M y name, the one given to me by my parents when I was born, was an accident. Initially, they were going to name me Spencer, a decision they thankfully forgot on the way to the hospital to bring me into the world. They named me ____ and gave me the middle name Stanley, after my grandfather. As they were writing it down, they realized at the last minute that my initials would spell ASS, and that felt like setting me up for failure. So they pivoted and gave me two middle names: Gerald and George, after two men I never met. I never liked my name, and I never fully understood why.

I have never believed in God, but I have always asked him for favours. When I was a kid and my bedroom was on the second floor of our house, with my window facing out into the night, I lay awake in the captain’s bed I slept in and stared into the sky, imagined God listening and cataloguing the desires of all the people trapped here in the place he left for us. I asked to be remade, to wake up new. Not as a prayer—rather, I begged and pleaded and made promises. Maybe this is just what praying feels like to firm believers.

I have begged that God might change me, but I have never believed God is real, and we cannot rely on the things we don’t believe in to ever save us. We can only trust the strength of what desires we can hold in our own hands.

I have worked with my hands my entire life. These hands stocked the grocery-store shelves in Whitehorse, where I grew up; these hands worked fashion retail and sold Cuban cigars to American tourists. These hands worked for years with my dad at All West Glass, the glass shop he ran down on Fourth Avenue. I started working for him when I was young; grew old and tired and angry in the walls of that shop; gained experience under the sound of power tools, men’s voices, and the distant static of the radio.

The first time I heard Neko Case, it was on that radio, over the din of men working and yelling and sweating and bleeding. Mid-afternoon in the fall on a nameless day in the Yukon of my youth, the dirt on the floor mixed with a green powder we sprinkled on it to minimize dirt that smelled a bit like old coffee and new mould. CBC Radio playing in the background, the faint sound of public broadcasting the counterweight to whatever intensity lingered in the air as we pushed ourselves to keep going. Hard and tired bodies, always moving. If there is time to lean, there is time to clean. There is only time to push on. Bleed and move and sweat, and only stop when there is nothing left to fight for.

I was replacing a shattered windshield in a 1988 GMC Suburban, my arms reaching over a weathered dashboard to cut away at the urethane bonding the broken glass to a crumbling metal frame succumbing to rust and time. A tree had fallen and crushed this windshield in the middle, and the only way to cut it away was to use my left arm to hold the broken glass in place so it didn’t fall on my neck and shoulders and use my free arm to slice away at the glue. Get it loose enough that I could lean back in a well-worn driver’s seat and kick it out with my steel-toe boots. Worry about the bleeding later; worry about the way your back hurts in the lower and the left sides because of the way you have to twist your wiry frame around to slice and kick and push and bleed all at once.

In the midst of all this, a Neko Case song came on in between interviews with local mining experts and city councillors pushing for re-election despite never once living up to the faint promises of their office. Case’s voice caught me, there behind the dash of a Suburban with a shard of glass stuck in my arm. I knew it was bleeding but I couldn’t really move, and blood was just something I had learned to accept. I came to welcome it as a sign that I had pushed myself as hard as possible. Put some paper towel and tape on the spot where blood was emerging and kept going.

I was not paying attention to the music until I couldn’t help it, until Case’s voice wrapped around me with smoky weight that announces itself like an army at the gates. It was an instant and easy obsession with the tones and timbers of her voice, dipping low like a bird buzzing above the surface of a lake, only to shoot for the heavens to accent the potential of its otherworldly beauty. I didn’t know who she was, but I listened for words so I could have phrases to remember her by.

I’m so lonely.

My body shivered at each syllable, the word lonely stretched to its breaking point, and I promised myself I would learn all I could about the woman attached to this voice. A radio host mentioned a name: Neko Case. I didn’t hear the song title but remembered enough of the words to write them on my arm in permanent marker. Below where a piece of paper towel was taped to my arm and the dried blood staining it, I scrawled, “Niko (?) Case, last night I dreamt I’d forgotten my name.”

