Aaron Lee Tasjan feels the pull of community in troubled times

The social and political realities of the last year have in many ways drawn Aaron Lee Tasjan’s 2024 album, Stellar Evolution, into greater relief, accentuating both the shadows and the light in a record that, at its core, serves as a celebration of community.

One of these darker moments arrives courtesy the synthesizer-driven “Nightmare,” which finds the song’s queer narrator applying makeup in their car as a prelude to a night out dancing, assuming they’re able to navigate the dark downtown streets and make it safely to the club. “I’m fearing for my life,” Tasjan sings. “Mama, they want to kill me.”

In an early March phone interview, Tasjan said the song has roots in an altercation he experienced ages ago at a combination gas station/Taco Bell outside of Galion, Ohio, when a car full of teenagers pulled behind him in the drive-thru and began yelling homophobic slurs as he attempted to place an order. “And in that moment, I just kept thinking, ‘This never ends,’” said the Nashville-based Tasjan, who performs at Natalie’s Grandview on Friday, March 7. “If you’re a person who is I guess in some way visibly different, folks come after you in different ways, and it can feel really unsafe.”

These anxious feelings have only intensified in recent times, fueled by legislative attacks undertaken by Republicans against trans and queer people and further magnified by an accompanying spike in acts of violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community. Even just a few years back, Tasjan said, he was comfortable parking a few blocks away from a Nashville club he frequented and walking there hand in hand with whichever man he happened to be seeing at the time. “And I don’t know if I would do that now,” he said.

Other songs have taken on new resonance, including “Alien Space Queen,” which Tasjan initially envisioned as a celebration of “transness as a superpower,” and which has since come to stand as a foot-down act of defiance in the face of the trans erasure being perpetrated by Republican politicians while Democrats stand idle as observers. The impact has been both widespread and devastating. Billed as “Aaron Lee Tasjan and Friends,” this current tour was initially set to feature among other performers Jessye DeSilva, a transgender Boston musician. But in recent weeks, DeSilva had to back out, with Tasjan citing as one reason the potential dangers that exist in crisscrossing the country now as a trans person.

“So, in a lot of ways, the place I was at in my heart when I wrote that song is really hard to find right now,” Tasjan said. “But I also realize that if you let people like Donald Trump and JD Vance take the joy from your life, that’s the only true victory they could have. So, in other ways, that song is something I’m really proud to sing right now and is in many ways the message I want to communicate to the world. … I try to remember that a big part of why I wanted to be a singer in the first place was to try to build community.”

This realization has come to serve as a full-circle moment for Tasjan, who first picked up a guitar with these idyllic aims and then at some point found he had become distanced from them, increasingly enamored with the idea of chasing success, which he described as “not a great place for me in terms of my headspace.” 

That the musician might have temporarily been thrown off axis is understandable. When Tasjan was in his mid-20s, for instance, the New York Dolls plucked him from his glam-indebted former band, Semi Precious Weapons, and brought him on the road as a touring guitarist.

“I met [New York Dolls frontman] David [Johansen] the day before we flew to South America to do a whole tour, and I’d never even been in a room with him before,” Tasjan said of the Dolls legend, who died Feb. 28 at age 75, recalling him as a true original “who could never stop himself from being who he was or who he thought he could be.” 

Tasjan has been helped in this grounding by therapy, which also accounts for why a handful of songs on Stellar Evolution drift back in time to experiences the musician had as a teenager and early 20-something. (“Horror of It All,” a surging synth-wave cut, took shape as Tasjan recalled the time a high school classmate called on a teacher to intervene after they witnessed the only out student in their school putting on makeup in their car.) 

“Really getting into therapy, I made a conscious decision and effort to talk about these experiences, which is something I didn’t really do at the time all of these things were happening,” Tasjan said. “And that’s part of the goal of being a musician, too. It’s about the connection with the world and the humans around me, but then also trying to know myself more and better. … And some of that stuff can be scary, but that’s a noble way to face a fear, I think, turning it into something you can sing.”

Offering up this deeper excavation, Tasjan said, could also allow his experiences to serve as needed balm for younger members of the queer community who might not yet be able to live as their fullest selves. At one point early in our interview, I relayed a recent conversation with a young trans activist who expressed their concern in this moment for those “closeted trans middle schoolers” deeply fearful of what their futures might hold. 

“I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be a young person in this society right now who knows they’re trans and wants to come out,” Tasjan said. “When I was a young person, I was looking around for people I could relate to, and whose experiences mirrored the ones I was having. And that just wasn’t there at that time. … I think that visibility is important. And the more people that are willing to be visible in that way, the easier it can maybe be for some young people who are trying to navigate those big emotions.”

Another essential resource, and one which reverberates throughout Stellar Evolution, is the importance of chosen community, which Tasjan described as the motivating force behind his current tour.

“I have really reconnected with the idea of wanting to build community, to know myself more and to be sort of in an act of service to others,” said Tasjan, who will be joined for these shows by a rotating cast that includes Bobby Bare Jr., Ricki, Jeff Ratner and Kim Richey, among others. “Doing these shows with my friends, we’re going to sing my songs, but we’re going to sing some of their songs, as well. We’re going to be our own traveling circus, if you will. A traveling sideshow. Maybe people in the crowd will even get involved. Maybe I’ll see [Columbus musician] Happy Chichester sitting out there and be like, ‘Hey, man. Get up here and play a song!’ Those are the kinds of shows I want to have. Being in community with others just feels like where I need to be right now.”