Against Me! Frontwoman Laura Jane Grace On The Birth Of Her New Project

The Devouring Mothers is a more singer-songwriter-leaning album – did you feel that such songs wouldn't find a home in Against Me!, but still wanted an outlet for them?

No, it's really just about being more true to how the songs came about. A lot of these songs started out with me thinking they'd end up as Against Me! songs but then at the beginning of 2018 I found myself in a room with Atom [Willard] on drums and Marc [Jacob Hudson] on bass. We had gotten together under the guise of working on the next AM! album, since Marc had recorded the previous album, it was thought that this was a sort of preproduction, but the more we progressed the more I felt it would just be dishonest to then take the songs and plug them into AM!. That just wasn't how they came about.

Against Me! was going through some changes last year around this time, with Inge [Johansson] leaving the band and Andrew [Seward] coming back into the band, and I thought it would be best to just kind of wipe the slate clean and start fresh but I still really wanted to do something with all the songs me and Atom and Marc had been working on, so that's how the album came about.

Is there a different mindset for writing the songs? Or do you just write songs and then try to find a home for them later? So you don’t write an Against Me! song or a Devouring Mothers song specifically?

I just write songs. Most often the songs just start out me on an acoustic guitar. I usually start with lyrics and then put chords to them. There were a couple songs on Bought To Rot that were true collaborative efforts musically though, like China Beach. Atom wrote the music to that song and I put words to it, wrote some guitar leads. Manic Depression started out as a bass riff that Marc was just messing with in the studio one day. I was like, "Woah, wait, what's that?" and had written lyrics and guitar parts for it within an hour. But yeah, most of them just start out as me on an acoustic guitar.

I did feel like lyrically the songs of Bought To Rot weren't what I wanted the next AM! record to be about though. Somehow just presenting them under a different name made me feel different towards them mentally, more free, like there were no expectations. Whereas with AM! our next album will be our eighth and real or not I've put a little bit of mental pressure on myself to make it something special.

Does it make it easier or harder to separate those two projects when Atom Willard is involved in both?

It can be tricky for sure but I like that it's all in the same family, per se. Marc recorded the last couple Against Me! albums at his studio in Michigan and he's been touring with us for years doing sound. Back in 2015 when I was still finishing up writing my book, I had reached a point where I was losing my mind sitting in front of a computer screen typing away and really wanted to try out what I was working on in front of an audience. 

So I booked a two-week long tour of the east coast and went out and did these shows that were like a mix of spoken word [and music] – reading passages from what would become the book to see what worked and what didn't and mixing in stripped-down AM! songs and some covers. I asked Atom and Marc to come along on the tour and back me up. We had a real good time and it worked really well musically. While we were on the road I thought, "We're a band, we're not AM!, we need a name!" and dubbed us 'The Devouring Mothers', inspired by an art book I had picked up at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain at a Niki De Saint Phalle exhibit. So the tour went really well and after I was like, "We should try and record something together like this," and that summer, in 2017, we went into Marc's studio and recorded a bunch of Mountain Goats cover songs for fun. It went really well in the studio with the three of us, which made me start thinking "We should really record a proper album together," and then in 2018 all those pieces fell into place and by summertime we had the 14 songs that comprise Bought To Rot ready to go.

Are you finding different crowds for the projects? Like are there a whole lot of Against Me! fans at Devouring Mother shows? Are you even finding folks are coming in cold to it, maybe not even knowing who Against Me! are?

There are a lot of Against Me! fans at the shows, which is expected really. It's nice 'cause touring on this album gives us a chance to play venues that AM! doesn't play anymore – more intimate and personal [venues]. The pace of the show is different too. Against Me! sets area styled after the Ramones, song after song after song, go, go, go. Devouring Mothers shows are slower paced [with] more chance to bullshit with the audience in-between songs. But also, there are people who are coming into this cold, people who aren't AM! fans and just know my name from my book, or from my work with trans activism. Really, everyone is invited – come one, come all, the more the merrier.