Words matter. These are the best Laura Jane Grace Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I really like dumb romantic comedies; that’s the way I can turn my brain off and let go.
I feel self-conscious for even having met so many other band people and artists, I don’t want to be that artist that is only able to talk about themselves and their own band. I don’t want to be that person. I’d rather just be quiet than be that person.
I turned to punk because I didn’t fit in anywhere else.
A lot of people don’t perceive me as female or trans, they just see some rocker.
I had gone from being married with a kid, two cars, garage, nice house in a nice neighborhood to all of it gone.
I had some real health complications with my HRT – hormone replacement therapy.
I don’t want to be just that transgender performer or that transgender musical artist. I want to create songs and art and have those be judged on their merit alone.
Any doctor will tell you a great treatment for depression is exercise, physical exertion, that it really ups the dopamine in your brain, so that’s what a show is. I play a show and that’s a high for me; I can ride that.
I guess I’ve been existing in my own head a lot.
That’s one of the biggest fears a lot of trans people have if they decide to come out, that they’re making themselves unlovable and that they’ll never have a relationship again.
It’s not like I came out in ‘Rolling Stone’ and all of a sudden I had a closet full of all the clothes I want.
I grew up with a mother who always had every fashion magazine stacked up on the side of her bed. When I was really young, I’d lie in bed with her, and we’d look at the magazines.
In a perfect world, in my opinion, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ and ‘theirs’ would be the pronouns that everyone would use.
As an artist, you’re just observing the world around you. So much is overwhelming and it’s all so inescapable that it can’t all speak to general cultural statements.
People don’t have to understand a language to understand the emotion and sentiment behind a song.
I’ve been keeping tour journals since I was 17 years old.
I think the hardest part for musicians is what a wide gulf of time there is between when you decide to sober up and when you have the ability to navigate being social and having relationships and being in a band and having friends while sober.
I don’t feel like I’ve ever been in mainstream society.
As technology and science advances, I think the ability to alter yourself should be embraced.
I have gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia. I don’t like to see pictures of myself.
My whole identity is not gender. My whole identity is not talking about gender. There are so many other things in my life that are fulfilling that I like to think about too.
Living in Italy meant growing up without MTV.
You know, sexism in the punk scene – or just in rock and roll in general – is so easily demonstrated by the amount of women or queer people that you see on stage versus the amount of cis males that you see on stage.
Being able to write about love through a trans lens is something that’s not really represented when it comes to love songs.
I recognize that I’m in a band, and part of being in a band is doing interviews, and I do have a platform so I want to use that platform to talk about things that are real.
I dealt with depression for my whole life. That’s not something that was caused by being trans.
I was always taught by punk to think for yourself and to question authority. That’s what I’ve always tried to do.
When I’m on tour, people see me in one way, but in normal life I doubt people even recognize me.
It would be weird enough just being in a band trying to date. It makes it harder being a parent. And it makes it really interesting when you’re trans.
The idea of Ryley Walker not ever listening to Leonard Cohen is like me going out to dinner and them telling me that they’ve never had spaghetti or whatever.
Trans people should be able to fall in love and sing love songs too, and have that be just as valid. You turn on the radio and every other song is some guy singing about some girl who broke his heart, or vice versa. And there’s not a lot of trans representation with that.
I’m a musician and I listen to music all the time. If there’s something out there where someone would tell me that I should listen to, I would listen to it.
Writing your memoir is inherently narcissistic.
Any way that I can use my career or my platform to push along transgender visibility in the mainstream and society serves me on a personal level in that it will make day-to-day existence when I’m not doing this that much easier.
I was married for like seven, eight years. And then coming out of that I was like, ‘Okay, now what? I guess I would like to date? That’s a reasonable thing. I’m allowed to have that!’
For most people who are transitioning, surgery isn’t really a financial reality. So to place these goals of ‘in order to be happy with my body, I must do this thing’ is really damaging to yourself.
Two Coffins’ is a song I wrote for my daughter.
I’m totally fine with myself. It’s the other people I run into out there who are so hung up on gender. The way it trips them up is their problem, not mine.
My least favorite thing about being in a band is photo shoots and video shoots. I like writing songs.
As a trans person, I don’t feel welcome in most public spaces. Especially now with Trump, I don’t feel faith or recognize that we’re protected by the government or administration.
Growing up, my experience with transsexualism was nothing but shame. It was something very hidden, and dealt with very privately.
Maybe you don’t know who a person is just based on the way they dress. I know that’s a really simple thing you’re supposed to be taught really young, but sometimes you can forget.
If you look at the difference between the first Clash record and ‘Combat Rock,’ what an evolution.
I’ve never had trouble talking and expressing my feelings.
I remember being really young – being 13 or 14 – when I first was really excited about punk rock as an idea, and I was like, ‘Don’t ever not be punk. Don’t ever not be punk.’ Telling that to myself, I guess it was like self-defense against the scary world around me.
To know that the people who are singing along at your show actually have something in common with you and can identify with what you’ve gone through, makes the songs that much more meaningful to sing.
What I learned early on, is that it’s not really fun to do things alone.
Most people I know stopped talking to me after I came out.
Fred Durst gave my first wife a tattoo of a star on the bottom of her foot when she was 14 years old in his trailer home. So that was my first introduction to Limp Bizkit.
I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually I’ll flip, and I’ll present as female.
My first record I ever got was ‘Full Moon Fever.’ My dad gave me a copy when I was maybe nine years old or something. And I listened to the heck out of that record. I loved that record.
At 8, I got my first cassette, which was Def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria.’
If I want someone to recognize the gender identity I feel, I’d have to ask for that. I can’t assume people will know how I’d like to be treated on their own.
The period of time between when you’re done with a record and when you start touring is the worst period of a time in a musician’s life.
Striving to make music that empowers people as opposed to making them feel like they’re being beaten down every single day is so important.
Saying to someone ‘I’m a transsexual’ is the most empowering thing I’ve ever felt in my whole life.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I’ve kept journals since I was eight years old.
Trying to cause chaos – I think that’s the way I create change.
The first record we made, we recorded and mixed in a day. The second record was recorded and mixed in a week. The third was recorded and mixed in a month, and ‘New Wave’ was mixed and recorded in six months. It was an epic project.
At 20, I was married, working as an auto mechanic, and living in Gainesville. I was doing Against Me!, but it wasn’t by any means a full-time gig.