Shira Yevin of Shiragirl Talks Gritty In Pink, Warped Tour, and the Power of Persistence

Shira Yevin created the most punk rock moment in Vans Warped Tour history when she crashed the LA leg of the 2004 tour in a pink RV, set up a makeshift stage and started performing with her band, Shiragirl.

It was a ballsy move for the pop-punk vocalist, whose band was initially rejected from joining the heavily male-band-dominated event. But it paid off in a big way when Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman had a change of heart.  

“The original plan was to play like a song at the Truth [Campaign] truck [but] we just drove the RV in like we’re supposed to be there,” Yevin tells Rockmommy. “We drove into the grounds, parked across from the skate ramp next to the Truth Campaign truck and fully expected to get in trouble for it … when Kevin came out … we were like holding our breath and he just said, ‘so are you on for the rest of the tour?’

The moment, Yevin likes to say in media interviews, was “both an invitation and a challenge,” which she was happy to oblige by joining the tour for the rest of the summer.

Soon after, Yevin won MTV’s 2005 “Warpie Award” for crashing the tour. Her actions changed things for women, in small, but measurable, ways: The Shiragirl Stage at Warped Tour ultimately hosted 300 female-fronted acts including Joan Jett, Katy Perry, and The Dollyrots.

But becoming Wikipedia-level famous for what went down in the summer of ’04 only scratched the surface of what Yevin hoped to accomplish in equalizing rock music for women.

After relocating to LA from Brooklyn in 2014 and continuing to put out music for Shiragirl and other projects, Yevin’s lingering frustration over the lack of equitability for women in the music industry reignited her spark to disrupt the status quo yet again.

In 2020, Shira started Gritty In Pink with the goal of helping women and nonbinary musicians grow their careers, gain confidence, and gain exposure via partnerships, media and events. In 2022, Gritty secured pre-seed funding from investors to help launch its INPINK marketplace, a network for women/nonbinary artists and music industry pros. Live Nation announced its lead investment in Gritty In Pink, and Melissa Etheridge joined as Strategic Advisor. 

Thereafter, the partnerships kept coming. In 2025, Gritty In Pink partnered with the rebooted Vans Warped Tour to launch the Gritty Warped Warmup Tour presented by MadHippie, featuring rising stars like Sweet Pill, Royal & the Serpent and Sophie Powers.

We recently sat down with Yevin to soak up some of her girl-confidence vibes, ask a few gritty questions, and find out what’s next for 2026.

The edited transcript is is an excerpt of the full YouTube interview (below), between Gritty in Pink’s Shira Yevin and Rockmommy editor and founder Marisa Torrieri Bloom.

Rockmommy: Hi Shira! You are famous for crashing the Warped Tour in 2004. But before that happened, when did you decide that you wanted to change the world with your art?

Shira Yevin: I’m a Jersey girl actually … I went to school in Philly, studied abroad in London, and then moved to New York and lived in Brooklyn for a long time. I grew up being a dancer and a performer, with musical theater — and then in college, I started studying feminism.

I had a minor in theater arts and choreographed a play that kind of changed my life. It was called ‘she cuts herself / she likes to write.’ Gina Young wrote the play and basically this is how I met a bunch of the girls who were involved in Riot Grrrl NYC. And it kind of took everything I was studying in college about feminism into the real world and into real life.

I was just so stoked to find a community. I was also, at that time, coming out. It was a very different time to be queer. And I found this community!

I just always have been very action-oriented. I think a lot of people in this life will sit around and complain about all the things that they don’t like. I’m always just like, ‘what can we do?’ So I met this group of dynamic women, one of them [was] Meghan Storm, who’s one of my best friends to this day and who I’ve been touring with all year on the Warped Tour [2025]. We just inspired each other.

And that’s when I decided I want to do music, even though my mom sort of would joke around growing up like, ‘Shira, you can’t sing, you know.’ Then I discovered Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill.

I studied abroad in London and started recording music. And that’s how I broke into it. But actually, I went to college initially to do science research. And yeah, I wanted to find a cure for Crohn’s disease because I was diagnosed when was 14.

Rockmommy: Eventually you have to choose, because you can’t do it all. You can love the science and medicine, but [with] the arts, it sounds like the call was so strong, you couldn’t ignore it. At some point you were like, ‘I want to start a band.’ How did you find your people?

Shira Yevin: It took a while because I went to London …  and I came back and I was like, ‘I want to put a band together. But I knew not the first thing. And I was also kind of leaning towards being more like electro punk. Like Peaches was a really big influence. so my girlfriend at the time was a DJ. So we kind of just started there, where she would just spin the tracks and kind of scratch over it. And then, slowly, we were like, ‘let’s add a guitarist, let’s add live drums.’ Then I met Tim Armstrong from Rancid on Warped Tour 03, which changed my life.

