American rock band Against Me! have announced their upcoming west coast U.S. Spring tour. Beginning on Friday, May 11 in Bellingham, WA, the 14-date tour will visit markets such as Portland, OR, Reno, NV, Santa Cruz, CA, Sacramento, CA, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and culminate with a performance at this year’s Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas, NV on Monday, May 28. The band will be making headline appearances with supports Chris Farren and Paper Dolls, and will be performing three co-headline dates with Turbonegro in California. A full listing of dates can be found below and tickets for the entire tour are on sale now. More information can be found on Against Me!’s official website here.
‘Shape Shift With Me,’ Against Me!’s seventh full-length studio album, has the distinction of the first album front-woman Laura Jane Grace has written truly from the heart, with no metaphorical cloaks cast over the lyrics. It’s an album about love, that deceptively complex emotion we all struggle with yet has somehow eluded most of Grace’s songwriting for the past 20 years. Recorded, mixed and engineered by Marc Jacob Hudson (Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day) at Rancho Recordo, ‘Shape Shift With Me’ is available now physically and digitally via the band’s own Total Treble label (iTunes, Amazon).
“Tons of people have written about love. But while love is cliché, it’s infinitely relevant,” Grace says. “For me, having always been in a punk band that was expected to be political, I never felt like I had that option to write about feelings in that way. That’s what I ended up being drawn to this time. It’s writing in a way I thought I could never write before, and not giving a shit about expectations.”
‘Shape Shift With Me’ is a loose concept album about traveling the world and falling in and out of love, with Grace serving as the narrator. But even though she was opening herself up to new songwriting topics, she knew what her mission was from the start.
“Is there a record that is about relationships from a trans perspective?” she asks rhetorically. “There needs to be more records about trans rights and everything like that, but feeling like I already did that, I wanted to move on to write commentary on living from a trans perspective. I wanted to write the transgender response to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Exile On Main St.’, Liz Phair’s ‘Exile In Guyville’ and the Streets’ ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’. All those records are relationship records. There’s been an infinite amount of records talking about what love means from a cisgender perspective. I wanted to present the trans perspective on sex, love and heartbreak.”
Against Me! will be making the following U.S. appearances this Spring:
May
11 – Bellingham, WA – Wild Buffalo House of Music *
12 – Tacoma, WA (Sabroso Festival at America’s Car Museum)
13 – Portland, OR (Sabroso Festival at Portland Meadows)
15 – Chico, CA – Senator Theater *
16 – Reno, NV – Cargo *
18 – Santa Cruz, CA – Catalyst *
19 – Sacramento, CA – Goldfield Trading Post *
20 – Petaluma, CA – Mystic Theatre *
21 – Santa Ana, CA – The Observatory *
24 – Ventura, CA – Majestic Ventura Theatre ^
25 – Berkeley, CA – The UC Theatre ^
26 – Los Angeles, CA – The Regent Theatre ^
27 – Flagstaff, AZ – Orpheum Theatre %
28 – Las Vegas, NV – Punk Rock Bowling
* w/ Paper Dolls & Chris Farren
^ w/ Turbonegro & A Giant Dog
% w/ A Giant Dog