Morgan Enos is a musician, essayist and music journalist specializing in classic rock. He records and performs as Other Houses and has bylines in Billboard, HuffPost, the Recording Academy, Vinyl Me, Please, TIDAL and more. He is also the co-founder and editor of North of the Internet, a series of conversations with creative people. He can be found at his website.
“Who said we’re staying sane? That’s an assumption.”
Laura Jane Grace and Paris Campbell Grace burst out laughing on the back porch of their Chicago abode, enveloped in roiling plumes of spliff smoke. It’s a moment of calm — however botanically induced — before chaos descends and they hit the road for a long stretch of spring and summer dates as Laura Jane Grace and the Mississippi Medicals.
The Against Me! frontwoman and Instagram-friendly comic, who tied the knot in 2023, are supporting Adventure Club, their new album out July 18, released as Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes. It’s arguably the punk veteran’s most electrifying solo release yet — a galvanizing mix of high-velocity bangers (“WWIII Revisited” “Wearing Black”) and rawer off-ramps (“Free Cigarettes,” “Walls”), and a high watermark in her still-evolving solo career.
Grace remains one of the most superb singers, songwriters and performers in modern rock. She’s also a genuine trailblazer, coming out as trans in Rolling Stone in 2012, way before mainstream transgender acceptance took root.
Still, as she readily admits, it’s been far from an easy road as of late. (The death threats she received for “Your God (God’s Dick)” — Adventure Club’s pogoing, profane, weirdly philosophical first single, which sent the right into conniptions via a Bernie Sanders rally performance — are just the tip of the iceberg.)
“Mentally, physically, spiritually; I am not doing well. Superficially I am just like YOU and doing my best to keep appearances up!” Grace recently posted on Threads, followed by a series of stock images of pistols shooting bare feet. And in all three senses, the music industry has been a big part of the problem.
“It’s kind of a fucking mess — a nightmare to navigate,” she says, citing in part consumer confusion from her various backing bands — the Devouring Mothers, the Mississippi Medicals, now the Trauma Tropes.
“People are like, ‘When you’re doing a solo show, does that mean you don’t play Against Me! songs?’” Grace says. “And then it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s the Mississippi Medicals — does that mean you don’t play songs from this record? That’s why I gave it the title Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes — trying to subvert the way Spotify insists on fucking categorizing things, so that the band name can kind of still be in there.”
With all this context, I asked how they keep it together as newlyweds and creative collaborators amid these choppy waters. Turns out, in many ways, they’re taking this experience moment by moment.
“I don’t know what the fuck is happening until it’s happening,” Campbell says. (“I know what I’m doing until January 2026,” Grace counters.) Whichever the case, Campbell’s smoking cigarettes again. “Cold turkey? Smoking hot turkey,” she says with a baked grin. But as for Adventure Club, it’s no turkey at all — and neither is its origin story.
Read on for the full conversation with Grace and Campbell; the Mississippi Medicals’ tour dates can be found here.
Morgan Enos: How did Adventure Club come to be?
Laura Jane Grace: The last song on the record is “Walls,” and that’s where it all began. Before I had even met Paris, [my publicist] Tito [Belis] forwarded me this email from this person named Christos Sarris from the Onassis Foundation in Greece, asking about some soundtrack work. At face value, it was the type of email where I was like, “Is this a joke?” or “Is this going to be a waste of time? But I followed up on it, and the documentary idea was legit. They were filming this documentary about the Negrita Prison in northern Greece called Walls, and they wanted me to take a poem by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy and set it to music for the soundtrack. I recorded a stripped-back acoustic version and a piano version, and it’s in the documentary, and it’s awesome. It turned out incredible.
From that came the offer of the two shows in Athens, which turned into three — one in Thessaloniki. So, I had that offer, and met Paris in the interim. We fell in love and got married, so I was like, “Alright, well, you’re coming with!”
Morgan: What happened next?
Laura: So, we flew over there, and one of those shows was at the Onassis Foundation — a fancy, amazing space. The other was a house show at this studio in the Piraeus neighborhood. We did those shows and went to Thessaloniki, which was a five-hour drive north.
We were supposed to fly out at Thessaloniki, but there were flight delays, so we were rerouted to fly out of Athens 24 hours later, which meant driving back to Athens. Jack [Jacopo Fokas], who plays bass on the record and recorded, engineered, and mixed it, and [drummer] Orestis [Lagadinos], were like, “Our flights are at 6 AM; we’ve got to go to the airport at 5 AM Let’s stay up and record. So we did that. We stayed up all night smoking spliff after spliff after spliff, and just fucking recorded the song. The version on the record is from that night in January, and it’s just a live recording of us doing the song. We finished tracking it, left straight for the airport, and were like, “Oh, that was fucking awesome. I hope more comes from this.”