I walked home from work that day, my body aching with each step on the crumbling pavement that eventually turned into a dirt road, up Alexander Street to Eighth Avenue, where I lived in a basement apartment that sounded haunted every time the heat came on. The pipes that ran through the ceiling were too big for the holes drilled to hold them, and every time they heated up and expanded, they banged against their surroundings and made a loud clang and popping sound. The decibels of hitting your limitations in this world.

I got home, typed the words fading on my arm into my computer, and waited to see what came of it. I searched Niko Case, found that I had spelled her name wrong. Neko. A member of the New Pornographers, an indie-rock / power-pop supergroup who were already big on music blogs in the early 2000s with their album Twin Cinema and the video for “Lose It” featuring the stars of LA’s exploding alt-comedy scene. On forums, people talk about the New Pornographers being Canadian, which feels both exotic and benign from within.

I looked for what information I could find on Neko Case. She isn’t technically Canadian. She was born in Virginia, moved from city to city before letting her roots grow deeper in Tacoma, Washington, until she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in the ’90s to attend the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Spend enough time in Vancouver and you are, at the very least, step-Canadian. She played in legendary Vancouver bands Cub and Maow, two of many that emerged in Vancouver’s nascent punk-rock scene in the early to mid-’90s. She was an artist, a drummer. She didn’t sing in front of anyone until she was in her twenties.

Neko Case is an artist written in legends. This woman with fiery red hair and a voice that could shatter glass just as easily as it could form it from sand and nothing. She appears almost otherworldly, possessed of a spirit that fears no limitations. The juxtaposition between the power-pop and balladry of the New Pornographers and the world drawn in her solo work that trades in country and roots origins. Her work is the promise of moving between worlds and finding yourself thriving in all places.

The year before I discovered Neko Case, I had been living in Alberta with my girlfriend. We did not have a good or healthy relationship, largely because I was too afraid of myself to let my guard down, but I am nothing if not obsessed with holding onto all things and people like an emotional hoarder, and I tried too hard to make it work without owning the fact that I was the problem. I believed so hard I could force it to work, like you could force yourself to believe in God. Like I could make the lie become real if I thought long and hard about the possibilities of its truths.

She was the first person I ever came out as trans to, in Red Deer, Alberta, while “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback played in the background at the onset of its popularity, and you cannot imagine a worse place to come out as trans for the very first time in 2001. She didn’t take it very well, but I didn’t handle any of this with grace either, and it dissolved what was left between us. We broke up and she moved on, started a family and a career and grew up. I became insular and angry at myself, taking it out on the life around me instead of doing the work I needed on my head and my heart.

I moved around a bit after that, moved to Calgary and then Edmonton and back between all of these places. Nothing ever seemed to work or fit, and if God was ever real, he surely would have carefully guided me away from this province in the midst of an oil boom proving toxic to my heart.

In my youth, into young and then older adulthood, I was quick to quit. Life often asked hard questions, and it was easier to drop everything and flee instead of listening to the desires burning where I stood. Leave behind all of my shortcomings and setbacks. A life of failures, living like a fire running wild through dry underbrush.

I always ended up back home, back in the Yukon, because it was where I felt the safest, but this was only ever partly true. Safety by way of the familiarity of a small town. Streets teeming with faces without names that all know each other and their business. Outside the safety of this, I could be anyone, and there is nothing more terrifying than possibility if you are already scared of your own truth. Better to hide it, better to blend in, better to be safe. A face with a name that feels familiar.

“I Wish I Was the Moon” is one of many standout tracks on Neko Case’s third record, 2002’s Blacklisted. There’s a legend in here too, that she was blacklisted from the Grand Ole Opry for taking her shirt off at an outdoor Opry performance. The truth is something different, that she likely had heatstroke and wasn’t making some grand “fuck you” to the long-running Americana institution, but the truth is never as good a story as a legend and a catchy name.

