Courtesy of Ryan Russell

Last year, Against Me! lead singer Tom Gabel made at once an astonishing, brave, and inspiring announcement: The punk rocker revealed he was going to now be living the rest of his life as a woman and changing his name to Laura Jane Grace. The past year has been a challenging journey for Laura. But as she told us backstage during a revealing chat after her band's performance this past weekend at Riot Fest in Chicago, it's been an emotionally liberating and highly necessary one.

How has it been over your first year since announcing you're female? Do you finally feel as if you're completely yourself?

On the stage, in particular, it's what I needed. One hundred percent. I had reached a total brick wall where I would be up there, and I felt like in between songs, I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to talk. I felt like there was this disconnect happening in my head. I felt like, "Well, this is kind of the end of the line for me because I don't know what to do." So having that barrier broken down is completely liberating.

Did you feel like if you didn't make that change, you may not have been able to continue in the band?

Not consciously in the sense of saying it in my head in those words. But in feeling like I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I had no passion when I was playing and I just didn't feel like I could continue to write music.

Take us through your recent solo tour. All accounts of it are that it was a fabulous success and audiences were incredibly receptive.

You have no barrier [during a solo show]. It's really intimate, for lack of a better term. You play the songs, you play the set, and then you talk with [the audience]. People come up, they tell you their story and their transitions. That interaction is something fans want; and for me, it's something I desperately need, too. I need that connection. 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.

How fun has it been to explore your feminine sense of fashion in the last year?

It's fun, and it's stressful in a sense. Because it's like, there's street-style— like what I wear in everyday life—and then learning what actually works on stage. Fashion before function oftentimes. But sometimes I'll get up there and I'll be like, "I should have gone for function." Last night, I was wearing boots while trying to stomp on my guitar pedals, and I was hitting all the wrong buttons. And I was like, "God dammit. These look really fierce but I'm a wreck up here." For me, my personal style is usually black. So whatever comes in all black and my size [works].

Have you always been into fashion?

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. And when I was older, those were always the magazines that were around the house. A lot of the early Against Me! artwork is collages from those magazines.

Your songs have always been quite personal. But your new single "Transgender Dysphoria Blues" might be your most revealing yet.

Yes and no. For sure being able to directly tackle topics that I want to tackle, like that—taking about gender dysphoria and talking about that in a completely overt way—is really great. But at the same time, so many other Against Me! songs in the past were already talking about that. Just no one realized they were talking about that because no one would have guessed or anything. With new stuff, I can talk about what I want to talk about without having to mask it and be vague.

How long has the band been working on new music?

Well, I try to continually write. So as soon as we finished the last record I started writing for the new record. I guess really it was probably like a two-year-long process with the songs coming together. There's been a lot of pitfalls with the recording process for this record where we technically recorded it like three times. Third time's a charm, though. All part of the journey.

Tell us a bit about the new material.

Because the record's been such a long process to come together, we've played all the songs live. In this day and age every song is on YouTube in some form or another to varying degrees of sound quality. Maybe not all of them have been done by the full band, but they've at least been done acoustic on solo shows—which is cool because [then] people sing along to the new songs.

The band is hoping to release its next album early next year, correct?

Yes. It's done. It's mastered. We're finishing artwork. It's hard to keep in perspective that, "Okay, the time will go quick [before we release it]." There's a part of me that's just like, "Put it on the Internet now. Let's go!" Because the recording process took so long, I feel like we're those runners at the end of a marathon collapsing as they come across the finish line. Their legs are giving out underneath them, they're vomiting everywhere, and they're just wrecks.

You and your bandmates are now all spread out across the country. For a band that tours as much as you do, is it nice to have a bit of separation during downtime?

We started out as a band that would practice six nights a week for like four or five hours. But doing that for the rest of your life is not realistic. And you got to the point where you'd be burned out from it. So to be in a position now, where everyone is pro, is refreshing and exciting.

You just seem so happy. It's so wonderful to see.

Yeah. I feel hopeful about the future. Talking about waiting for the record to come out, at the moment I'm in limbo. I know that in a second life is really going to start to happen and this is this weird pause that I have to make it through. But the pause is about to be gone. Life continually has reveals. So I'm waiting for the next reveal.

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