J
enni Rose already cried once this morning. Before the sun goes down, she says, she’ll cry again.
The tears are of both elation and relief for Rose, who came out to her family as a trans woman in the summer of 2024. Later that year, she came out to Vandoliers — the Texas country-punk band Rose fronts after co-founding the group in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs in 2015.
To be a trans person anywhere in the United States at this moment, when a new presidential administration is openly working to erase transgender people from existence, is dangerous. To be a trans person in Texas is especially fraught. According to Trans Legislation Tracker, there are currently 127 anti-trans bills in the Texas Legislature, and in February, the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, proclaimed in his State of the State Address, “The state of Texas recognizes only two genders — male and female.”
The timing makes Rose’s decision to publicly transition especially courageous, and underscores a tradition of radical defiance and protest for punk musicians. But Vandoliers aren’t only a punk band, and their ascending role in the masculine Texas-country and Red Dirt scenes will surely garner even more attention now.
Rose and her bandmates are ready.
“I’ve always been very arm’s length with people because of this,” says Rose. “I didn’t want anybody to ever find out about it. For 36 years, I’ve tried to be anything but a trans person, and it never went away. And, now, it’s going crazy, and I know that there are all these people who are kind of going back in the closet. But I’m going to come out and see what happens.”
We’re at a table in Rose’s home near Dallas, joined by Vandoliers’ trumpet and keys player, Cory Graves. Rose says she cried this morning in anticipation of what the day holds — a Rolling Stone interview and photo shoot for which a stylist has her in makeup, her hair styled, and dressed in a black denim front-slit skirt and black button-down with a single rose stitched at the top. The outfit is important, because after a lifetime of avoiding female attire, Rose is coming out to the world in clothing that makes her comfortable. If she’s not outright happy, she’s something very close to it.
“It’s been great,” Rose says. “Jenni has way more friends. I never had friends. You can ask Cory how many times I said I don’t have any friends outside the band. Now, I have a lot.”
Rose admits she’s taken her time coming out, fearing the worst with nearly every person she has told — from family members to the Vandoliers’ booking agent and brand-new label, the upstart Break Maiden Records. But she’s been delighted to have been wrong nearly every time. There was one religious family member who disapproved, she recalls, but otherwise, she’s been met with joy and support.
Now, however, Rose is telling everybody who doesn’t know her truth all at once. Vandoliers will release their fifth studio album, Life Behind Bars, on June 27, with the first single and title track — laced with Rose’s journey through both addiction and gender dysphoria — dropping this morning.
Rose chronicles her journey as a trans woman on the band’s upcoming album, Life Behind Bars.
Allison V. Smith for Rolling Stone
“I finally opened up, and I allowed myself to have friends,” Rose says. “I allowed myself to take care of myself, and I allowed myself to just be me, regardless of what people are going to say or do. It has taught me to stick up for myself. Once you get discipline and boundaries, all the people-pleasing stuff really falls off. That’s when I gave myself permission to be who I am, and to be Jenni.”
Rose’s name is a callback to a band she fronted in high school called Jennifer. Her first musical love was punk, which she attributes to attending a Blink-182 concert in 1999 with her father and sister. She started her first band at age 12, and was drawn to the punk scene in Dallas’s Deep Ellum before she was old enough to get into bars. Her first big break came in a ska band. In her 20s, she met drummer Trey Alfaro, and the two formed a “dirty rock” band called the Phuss. Then, in 2015, Rose and Alfaro founded Vandoliers.
Today, Vandoliers are a six-piece: Rose, Graves, and Alfaro, plus bassist Mark Moncrieff, fiddler Travis Curry, and electric guitarist Dustin Fleming. Their music is a mix of country and punk — echoing the “cowpunk” style of Social Distortion or Old 97’s. Rose considers Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller a mentor, and Vandoliers have opened several shows for Miller’s band. They also opened for Turnpike Troubadours’ 2022 comeback shows at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and later that year for Turnpike at the Ryman Auditorium. Since then, they have toured extensively as support for both Flogging Molly and Bowling for Soup.
Despite country phrasing and a fiddle in the band, Vandoliers’ live show leans heavily punk. Their songs are fast, and Rose — with guitar in hand — whirls around the stage in a blur of energy. By the end of the set, the band members are plenty sweaty, which Alfaro, Curry, and Graves address by doffing their shirts.
Rose’s shirt, however, stays on.
“If you’ve ever been to a Vandoliers show, you know that there are band members that take off their shirts, and there are band members that don’t,” Rose says. “The reason I don’t is that I feel like I’m topless up there.”
That feeling chased Rose throughout her life, starting when her hometown of Keller, Texas, was still a rural dot and continuing as the sprawl of Dallas-Fort Worth surrounded her as a teen.
“When I was four, I didn’t want to be a boy,” Rose tells Rolling Stone. “But it was weird. I was stopped. I was told it was bad, because that’s what normal people would do: ‘Stop wearing dresses. Boys don’t play with dolls.’”
Hearing that instilled shame and fear in Rose. She avoided sports, especially locker rooms, and grew up self-conscious about her own body, even when onstage with her band.
But in March 2023, something changed when a night of activism for Vandoliers turned into a moment of clarity for Rose.
The band was scheduled to perform at the Shed, a barbecue-and-motorcycle joint in Maryville, Tennessee, not far from Knoxville. Days earlier, Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, signed a bill restricting public drag performances in the state. In protest, the six members of Vandoliers bought dresses and performed the concert in drag.
Vandoliers formed in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs in 2015.
