We did a two-week run in March for SXSW. It was good. It was kind of intense. We recorded the next album the week before we left, and I blew my voice out. So the first night of tour, my voice was really shaky. The next night, I just couldn’t do it. I was freaking out about keeping my job. We stopped for lunch in Texarkana and our bassist was like, “There’s an Urgent Care place across the street, just run across the highway, get a steroid shot, let the steroids do their job, and it’ll save this tour.” And damned if it did.

Some of these songs are like three or four years old, even older in some cases, and it’s just kind of remarkable that when we perform the same feeling is there, and every bit as real when I first wrote these songs. I think the explanation for that is simply that it comes from a real place. It comes from my life experience, and it’s bigger than me. I want people to know that, like, everybody is going through some hard-ass shit but nobody is alone in that. I try to put words out there that people feel an affinity with it, so they think, She knows what I’m going through.

A big part of the reason I turned out the way I turned out is based on where I grew up, poor as fuck. My dad’s been self-employed for over 30 years now, and my mom opted to stay home with my two sisters and I. Poverty pretty much followed us around wherever we moved. My sisters and I went completely different directions with that same experience. My older sister went to school for a million years and got a double-masters because she was like, “I want to be able to live a different way.” My younger sister is in the navy in Spain right now. My reaction was just like, “Man, do I really need a shit-ton of money to be happy? No, I just don’t.” That’s where the punk rock comes into it, and the country.

The guys in my band are older, and they’ve been playing music for so fucking long. I think Eric Peterson has been in bands since he was 16, and now he’s in his fifties. I feel like I’m in this special unique position where I can actually help them do what they’ve been wanting to do for decades. I love those dudes. They’re like the family that I got to pick. I want to help us as a band and steer us on a successful path so that for them all those years and years and years of hard work will pay off, and they can finally make a living wage making music instead of having to hold onto some side jobs.

And I don’t think it’s that far off. I only work like one or two nights a week now at The Cave, and I fucking love that bar, man. It will be a sad day when I leave, too. I’m pretty involved in the local music scene trying to make spaces for women and trans folk and members of the LGBTQ community, and just get them more platforms, better visibility, and better representation. Working in a venue, I mean it’s just straight white dudes every night in band after band. So my main project with my activism partner Erica is Manifest, a two-night street venue music festival in Chapel Hill, and the only requirement for each band is they must have one woman member, a member of a minority, or an LGBTQ member. We’re not trying to do a super-flashy progressive thing, we’re just trying to say this is normal, this is the way it should be.