass serves as a metaphor for striving to avoid mistakes and living thoughtfully.

[06:12] Nico Stratus: "My dad has this thing he calls the white shirt theory... trying 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."

Nico applies this theory to her writing process, striving for precision and care in her work.

Significance of Mixtapes in the Memoir

Mixtapes play a vital role in Nico's memoir, representing a cohesive narrative of her memories and emotions. She explains how creating mixtapes was a way to string together songs that told her story, much like chapters in a book.

[07:33] Nico Stratus: "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."

Alison Stewart relates to this sentiment, likening mixtapes to collages that capture the essence of personal experiences.

Influence of Specific Songs and Musicians

Nico highlights the profound impact specific songs have on her life and writing. She discusses R.E.M.’s "Man on the Moon," appreciating its blend of dark and whimsical tones, and how it mirrors her own creative struggles.

[11:20] Nico Stratus: "Man on the Moon is kind of dark in its own way... it's such a good snapshot of the multitudes in their work."

She also mentions Bruce Springsteen’s "Dancing in the Dark," connecting the song's themes of self-doubt and transformation to her own experiences with alcoholism and gender identity.

[14:22] Nico Stratus: "Dancing in the Dark is a perfect song... when I look at myself in reflections, I don't know who this person is."

Relationship to Music and Cultural Impact

Growing up in the Yukon Territory, music served as Nico's portal to the wider world, fostering her imagination and sense of possibility. Listening to music allowed her to envision places and selves beyond her immediate environment.

[12:47] Nico Stratus: "Music was kind of all I had... and music was this thing that binds a bunch of songs together in memory."

She reflects on how music not only provided solace but also inspired her to believe in her potential to transcend her circumstances.

Trans Identity and Broader Life Experiences

While Nico’s memoir addresses her trans identity, she emphasizes that it is not solely a trans memoir. Instead, she intertwines it with broader experiences related to labor, class, and her upbringing to present a multifaceted narrative.

[15:47] Nico Stratus: "I wanted to reflect all of the things that built me to the point that I was... how can this be multifaceted?"

This approach underscores the complexity of her identity and the various factors that have shaped her life.

Sobriety and Personal Challenges

Nico candidly discusses her journey to sobriety, detailing the pivotal moment that led her to seek a better life free from the grips of alcohol.

[17:25] Nico Stratus: "Because it was just becoming a problem and it wasn't going to allow me to be alive anymore... I decided I'm going to quit."

She shares the challenges of maintaining sobriety and the ongoing nature of personal growth and self-improvement.

Conclusion

Nico Stratus’s "The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman" offers a deeply personal exploration of identity, music, and transformation. Through her discussions on All Of It, listeners gain insight into how fatherly influence, personal struggles, and the power of music intertwine to shape one's journey towards self-discovery and acceptance.

[19:24] Nico Stratus: "It deepened my connection to a lot of them, for sure."

Alison Stewart wraps up the conversation, highlighting the multilayered nature of Nico's memoir and the universal themes that resonate with a diverse audience.

[23:50] Alison Stewart: "Thank you for coming by the studio."

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Upcoming Event:
Nico Stratus will be speaking tonight at 6 PM at Rough Trade in conversation with Maris Kreitzman. For more information, visit roughtrade.com.

Transcript

[Nico Stratus]

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[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 Ancel will join us in studio to talk about his new bakery. And 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 in Florida, that is in the future. Let's get this hour started with the life saving power of dad Rock. 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 Nico Stratus. 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 and Nico Stratus joins me now to discuss. Nico, welcome to all of it.

[Nico Stratus]

Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

[Alison Stewart]

Nico will be talking about her book tonight at 6pm at Rough Trade, where she'll be in conversation with Maris Kreitzman. For more information, head to roughtrade.com how did you come up with the title of the book?

[Nico Stratus]

It kind of came to me. It was one of those things I had like written it down on a piece of paper on my desk and 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 like really early in the morning and thought it was funny. And then it was like one of those things that just sort of like haunts you and follows you around. And I kept coming back to it and then eventually I was like, well, that's it right there. You know, 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?

[Nico Stratus]

I was really. It's funny, like, 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? And I said, no. And then, of course, now people are very curious, and I should have. I should have sort of expected that. And to me, I tried to create a sort of modern definition for myself of what I thought dad rock was, and try to. Because so often it is used as a pejorative. People are talking about it, and they're talking about these things. They're. That they're sort of making fun of in whatever way. And I wanted to steer it away from that. And so I. 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. How you can live if you choose to live that way. And so that is sort of part of it for me is this sort of 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.