Vincent Monsaint*
“I had worn a dress before, but it was in the dark, in private, or I was super ashamed of it,” Rose says. “Cory says, ‘We should wear a dress and protest this.’ And I’m going, ‘That’s a great idea!’ Then, we went and bought dresses, and I was super happy about it. I got to try on a dress with my friends. Everybody was over there, like, giggling and having a good time, and I was kind of alone. I put it on, and I felt really good. Just, Oh, I look nice! And I walked out onstage and played a great show. When It was over, I thought, ‘I was really brave today.’
“And then, it went fucking viral.”
In an Instagram post that began with “Fuck a drag bill,” the band announced that it would auction off the dresses and donate the proceeds to LGBTQ+ charities in Tennessee. Regional news sites picked it up, but so did worldwide outlets like Yahoo! News. The sudden attention forced Rose to reckon with herself.
“The entire world got to see me in a dress the first time I wore one outside of a locked door,” she says. “My shell shattered.”
The whirlwind of press interviews that followed caught her off-guard. “I got really, really scared,” Rose says. “People kept asking me, ‘Is there anybody queer or trans in your band?’ And I’d go, ‘No! We’re just a bunch of hairy dudes!’ But that wasn’t really true.”
In the summer of 2022 — the same year she got sober — she started keeping a journal during a European tour. “One day, maybe a week after the dress thing happened,” she says, “I wrote, ‘Fuck. I think I’m trans.’ I closed the book and didn’t make another journal entry for, like, two months, and when I did, my next entries were just what I was doing that day: ‘I’m in San Antonio today! Had tacos! They were good!’”
Vandoliers had previously listened to Laura Jane Grace’s book Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout in their van while touring, but in the months that followed that journal revelation, Rose reread it.
“There was so much familiarity,” Rose recalls. “When I finished it, I realized, ‘Oh, shit. I think I have gender dysphoria.’”
Even a year earlier, Rose believes she would have tried to repress those feelings with alcohol or cigarettes. But with neither a viable option, she sought therapy. Her first sessions were unproductive (”the wrong therapist,” she says now) and often involved her blaming the road for the personal sadness she felt, despite having a stable, loving family at home. She’s married — to a woman — and the couple has a young daughter.
“When I was four, I didn’t want to be a boy,” says the singer. Photograph by Allison V. Smith
Allison V. Smith for Rolling Stone
Rose returned to therapy and this time chose a gender therapist named Renee: “Within two sessions, she goes, ‘You are very trans.’”
As Rose processed it all, she began wearing shirts onstage that read “Protect trans kids.” The message was heartfelt, but it was also a trial balloon for her own journey. “Protect trans kids, but also protect me too,” she deadpans.
Then, in early 2024, Vandoliers began recording a new album with producer Ted Hutt (Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly) at the famed Sonic Ranch studio outside of El Paso. Rose offered roughly 40 songs for the project, but when Hutt heard them, he found them shallow. He challenged Rose to dig deeper in her lyrics and make the songs more personal. Rose did, and that process became her final sign. She decided to come out.
“That’s when I knew that this wasn’t going to go away,” she says. “Ted is making me go deeper and deeper, lyrically, and it hits gender dysphoria. Some of the things I put in were just, like, feelings. But some of them were pretty blatant.”
Rose came out to Alfaro in the summer of 2024 while Vandoliers were on an extended West Coast run. She came out to the rest of the group on Nov. 4, days before the U.S. presidential election. Vandoliers were on tour, opening for Lucero. Rose gathered the members together in their van and told them she was a trans woman. She recalls Graves realizing what she was saying before she could finish telling the group, and seeing a look of giddy anticipation cross his face.
“It’s exciting,” Graves tells Rolling Stone. “It feels punk rock as fuck to be in the trans space but in a country band.”
Graves says the days following the election of President Donald Trump, on the heels of Rose coming out, left him feeling uncertain about how to navigate the near-term future. But, one night, he went out and met a Vandoliers fan who brought up the dress protest, calling it inspiring.
“I went, ‘Holy crap, maybe I don’t have to save the whole fucking country,’” Graves says. “If I can narrow my lane to advocate for this one thing, I can have, like, a reason to exist for the next four years.”
He sees that reason reflected in Rose.
After Vandoliers performed a 2023 show in drag to protest an anti-drag bill, the group went viral. “People kept asking me, ‘Is there anybody queer or trans in your band?’ And I’d go, ‘No!’ … but that wasn’t really true,” Rose says. Photograph by Allison V. Smith
Allison V. Smith for Rolling Stone
“After you told us,” Graves says to Rose, “you became, like, yourself again, but in this different person. You were wanting to hang out with the group all the time, you were gabbing away.
“One of the things you said was, ‘I felt like I was going to come out and lose all my friends.’ But I felt like you came out and we got a friend back that we didn’t have before.”
Vandoliers’ next concert is April 26 in Forney, Texas. On May 16, they’ll open for the Toadies at Skydeck on Broadway in Nashville, followed a day later with a spot on the bill at the Dusty Trails Country Festival in Kansas City. And this summer, the band will embark on a coast-to-coast run of more than 30 headlining shows, starting June 21 at Globe Hall in Denver. They’re calling it the Life Behind Bars tour.
Rose acknowledges she’s slightly on edge over the possibility of frightened or close-minded promoters canceling shows. But any anxiety is outdone by the anticipation of simply getting to be Jenni Rose behind the mic, with the spotlight fully on her. “I’m going to try to stay in the moment,” Rose says. “In the last few years, I have always thought about this light emitting from my chest. I’ve been behind a mask, and I could still feel that light, and I could still share it with people, but now it is going to be, like, really fucking bright.”
Production Credits
Makeup by LAURA LOMONACO