Case hadn’t started as a country musician; she started in punk rock and art scenes, moved cities and genres. Leaned into power pop with the New Pornographers, recorded vocals for their debut record, Mass Romantic, as she was leaving Canada for Seattle with the loss of her student visa. Even with the New Pornographers, sharing vocal duties with Carl Newman and Dan Bejar (Destroyer), her voice takes off like a storm and shakes the shutters loose, demanding attention. Her voice is the product of a life of curious discovery, the voice of rifling through a record store and finding Bowie and Wanda Jackson and ELO and Thin Lizzy all at once. An artistic journey through influences that build to a single point. Case’s voice has always been the point of entry to her music, or at least it was for me, and it’s only in crossing the threshold into the world of her songwriting that you can be so ecstatically lost in her haunting and beautiful phrases.

It is hard to hate the entry point to your own life, but I hated my name. When I was in high school and I started to make friends, people abandoned my first name. They called me Stratis, like a rogue cop or a model prisoner. My first name held no power or meaning to me; every time it was used, I thought someone was talking about a different person. This disembodied name attached to a face that was never there. When people asked what it was, I mumbled through it, and it became an amalgamation of consonants and vowels that always proved interesting when it was spelled on to‑go cups in busy coffee shops. I joked that I said my own name wrong as I rushed through it. Partners and lovers would tell me it was weird to call me Stratis and also weird to call me ____, and both were true.

Neko Case did not have a good relationship with her parents. It is not for me to speculate, and I can only go off interviews and snippets, but she has spoken on the nature of the relationship between them, telling the New York Times in 2009, “I’ve been mourning my dad my whole life,” and NPR in 2013, “They’ve never really been my parents. . . . They are my biological parents, but they never wanted a kid, and so I just wasn’t really parented.”

“I Wish I Was the Moon” is easily read as the fallout of a relationship that no longer served the heart of its narrator.

God blessed me, I’m a free man, with no place free to go.

An easy read of songs about relationships is that they are always romantic, but there is too much faith in never questioning or considering all the relationships that build a life, the ones that bind us by the names we trade with each other. What if she was singing to the troubled distance put between herself and her parents?

Last night I dreamt I’d forgotten my name
’Cause I sold my soul
But I woke just the same.

When pleading to God doesn’t work, eventually you might consider what the devil may offer. God never once responded to my pleas and prayers, and while I never made inroads on conjuring the devil, I made it known I was willing to parlay. Anything to change my body, my life, my name.

I’ve always been lucky to have a good relationship with my parents, despite it not always being an easy road for us. Being a parent is a hard and often thankless task, and not everyone is up for it; not everyone is good at it or desires it. Parents and their children are complicated connections that are easily cut, and sometimes severing toxic tethers is the best you can do. There are plenty of mothers and fathers in this world, but fewer moms and dads. A mother and father bring life into the world; moms and dads do their level best to raise them, show them the way, impart what lessons they know.

Deals with God and the devil never worked out, and as I grew older, into my twenties and then my thirties, I started to ground my plans in reality. How to separate myself from my name. This burning desire to be who I knew I had buried deep inside all the locked corners of my body was never going away, and in desperation, I made plans. Plans to fake my own death, plans to secede from family and home. I thought I would be so unloved and unlovable in the life I desired for myself, transness burning holes in my soul desperate to be real. I had tried to come out and it had never worked, and it felt like I knew I was making a bad decision. Maybe all I had left were bad decisions.

I thought the only way to be alive was to just one day disappear. I wanted that to be the job of gods and devils, because I wanted there to be some trick of divine intervention that let everyone forget that I had ever been real at all. Let me be erased and reborn; I am willing to be alone when I do. These are the terms I offered to deities I don’t believe in but will accept help from all the same.

It’s harder to make the decisions yourself to take what you need from this life and know that you might lose people along the way. It’s harder to accept the responsibility of distance from names and faces and hearts you have known for days and weeks and years. To be trans is to be someone new, and familiar faces don’t always like new in place of the old.

