Pansy "Skin Graft"
The Seattle-based musician Vivian McCall Vivian McCall established her career as a multinstrumentalist and recording engineer with the outsider-y retro pop band Jungle Green in Chicago. After years of engineering sessions for her bandmates, and recording an Jungle Green album with Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado at Sonora Recorders in Los Angeles, she recorded the self-titled Pansy (Earth Libraries, 2021): eight, short, deeply-personal songs about transformation and becoming. Vivian, a transgender woman, was processing her transition in real time, and drawing from the music that helped her survive–The Magnetic Fields, Liz Phair, and the eclectic punk of New Zealand’s Dunedin sound (Chris Knox, The Chills, The Clean, and others).
Where Pansy is about becoming a person, the Skin Graft EP is about being one, Vivian says, and balancing ordinary struggles with the existential crisis of living in a country that’s grown wildly hostile to transgender people. Recorded at “the Unknown” studio in Anacortes, Washington, Skin Graft is due via Earth Libraries in November 2025.