Interview Pt. 13
Leeah Swift (LS): What’s the next one?
Reporter McStrawman (RM): “Just Like a Woman” by Nina Simone. Is that a reference to the Bob Dylan tune?
LS: It’s actually just a straight up cover.
RM: Really? Nina Simone doing that song?
LS: I know, right? I mean, she had an amazing talent for doing other people’s tunes, most often rendering the original obsolete. That sort of transformative power is actually something Nick Cave admires about her.
RM: Does that play into your Nick-Cave-as-trans ideas? .
LS: Well, I mean, no, not really, but, like, it could be. One of the unnerving problems when I read things as trans is,like, I can do it with nearly anything. I’ve done it with an entire Fall Out Boy record. This “Just Like a Woman” cover has its own things that I look at through a validation-of-transness lens, and I’ll go into that in a bit, but I’ve never thought of Nick Cave’s admiration of Nina Simone as a trans thing.
RM: Your point is that could, though, right? and that’s a problem?
LS: Yeah, actually, like, check this out: Laura Jane Grace has talked about how her earliest memories are of gender dysphoria, an experience I don’t precisely identify with, I guess, I’m not sure…memories are hazy and hard to decipher.
RM: Where are you going with this?
LS: I’m getting there, sorry, I can distract myself really easily.
RM: I can tell.
LS: It runs in the family. My mom tells stories like that too, though it seems my sister has gotten a bit more streamlined. It’s taken the entrance of my brother-in-law into our family unit to have someone at the dinner table who will be like “Okay, focus, what happened to the story you started with?”
RM: which is what I feel like saying now.
LS: Haha, yeah, I bet.