The Vandoliers

"Most personal album yet" is a well-worn cliché within the cliché-addled world of music promotion. Bu tLife Behind Bars, the fifth studio album from beloved Texas country-punk ensemble Vandoliers, brings new meaning to that phrase. This album marks a series of firsts for the band, it's their first release with upstart Break Maiden Records and distributed by storied indie Thirty Tigers, their first with Grammy-winning producer Ted Hutt (The Gaslight Anthem, Flogging Molly, Lucero), and their first recorded at the sprawling Sonic Ranch studios in West Texas. Most importantly, though, this collection of songs offers a window into frontwoman Jenni Rose's journey through addiction and gender dysphoria—a journey that has culminated in her decision to come out as a trans woman while working in the macho worlds of Texas country and punk rock, at a moment when the rights of trans people are more intensely threatened by the day.

"It's heavier than our other stuff," says Rose. "Why is this country punk band that's usually a source of positive energy so melancholy? It's because I was dealing with accepting my gender dysphoria, while also trying to get sober."

For the uninitiated, even the most melancholy Vandoliers song has a degree of exuberance and verve, full of an irrepressible energy that has led the band to tour with everyone from Flogging Molly to the Turnpike Troubadours to fellow Dallas-Fort Worth natives the Toadies and the Old 97s. Songs like pandemic anthem (only Vandoliers could make those two words fit together)" Every Saturday Night," "Cigarettes in the Rain," "Sixteen Years" and their irresistible take on the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" have helped the band find a devoted following across the world, fans who pack out shows that are always life-affirming and usually end withsome Vandoliers hopping around onstage shirtless.

It was onstage that Rose fully realized who she was for the first time. In early 2023, she was barely six months sober and fighting to stay that way while touring with some of the most raucous bands around; she was also trying to write a new collection of Vandoliers songs responding to the first feedback she'd gotten from Hutt. "Your songs are superficial," he told Rose. "There's a barrier between what you're actually writing and your deeper self."

In the middle of that, Vandoliers happened to be playing a show in Maryville, Tennessee the same day that the state's governor, Bill Lee, had signed what was generally understood as a "drag ban." Cory Graves, who sings and plays keyboard and trumpet in the band, suggested they all wear dresses for their show that night in protest. "I was like, 'Hell yeah, I would love to do that'—like, how harmless is this?" says Rose. Photos from the show went viral, and were covered by Rolling Stone, among many other outlets.Rachel Maddow did a segment on the band on MSNBC. "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. The wall that I had keeping this side ofme invisible was completely shattered. I wrote down in my journal, 'Fuck, Ithink I'm trans.'"

Rose spent months grappling with that realization, pushing back against it and reflecting on it all the while putting together the songs for this album and continuing the band's dizzying touring schedule. At that point, the band thought they would have to release their next album independently. To fund a session with Hutt at the Sonic Ranch—the band's dream producerand recording studio—they turned to their fans, releasing the rebellious call-to-action imaginable, "Together We Will Sink Or Swim," as the prompt for a very early album presale.

The fundraising worked, and at the Sonic Ranch, Rose was once again compelled—in large part by Hutt, and his meticulous editing of the 40 demos the band brought in down to the 10 carefully honed tracks on the album—to be completely vulnerable. "Before the session, I was like, 'I can still do this. I can still be Josh,'" Rose says. "But day one of the studio, I was like, 'Ah, fuck. I think my life is going to get a lot different very quickly.'"

Hutt kept choosing songs, like album opener "Dead Canary" and "Evergreen," that were Rose'smost raw and confessional—until she and the Vandoliers reached the studio, she didn't fully realize that she'd actually written them about the experience of dysphoria, about the searching and pain and struggle that she was feeling: "I was running from my shadow/tried to hide it, but it followed," are the first lyrics Life Behind Bars listeners will hear. While both songs—and in fact, most of the album—are upbeat and sing-a-long-ready in classic Vandoliers fashion, they're a little more stripped-down and intimate than the band's typical raucous fare.

The plaintive title track, co-written by Rose, Graves, Joshua Ray Walker and John Pedigo, also has multiple meanings. "The first thought was the double entendre of working behind a bar and prison," says Rose. "Then it kind of turned into, 'Life in a band versus prison.' The way that I hear it now is just like, 'Oh, this girl is in prison.'" It has all the sharp observations and catchy melodies of Vandoliers' best work, but with the added context and depth of Rose's path to self-discovery.

"You Can't Party With The Lights On" is a textbook honky-tonk tune that's sure to become a live staple for the band, and features Walker and Taylor Hunnicuttas guest vocalists. It too, though, includes a melancholy subtext—making it a "cry at the bar while everybody's dancing" song, as Rose puts it. The timeless title and hook also, to her, meant, "I can't know myself like this and keep going on like I've been going on."

The album has more explicitly political tracks as well: "Bible Belt," which Rose wrote about the fear and pain of feeling like an outsider deep in the Fort Worth suburbs, and "Thoughts and Prayers," a darkly funny composition written and sung by Graves about the epidemic of gun violence in America written in the aftermath of the Route 91 festival shooting in Las Vegas, but inspired by just how normal it's become—and the fact that Graves himself witnessed a shooting at a mall food court in Irving, Texas when he was just six years old.

These are the songs of a band that is fearless and fun, hellbent on spreading joy wherever they go, and 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 fort hemselves."