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Sammy poses with an iridescent sword in front of a mossy concrete statue. 

Listen to Season 1, Episode 8 of the podcast below: 

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This week’s episode is an interview with Sammy Gagnon, an indie rocker from Baltimore. But first I want to talk about someone a little closer to home. About an hour’s drive south of where I live, in Lilington, North Carolina, there’s a men’s prison called Harnett Correctional. A trans woman named Kanautica Zayre-Brown is imprisoned there, and she wants to be transferred to a women’s facility. Sharing a dorm with 38 cis men is really scary, but solitary confinement is worse, and there’s no reason she should even have to be in the building. I thought that was pretty messed up, and if you do too, I need you to call the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, Prisons Division at 919-838-4000.

Let them know that you demand that they transfer Kaunautica Zayre Brown to a women’s facility to ensure her rights and safety.

If you can, see if you can talk to or leave a message for Kenneth Lassiter, the director of prisons in North Carolina. If you’re not totally sure what to say, I put a script at the bottom of this article, along with more information about Kanautica’s situation, and three more numbers to call. 

Back in October, I went on a little road trip to Washington DC. Whenever I travel now, I reach out to local trans musicians and see if they want to be interviewed for the podcast. Sammy Gagnon, who plays under the band name Sammy Heck and runs the DIY label Deep Sea Records, drove all the way down from Baltimore to meet me for this interview. We met up in a dilapidated strip mall in Greenbelt, Maryland, outside  of a vegan café where someone was protesting by eating slabs of meat. We talked about how she got into the DIY scene, what Guitar Center is like as a trans woman, and cracking eggs.

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When you go to as many local shows as I do, you start to notice the regulars. The drummer who splits his time between seven metal bands. The keyboard player who also plays saxophone and also also works sound at your favorite cafe. Sinclair Palmer is one of those people. They are a grad student in musicology at UNC Chapel Hill, a violin and bass teacher, and they play electric bass for two awesome local bands: The Muslims, a radical punk band, and Caique Vidal and Batuque, an orchestra-sized samba reggae group. (They’re also a Durham Beat contributing writer.) 

I went to visit Sinclair at their little cabin by a creek in Hillsborough, North Carolina. We talked about their bands, their post-graduation plans, and then got really, really deep into a conversation about cultural appropriation in music.  

Listen to Season 1, Episode 6 of the Trans Music Podcast below: 

iTunes - Spotify - Stitcher - Google Play Music - Bandcamp

Read the transcript and see more portraits of them over on the Durham Beat: Artist Profile: Sinclair Palmer

Listen to Season 1, Episode 4 of the Trans Music Podcast by clicking the player above, or listen on: iTunes - Spotify - Stitcher - Google Play Music - Bandcamp

Back in September, I got to speak with two members of the HIRS collective, a punk band from Philadelphia. If I were to try and pin a genre on them, I would call it grindcore. Really abrasive, sort of punk, thrashy, sort of heavy metal. Another trademark of theirs is really really short songs. Some of them are as short as 18 seconds – too short to put on most music streaming services, in some cases. 

If you don’t recognize their band name, HIRS, it’s actually a gender neutral pronoun. I use gender neutral pronouns myself – I use they/them pronouns – which I think are the most popular ones in English. But there are other gender neutral pronoun sets, and probably the second most popular is Ze/Hir/Hirs pronouns.

Example sentence:
Ze went to the store to get hirself a sandwich.

That’s what their band name is referencing, just putting that out there for people who might not have heard of that one.

This interview was recorded at about 1 in the morning, at my friend Jesse’s house. I had been up all day at my job, they had been driving all day (and then played a show obviously). The house itself was full of loud punks, and the only place we could find to record was Jesse’s son’s bedroom. Jesse’s son really likes transformers, so we made a lot of trans-transformers puns, Luckily for you, I cut them all out in the editing process.

Another note: They don’t like having their faces in photos. 

We talked about their organizational philosophy, tokenization in punk, and using violent music as an outlet in a violent world. 

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Listen to Season 1, Episode 3 of the Trans Music Podcast by clicking the player above, or listen on: iTunes - Spotify - Stitcher - Google Play Music - Bandcamp

Do you know that Robyn song, Call Your Girlfriend? Well for a long time, I thought it was written by this week’s guest, A.W. Weiss, because their cover of the song is just so great.

I’ve listened to A.W.’s music for a long time, so I was so excited that I had the opportunity to interview them when they stopped in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on their living room tour a couple months ago. We had to do the interview pretty quickly, because they had a show to put on, but we still got to talk about their new sound, their new country music project, and transitioning as an already-famous person.

Riley: So the last time that I saw you play was in 2015. You were on tour with Mal Blum and Kid in the Attic promoting your last album; it was really good.

A.W. Weiss: Yeah, that was a great tour.

And since then, you’ve changed your name…

Mmhmm.

Come out as nonbinary…

Yup.

Gone blond…

Sure have!

And left your label.

Ha! Well, my label left me, but that’s a whole thing in and of itself.

Do you want to talk about it?

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