[Nico Stratus]

You know, I worked in construction for a really long time. I worked in my dad's glass shop when I started working for him when I was a teenager. I became a journeyman in my early 20s. And a lot of the work was learning to be unafraid to fail. And 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. And, you know, I. From my years of doing that sort of work, I've got a lot of scars. I have. You know, I have pain issues. I have all of these things, but 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 thought planned through what I was gonna do. And maybe this is a lesson that I can sort of store in myself and I can refer to later when I'm gonna approach a similar thing later. And 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 sort of eventually figure it out. I think I have now because I did a whole book, but I don't really know. But a lot of it is just being willing to fail. And 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]

Yeah. It's interesting because a lot of your book is rooted in labor. Yeah, right. You worked with your hands. Your dad worked with his hand. He's a man of few words. So we should say, how did working with him help you understand him?

[Nico Stratus]

You know, my dad was one of those people that, you know, he was at work a lot. So I didn't really get to know him terribly well because when he was at home, he was at rest. He was, you know, recovering from long work days or whatever. And so being able to work with him, I got to sort of see him in an environment I never really knew was real, which was him at work. Him, you know, 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. And now he is a much more fully realized person. And 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. You know, like a lot of the things I picked up from him in my younger years, I still sort of approach my life that way. And I think just sort of being able to be engrossed in an environment with him wherein, you know, we became sort of dependent on each other and was a really fascinating way to get to know him because labor was so much part of his life. You know, he started working in his dad's glass shop when he was 13, and he's 71 years old now, and he still works in that industry. So, you know, like, 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?

[Nico Stratus]

My dad has this thing he calls the white shirt theory, wherein he wears a white shirt to the glass shop. When we would. When we were more actively working in the shop. He doesn't do a lot of physical work anymore, but. And he would try to stay clean all day. And what that was. Was him trying to be intentional about everything that he does and trying not to rush and try not to be sloppy or careless. And look, it is hard to have a white shirt stay clean when you're working with glass all day. But some days he would do it, and some days that's a real triumph. And 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. Have they read it?

[Nico Stratus]

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? And my mom said, really good. And he laughed and said, that's surprising. So, I mean, by proxy, he's read it, I guess, but I don't know. I don't know if he's poured into it yet or not.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm speaking to Nico Stratus. 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?

[Nico Stratus]

You know, I'm of the perfect age where making mix tapes was a formative experience for me, or getting mixtapes or stealing them from my sister because some guy made my sister a tape with once. And 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. And those things were really important to me because they. I have a very bad memory. I'm in my 40s. I've got a lot of trauma. I had, you know, years of alcohol abuse. So sometimes my memory is fuzzy, but, like, a mixtape is a thing that binds a bunch of songs together in memory. And sometimes when I hear specific songs, I still hear the song that's supposed to come next because it was on one T I had in 1998. And so 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. Like, did you have that experience?

[Alison Stewart]

Oh, my gosh, yes.

[Nico Stratus]

Do you have that same. 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 and I think about having something to wait for the song to come on the radio.

[Nico Stratus]

Yes.

[Alison Stewart]

First of all, yeah, I'm there holding.

[Nico Stratus]

The record and the play down, just in case. Just in case.

[Alison Stewart]

And when I think back on them, I think of them like collages a little bit.

[Nico Stratus]

Yes.

[Alison Stewart]

And also I see it's. I have a memory of, like, young love. It's like you made a mixtape for someone. It could be a friend.

[Nico Stratus]

Sure.

[Alison Stewart]

Your best friend. Or it could be.

[Nico Stratus]

But that's still love.

[Alison Stewart]

It's about love.

[Nico Stratus]

When I thought about it, 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. And it's a track list, and it's all these things, and it is a collection of love. Whether it's platonic or romantic or whatever, it is a collection of stories with 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?

[Nico Stratus]

I had a bunch of songs that I knew I wanted. I made a really long playlist that I started whittling down, and it was kind of 50, 50. There was some where it was, okay, I want to tell this specific story, and what do I know that fits into this category of dad rock that I have created? And what songs do I think fit in that? And I was. 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. And if it didn't work in my head, if it didn't conjure a specific memory, I would cut it away. So it's this sort of, like, long process of making playlists and sort of slowly removing songs from them. There were some that I was very particular about wanting, like the Water Boys, that Fisherman's Blues that starts off, that was a big song for my dad. And I was like, that is how this needs to start. And I knew that from the get go. But others, you know, they changed over time. Like when I chose man on the Moon by R.E.M. initially, I was going to do Night Swimming, 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. And 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 REM man on the Moon, and we'll talk about it on the other side. Tell me, are you locked in the punch, Andy? Are you goofing on elders.

[Nico Stratus]

Are we losing touch?

