Meet Macy Rodman, the 'trans pop Courtney Love' who won't cede an inch

Lazy Girl’s set was anything but. Macy Rodman moved across the stage of Brooklyn’s Good Room with a mid-aughts party girl purpose, cutting through the Trix Yogurt haze of the gem-tone spotlights to claim every inch of the Greenpoint venue as her own.

Macy’s no stranger to the politics of taking up space. Blissful ignorance of how one’s body will be received in a given environment is a luxury not often afforded to trans people. The songs on her HELP EP—self-released on SoundCloud and Bandcamp back in February—reflect the experience of constantly having to assert her right to exist in a culture that would rather see her erased. But while the everyday transmisogyny that fuels everything from street harassment to the passage of transphobic “bathroom bills” might make Rodman “wanna lay down and die,” to borrow a phrase from her underground breakout hit “Lazy Girl,” there she was last Friday night: taking up space and annihilating the crowd with her presence.

Before she became the self-described “trans pop Courtney Love” we know and stan for, Macy was just a little seal girl living in the real world. Born and raised in Juneau, Alaska, she left the non-contiguous tundra of the 49th state at 18 to pursue her bachelor’s degree at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. After dropping out in her sophomore year, she embedded herself deeper and deeper into Brooklyn’s queer nightlife, and before long she was hosting and performing at events of her own.

For three years, Macy threw a party-slash-queer performance variety show called BATHSALTS at Williamsburg bar Don Pedro. It’s been nearly a year since the last installment of her so-called “Drag Show For F&%$ups” took place, but Rodman, like J.Lo before her, knows where she came from. To honor her come-up on the JMZ, the 26-year-old included a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” as the closing track on her HELP EP—the same song she’d often sing to close BATHSALTS.

“It was just this ode to where I’ve been, where I’m going,” she said of the decision when we spoke in March. “A really nice way to tie it all together.”

Macy co-produced the HELP EP with New York DJ JX Cannon—with the exception of “Don’t Break My Heart,” which she produced entirely by herself, “from top to bottom.” She told me that the writing and recording process took the pair the “better part of a year.” She’d write lyrics and make beats on her own until the songs were about “half figured out,” then she’d take the tracks to JX so they could “build up from there” using “pretty basic pop stuff” (drum machine, synths) and various music software applications (REAPER, Reason, GarageBand, Logic Pro).

Although it’s only five songs long, HELP covers a lot of ground. Rodman stays high off the energy of a new crush even when she’s coming down (“Drug Nights”). She contemplates vengeance against those who perpetrate anti-trans violence against her (“Violent Young Men,” the forthcoming video for which was directed by Jake Dibeler of the band Bottoms). She details the psychological toll of existing while trans over a bratty-cute beat (“Lazy Girl”). She foresees the coming end of a relationship with Cassandra-like clarity (“Don’t Break My Heart”). And finally, she gathers her missing pieces to begin anew (“Landslide”). The EP as a whole is framed within the upswing and subsequent downswing of a complete depressive cycle: the cautious optimism, the pent-up rage, the paralyzing ennui, the profound sense of powerlessness. It’s all there within in the EP’s 19-minute, 37-second runtime.

While she’s far from the first musician to tackle depression in her work, Macy’s exploration of that theme is unique—if not singular—for its portrayal of transmisognyny as a situational catalyst for depression.

“Aside from the, like, chemical depression, I think that a lot of the agoraphobia and fear of going outside—what I’m talking about in ‘Lazy Girl’—is not wanting to have to deal,” she told me. “Some of that is fear, and some of that is this, like, need to want to present in a certain way that takes a lot of effort. And oftentimes, that effort isn’t even recognized. [It’s a] combination of frustration, fear, hormones—it’s a lot of factors.”