This will be the first in hopefully many musical analysis of artists. I wanted to start with this artist/band for a few (mostly subjective) reasons:

• They are really good
• I just got the honor of seeing them in concert
• I also harbor similar feelings to Chicago deep dish pizzas

More thematic reasons include:

• What does it mean when an artist goes solo/changes their name?
• Given Laura's public transition and gender dysphoria, has this changed the music?

Laura Jane Grace is the singer from Against Me! (the ! is part of the name). Against Me! put out there most recent album in 2016. The solo project, Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers put out an album in 2018. Both bands are actively touring in 2019. Both bands share a drummer (Atom Willard) and singer/songwriter/guitarist (Laura Jane Grace). Both bands are punk.

Against Me! sold out the Paradise in Boston. Yet Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers, with her new name and less name recognition, had a great show but did not sell out the Sinclair. So why change your name? Is the music different?

Analyzing Music

As alluded to on the Math & Music homepage, Spotify has a great way to approach this problem. By song we can look at various qualities which can then be rolled up to an album level. Here is a table of Against Me! and Laura Jane Grace's albums. Note that only "Bought to Rot" was released as Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers, the rest are Against Me! albums.

From this we can see the new album is perhaps more minor and more explicit (cursing) than her prior work. But there is more we can look at.

Song Characteristics

Many things are very hard to quantify in music, but Spotify does its best. They provide the additional detail by track:

• Danceability
• Energy
• Liveness
• Loudness
• Valence (Think happiness/sadness)
• Speechiness
• Acousticness
• Tempo

*Spotify does have more, but this is wear I will focus most my analysis. For more information on these metrics please see the Spotify page.

On the below graphs, each point is an album, with the horizontal position reflecting when the album was released. Looking at these over time we see danceability is up, and energy, liveness, and tempo are down on the most recent album.

Cool, Cool. So we can see Born to Rot is very danceable and, loud and live. But while that makes a nice, pretty little graph, it doesn't provide the context. Let's put them all on a graph together:

Very interesting! Now there is a lot to unpack here. It's interesting how the first and last album have similar shapes, and the graphs flatten in the first couple albums. It's also interesting to note some key dates:

• Laura got married in 2000 and divorced in 2004
• Laura got married again in 2007, daughter in 2009, and divorced again in 2013
• May 2012, Laura came out as a transgender woman

Final Thoughts on Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers

Overall, the music from Laura's new project is inline with her prior work. Perhaps some of the growth reflect the maturing of an artist or a general trend in music. While I don't have too many answers, I hope you found this insightful or at least mildly interesting. I will analyze other artists in a similar fashion going forward and hope this provided a good introduction.