[Alison Stewart]

If you believe they put a man on the moon man on the moon if you believe there's nothing I feel.

[Nico Stratus]

Sleep Nothing is cool Mo.

[Alison Stewart]

Why was that song important to you?

[Nico Stratus]

I really like how it is both kind of dark and somber, but also whimsical and cheeky. And it was a song that, from what I understand, Michael Stipe struggled to find the lyrics for it first. And it took him a little bit to arrive at what it was about, which I understand as a writer. 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, you know. And the story that I understood about him writing man on the Moon was, you know, being around Seattle and sort of having the bed tracks and walking around listening to them, and then eventually just sort of comes into focus. And 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. But it was. I really like this idea, and I just love this automatic for the people that that song is on, you know, so much. That album is about this sort of transition into adulthood, and it's about loss and it's about all these ideas. And a lot of it is very dark. And man on the Moon is kind of dark in its own way. You know, the Andy Kaufman story that it references multiple times is dark and whimsical and strange all at once. And I love that all of those things exist because I think a band like R.E.M. you can sort of look at them and write them as like, you know, they're. They're, you know, these sort of self. Serious art people, or they're sad or they're whatever. But I think they contain so many multitudes. And I is such a good snapshot of the multitudes in their work.

[Alison Stewart]

My guest is Nico Stratus. Her memoir is titled the dad Rock that Made Me a Woman. You grew up in Canada? Yes, in the Yukon Territory. How did that shape Your relationship to.

[Nico Stratus]

Music, it was kind of all I had. You know, 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 kind of true, you know, it is. There's not a city that's close to that I could drive to. I lived there. And music was a portal for me in two 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. Well, welcome. Thank you so much. And you know, when I would listen to songs and listen, I mean, look, New York is storied in music. It allowed me to sort of 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? But those were real, or at least the possibility of them were real in songs. And so you could sort of envelop yourself in these things and say, what if these were real enough to sustain me until they can become real? And a lot of it was just sort of like allowing myself to live in these worlds that I created through listening to. I was a very introverted, very awkward kid. And I would just sort of 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 Wanna Change My Clothes, My Hair, My face?

[Nico Stratus]

Yes.

[Alison Stewart]

Page 177. It's a lyric from a Bruce Springsteen song. And you write that lyric followed you from room to room.

[Nico Stratus]

Yeah.

[Alison Stewart]

What did that song say to you?

[Nico Stratus]

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 that, the Anna Leivowitz of Born in the USA and Dancing in the Dark is this perfect snapshot of Bruce as, you know, a man who had a lot of yearning. I sort of, in the book, I call him the gayest straight man in the world. Because there's 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. And Dancing in the Dark is a perfect song for that of. It is so much. It is the self doubt brought A lot. And it is this idea of every time I see myself reflected, I don't know who this person is. And this was very real to me as a person who started to really disassociate when I would look at myself in reflections of myself. And this was at the time that I'm writing about in this essay, my alcoholism was really kind of getting to a bad place. And when I would see myself in the mirror, I was often swaying like a boat in murky waters, you know, and, and this idea of want to change my clothes, my hair, my face, I mean, that spoke to me and my trans heart, like very clearly of, oh, there's other people that feel this way. Bruce Springsteen feels this way. And if there's anybody who should never be worried about how good he looks, it's Bruce Springsteen at any age. But especially Bruce Springsteen born in the USA era. Like, come on, you know.

[Alison Stewart]

You know, you said in other interviews that this is not a trans memoir. And why, why is it important for you to say that?

[Nico Stratus]

Because I think it's easy to 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 I transitioned and then I was fixed. Look how great I am. And 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. And 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. But it forced me to look at reality and say, okay, if I want to survive, I have to start dealing with these things. And I'm still dealing with them now. You know, like, I've been out as trans for almost 10 years. I'm still dealing with a lot of realities about myself. Same as, you know, I have. I've been sober for 6ish years and it's the same thing with that. And I wanted to reflect all of the things that built me to the point that I was at. And I intentionally made the transition happen very late in the book because I think my experience in labor, you know, I grew up, you know, lower middle class, working class people. All of those things were very important to me and they were very real. And they're much, almost more real to me than being trans. You know, like, 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 like all consuming to me. But my experiences in labor, my experiences growing up poor, my experience growing up in the north, all of these things really inform who I am almost more than being trans. So 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?