Then I got the offer to do the fellowship there, which was in July. We went over there for the month, and didn’t plan on recording a full-length or anything. We were hoping for maybe an EP, but a full record came out of it. So, the reason “Walls” is last in the tracking — and there’s the more stripped-back, acoustic song, “Free Cigarettes,” in between — is because Jack thought it sounded too different from the rest of the recording. It’s supposed to give your ears a break to reset, and not notice that.
Paris Campbell Grace: We wrote “Wearing Black” and “I Love to Get High” here in Chicago before we went on the trip with Onassis.
Laura: The songs are kind of a mix. I think the oldest one probably goes back to 2017, if not 2018. This is the third record I’ll have done for Polyvinyl; they’re all born from a similar songwriting impetus, or inspiration.
Those were songs that were continual throwaways. Against Me! hated “Mine Me Mine” and “New Years Day.” There’s a 2020 demo recording of Against Me! trying to do “New Years Day.” We tried to do “Active Trauma”; I think I wrote it in 2017. So, I had a handful of songs in my pocket when I decided to go to Greece — ones I had been trying to work on for years. Then, Paris and I wrote “Wearing Black” and “I Love to Get High,” just hanging out on the back porch here, smoking joints. We wrote the lyrics for “Wearing Black” after dropping acid and meeting up with some friends at the Pride Parade here in Chicago last year.
So, we went in there with those two songs, and I had a handful of songs. The whole thing with the Onassis Fellowship is that there’s no pressure to create anything — but then there’s this unspoken pressure of, But, also, create something. Jack and Orestis were fully committed to the idea. Orestis completely cleared his schedule and made himself available apart from his normal band, Vodka Juniors, who are huge there in Greece. Jack completely cleared his schedule to not only do the recording and bass playing, but basically play host for us.
Every day, we would drive to a different location outside of Athens, find an incredible fucking beach spot, swim for a couple of hours, eat snacks, smoke weed, and then jump right into recording. We also took road trips — to the Corinth Canal, where there were thermal baths and underwater ruins. We swam out to caves with beaches inside of them. There were turtles and fucking sea urchins. We went to Epidaurus, the oldest venue in the world. I walked up to where the stage is, immediately yelled, then was immediately told not to yell. The most fascinating part was wondering what was backstage back then. Like, did Plato have a fucking rider, where he was like, “I want six figs and one jug of wine”?
It was an adventure. Jack would always say, “Alright, what are we doing today, Adventure Club?”
Paris: We did so many cool things, but I think the one thing that stands out the most was when you came into the studio after writing at the Onassis Foundation. You had “God’s Dick,” and you performed it out for the first time. It was the coolest day ever to see how that song evolved.
Laura: One of the ideas we threw at it was to use the baglamas, which is tied to this music called Rebetiko, which was basically folk protest music. Back in the day, cops would take their fucking baglamas and smash them.
Paris: Jack and Orestis also had a couple of tracks they had worked on before that. One of them ended up being “Poison in Me,” the other “Espresso Freddie.”
Laura: We became obsessed with the Freddo Espresso, a magical iced coffee drink that’s super refreshing in the summer. Jack had the music for that song; musically, it’s not anything I would ever write myself, but I came up with these joke-ass lyrics about a made-up character named Espresso Freddie. A lot of the pieces in that song in particular are direct references to things [from our trip]. The part about Apollo — that’s Orestis’ son; I’m not referencing the Greek god. And then, talking about how when Christos comes, we just hope that he’s happy — Christos is the executive producer for the project from the Onassis Foundation.
Morgan: What was it like when “God’s Dick” caused a furor?
Laura: The death threats were a little scary; that kind of freaked me out. It definitely was like, You shouldn’t set the alarm before you go to sleep. But otherwise, it doesn’t seem real. I’d turn on my phone screen and see Russell Brand or Dana Carvey saying some shit. It definitely caught some attention — but, like, does anyone really care?
Paris: I think there’s an aspect of being desensitized to virality.
Laura: It was definitely cool to shake things up a little bit.
Morgan: Any news on the Against Me! Front?
Laura: Just non-existent, if I’m being honest. There are sporadic waves on social media. I got a text from [guitarist] James [Bowman] around the “God’s Dick” stuff saying it was pretty cool. But, yeah, nothing. It sucks. Ain’t gonna lie.
(Photo Credit: Bella Peterson)
