Beloved Texas country-punk ensemble Vandoliers have announced their fifth studio album Life Behind Bars, which will be released on June 27 via Break Maiden Records / Thirty Tigers.
The album marks a number of firsts for the band, but most importantly this collection of songs offers a window into frontwoman Jenni (Gin-ee) Rose’s journey through addiction and gender dysphoria – a journey that has culminated in her decision to come out as a trans woman. She opened up about it in an extensive new interview with Rolling Stone.
Along with the announcement, Vandoliers have shared a music video for the album’s title track, a plaintive song with multiple meanings that was co-written with Rose and bandmate Cory Graves, as well as Joshua Ray Walker and John Pedigo. The band have also just announced a string of US summer tour dates. Find more info here: vandoliers.com/shows.
In 2023, when Rose was barely six months sober, the Vandoliers were scheduled to play a show in Maryville, TN on the same day that the state’s governor signed a “drag ban” bill.
Graves suggested the band wear dresses on stage in protest and auction them off to benefit LGBTQ+ causes.
Photos from the show went viral, generating coverage everywhere from Rolling Stone to a segment on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, but for Jenni it was a public moment that would change everything. “That was the first time I had ever worn a dress in public, but not the first time I had worn a dress — and then the entire planet saw it,” she says. “The wall that I had keeping this side of me invisible was completely shattered. I wrote down in my journal, ‘Fuck, I think I’m trans.'”
Rose spent months grappling with that realisation, all the while putting together the songs for the next Vandoliers album and continuing the band’s dizzying touring schedule. It wasn’t until the band entered the studio with Grammy-winning producer Ted Hutt (The Gaslight Anthem, Flogging Molly, Lucero), that Rose realised she had actually been writing about the experience of dysphoria. Whittled down from 40 songs to 10 of the most vulnerable and carefully honed tracks, Life Behind Bars may feel a little more stripped and intimate than the band’s typical raucous fare, but the album is still chock-full of upbeat and sing-a-long-ready Vandoliers classics.
Even the most melancholy Vandoliers song has a degree of exuberance and verve, full of an irrepressible energy that has led them to tour with everyone from Flogging Molly to the Turnpike Troubadours to fellow Dallas-Fort Worth natives the Old 97s. These are the songs of a fearless band hellbent on spreading joy wherever they go, a band who has made a career of pushing boundaries and taking all-comers, of making a bigger, brighter, bolder tent in a musical space that is still too often hidebound by tradition.
“We’ve been breaking rules in country for 10 years,” says Rose. “‘You play too fast.’ ‘You’re too loud.’ ‘You sing too high.’ ‘You’re more of a punk band.’ All that matters, though, is that people hear our songs and they help them in any way — that’s all we can hope for. I’m struggling so much on this record, but I hope that another trans girl listens to it and finds something in it for themselves.”
Life Behind Bars Tracklist
1. Dead Canary
2. Life Behind Bars
3. Your Picture
4. Bible Belt
5. Thoughts and Prayers
6. You Can’t Party With The Lights On (Feat. Joshua Ray Walker & Taylor Hunnicutt)
7. Valencia
8. Jim’s Barn
9. Evergreen
10. Dead in a Ditch