[Nico Stratus]

Because it was just. 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 and, you know, the day that I decided to quit, we had a welcoming party for me at a house I was living in at the time. And it was a fantastic night, great night. Woke up the next morning, wanted to die. And I thought, I can't keep living like this. This is untenable because eventually this dark thought that I wake up with will win and I need to start, you know, I need to fight against the darkness here a little bit. And so I decided that morning that I was going to quit. I walked down the street and got a tattoo. I smoked like three packs of cigarettes and listened to Dwight Yoakum and I decided, okay, I'm going to see how far I can walk this road. And I've been doing it for, you know, 6ish years now. But it was just this desire to what if I don't wake up and think about dying every morning? And 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 sort of pushing me to the edge. And I thought, well, what if I try to intentionally sort of keep myself back a little bit?

[Alison Stewart]

Can I see your tattoo? Is it on your arm?

[Nico Stratus]

It is on my arm. It's funny, I have a lot of them. It is on my arm. I'm just gonna take my jacket off here.

[Alison Stewart]

Oh, cool.

[Nico Stratus]

Radio listeners, I'm removing my jacket.

[Alison Stewart]

Nico Stratus is removing her jacket.

[Nico Stratus]

I have a harpy on my right arm who is sort of self obsessed and out a vision of herself in the mirror.

[Alison Stewart]

Oh, she's beautiful.

[Nico Stratus]

She's really nice. And I got it on a morning in Toronto, where I live now, by a trans tattoo artist in Toronto. And it was just sort of on a. My family heritage is somewhat Greek and so I sort of 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, and that's what that is.

[Alison Stewart]

Nika Stratus. Her book is called the dad Rock that Made Me a Woman. She'll be speaking tonight at 6pm at Rough Trade. For more information, head to Rough Trade. Did writing this book change the way you felt about any of the musicians or any of the songs?

[Nico Stratus]

It deepened my connection to a lot of them, for sure. You know, I wrote about Nico Case in the book and partially of where my name comes from is from Nico Case. And it really gave me a deeper appreciation for her and, you know, like, her memoir was announced after I had finished writing the book entirely.

[Alison Stewart]

It's such a good memoir.

[Nico Stratus]

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. And I thought, oh, no, what if I got something wrong because I did it because I hadn't read this book yet. But I think she's just such a brilliant and beautiful writer and reading more about her life and the stories that had informed her work were really formative and were really. You know, sometimes I would read these things as research and I would just sort of sit with them for a while. This was kind of the nice thing about being able to have the time to work on a book like this is you kind of 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. But it was this beautiful thing of like, well, I'm just gonna read about the mountain goats for 10 hours today because I need to in order to be able to write this, you know, 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?

[Nico Stratus]

If I was growing up today, that is a really good question. You know, somebody like Chapel Ron, I think is really nice. Like, my nieces are really starting to get into. I have like three teenage nieces, which is great because I get to know what kids are listening to. I say kids, they're teenagers. But like, somebody like her I think is just so fascinating. And 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. You know, like I was a teenager in the 90s and then I was early 20s in sort of the. What we called the indieslee's era for a couple years there. And, you know, a lot of posturing in those eras. Right. A lot of subterfuge. And 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 sort of endearing nature of her and the earnestness in a lot of that work, I think is really important, informative for a lot of people.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah, I've come around on Taylor Swift.

[Nico Stratus]

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

[Alison Stewart]

Or it is yourself and you're selling it. It's what you are.

[Nico Stratus]

Sure. I mean, it's exactly what I'm doing as a person who wrote a memoir. Right. I'm selling the idea of myself and the earnestness of myself.

[Alison Stewart]

Last Friday's show, we had the playwright Sarah Rule on to talk about her book, Lessons from Teachers. And listeners called in to shout out the lessons the teachers gave us. And 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. And I've carried that lesson with me throughout my life. Why do you think people find meaning in songs? Hmm.

[Nico Stratus]

I think that. I mean, not everybody does, which is kind of sad. You know, sometimes when I talk to people about some songs, they will be surprised that there was anything to be read in there at all. Like even man on the Moon, people are surprised sometimes that there's something to be read into that. And American Pie, same thing. American Pie is a song that really incorporates and talks about a lot of different things. And, you know, a lot of them are dense texts that actually leave a lot of things for the listener to take off and decipher. And, you know, when I was a kid, when I was really into something, I would go ride my bike down to the library and I would take out books and I would read about them and I would become obsessed with them. And I think a lot of it is sort of this inviting the listener or the audience to become invested in something and to make it their own and create that personal connection. And I think in order to do that, you kind of 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, right? Like that stuff I think is really important.

[Alison Stewart]

I have been speaking with Nikostratus, the author of the new book the dad Rock that Made Me a Woman. You can see more of Nico tonight. She'll be talking about her book with Maris Kreitzman at 6pm at Rough Trade. For more information, head to rough trade.com thank you for coming by the studio.

[Nico Stratus]

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

[Alison Stewart]

This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.