N eko Case moved her roots in the years after leaving her step-Canadian home in Vancouver. She left for Seattle, released her debut solo album, The Virginian, credited to Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, in 1997 and began laying the bricks that would become a path to follow. Where she had been playing in punk bands in Canada, now she was leaning into her country and Americana roots, learning to trust her voice and her desires. In 2000, she released the follow‑up Furnace Room Lullaby, finding a comfortable stability in the strength of her voice and now exploring darker depths in her songwriting. The title track, recorded with Travis Good of legendary Canadian band the Sadies, is a murder ballad complete with telltale heart motifs and a body buried deep under the floorboards of the living.

The murder ballad is traditionally a song crafted in a man’s narrative, often writing about the death of a woman in their orbit, a cheating wife or a scorned lover. Case joins the ranks of the bold women—artists like Dolly Parton, Wanda Jackson, the Chicks, and more—in country and Americana reclaiming their personhood in a genre seeking to write them only as objects, as victims.

There is something beautiful found in embracing the darkness. Around the release of Furnace Room Lullaby, Case left Seattle for Chicago, where she would release Blacklisted, removing the boyfriends from her name and allowing herself to stand alone on the stage. Blacklisted further cemented her place as a songwriter deftly capable of wading into dark water to dredge out songs of tremendous and terrifying beauty. She wields her voice, dramatic and atmospheric, like a swinging ax stalking you from around dark corners, taunting you deeper into the abyss. She credited the work of David Lynch and his frequent collaborator, the composer Angelo Badalamenti, as inspirations in her work. How to craft a darkness you can’t help but find yourself drawn to, how to crave the embrace of all our darkest impulses.

Case creates a world in which loss and pain and darkness can add as many stones as they want to the well of the heart; there is no less opportunity to keep going, to embrace with tender care the hard and difficult places we find ourselves and learn to keep going. Accept the responsibility of the hard decisions we make. Case moved from city to city seeking to make a life, made distance from relationships that didn’t work and held onto those that did. Made a life in her name.

I could never fake my death because I could not bring myself to sever my life from my name, no matter how much it didn’t serve me. When I did eventually come out, I planned to lose it all. I came out to friends slowly and carefully until finally I knew I had to tell my family. I told my mom my hard and difficult truth on my way to drop her off to a doctor’s appointment. She offered to tell my dad for me, and in the intervening minutes between these tells, I called my sister, who said, “I have to run to a meeting, and you choose now to tell me I could have always had a sister?” My mom told my dad, who in turn told me he was mad. Mad that I thought he would be upset, that this would distance us from each other. And that he only wants me to be safe, to be happy.

They asked about my name. Everyone wanted to know about my name when I came out. There are some who had no idea I ever had a first name, because calling me by my last name—my family name—had become ubiquitous. I was scared for the first time to lose it.

When I first came out, I struggled to land on a name, initially choosing a new one that didn’t work for me. I was trying to please other people in building a new life and clumsily made a new name that incorporated parts of the old. It worked only as a piece of worn tape holding old lives and new ones together. When it all started to fall apart and I knew I needed to find my own, I thought long and hard about the women who helped build me here.

In a friend’s living room in Toronto, there was a picture of the German actress and singer Nico walking through Times Square in an elegant suit, and I thought about her as this vision for who I wanted to be. The first time I tried on the name, it felt perfect, like finding an old shirt that fits you just right in all the places you desire to be held by familiar cloth. I thought about Neko Case too, thought about how I would rather not spell my name with a “c” and tie my namesake to the life of a timeless singer who was nonetheless an avowed racist. I thought about not wanting to steal someone’s life in order to build my own name.

When I needed to find who I was, I wrote down a name that I had misspelled on my arm in permanent marker many years earlier, below blood and glass, and returned to a life I had dreamed of, begged gods and devils for. A name that came to me hearing “I Wish I Was the Moon” playing through blown-out speakers on the CBC Radio of a life left in the darkness behind me. I went back to find the clues left behind and found Niko.

Excerpted from The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis. Published with permission from the University of Texas Press © 2025.

Niko Stratis is a writer based in Toronto.