Rockmommy: Yes! Tell me about what led up to you crashing the Warped Tour!

Shira Yevin: So the summer after I graduated, I went on Warped Tour because I was working for the Truth Campaign. And then I got introduced to this whole other world that I didn’t really know about. Obviously, I knew about pop punk, what I saw on MTV, you know, Blink-182 or whatever, but I didn’t know about this whole subculture. But I was like, ‘where are all the chicks?’ And people would say, ‘girls don’t play this kind of music.’ But I’m like, ‘I know that’s not true, because I had all these friends and bands, you know?’

So I literally approached Kevin Lyman, who led the tour … He was doing this Girlz Garage tour at the time [and] I was very new into doing music. Like I just had a few songs. I had stickers. We asked if we could have an opening slot on the tour.

My girlfriend was DJing on the tour as well. We were just inspired by what we saw on the tour, and were like, ‘we should make a mobile stage, you go on tour and just do it.’

Rockmommy: And then you got the pink RV?

Shira Yevin: We ended up finding like an old ‘89 Chevy RV up in Massachusetts and we’re just like, ‘let’s just tour the country.’ And I had met Tim Armstrong from Rancid at Warped ‘03 and he was like, ‘oh, if you’re ever in LA, come by, we could do some recording.’ He’s like, ‘I love your music.’ He just finished producing Pink’s third record, so I was like, ‘okay, I got to take him up on that offer.’

So we literally bought this RV, painted it pink and drove to LA on what we called the ‘Play as You Go Tour,’ in which we would just roll into a city like one week at a time and just pick up shows. We didn’t know what we were doing! The music was not that great, you know? But we were just all about making a scene.

And then finally made it to LA. And it was my first adult time being in LA., and we lived in an RV off Silver Lake Boulevard, recorded with Tim Armstrong, and just made it all happen. And then that was the summer where we were like, ‘okay, we want to crash Warped Tour.’

And we did ask first. There was this ‘Girlz Garage’ [tent] at time, and we asked, ‘can we bring girl bands into the Girlz Garage?’ Kevin just said, ‘let’s do it next year, we’ve got a lot going on this year.’ Well, ‘let’s do next year’ when you’re 21 is 10 years! I’m like, ‘I just recorded with Tim Armstrong, like, fuck it!’

The original plan was to play like a song at the Truth [Campaign] truck [but] we just drove the RV in … like we’re supposed to be there … we drove into the grounds, parked across from the skate ramp next to the Truth Campaign truck and fully expected to get in trouble for it … when Kevin came out … we were like holding our breath and he just said, ‘so are you on for the rest of the tour?’

It was both an invitation and a challenge! Like, ‘you want to roll with the big boys? Let’s see how far you can make it.’ But he also said that he had a soft spot in his heart because he used to follow the Grateful Dead around in a sandwich truck. He always considered me this hippie. He saw some of myself in him/ His thing was always, if you can make it happen, I’ll let it happen.

Rockmommy:  You know, like no risk, no reward. But the most punk rock thing that happened on the work tour that summer was instigated by you.

Shira Yevin: Exactly. Totally. I love that you said that because the following year we actually won an MTV Warpie Award for the most punk rock way to get an invite to the family. That was cool.

Rockmommy: Yeah, and what about the festival situation? Has that changed? At the recent CBGB Fest, the New Punks stage was all women-infused bands, not just female-fronted bands. I saw Demi Lovato two years ago. Her entire band was all women. How much progress are we making?

Shira Yevin: Yes, I love that. Women infused. I love that. It’s funny you mention Demi Lovato. Her musical director, bassist, and guitarist played in my band.  

Rockmommy: That was such a good show!

Shira Yevin: I was so proud of them, seeing them on the VMAs, you know? I was like, tears of joy. But yeah, no, we are making progress, you know? We’re still not at parity. There is a site that you’ve probably seen called Book more Women, where they literally break it down by percentage of lineups … we still have long way to go … and it’s certainly these days where it feels like things are sliding back with women’s rights, you know, so.

Rockmommy: I want to talk about Gritty iI Pink, what you’re doing now, and why women might want to join Gritty In Pink.

Shira Yevin:  So we have our platform INPINK, which is a platform to hire women in all aspects of the industry …  beyond musicians, also have photographers, videographers, marketing business, graphics. It’s free to list and we don’t take a cut of what you earn. So if you’re female creative women or non-binary … go on and add a listing. It’s backed by Live Nation and you know, we’re always searching the network to hire for various events, festivals, opportunities.

And then we do these Gritty In Pink all-girl jams. Right now we’re based in L.A., but we’ve done jams in other cities. We’ve done other festivals. We’ve done New York. So just getting involved in any of the jams is always good.

Rockmommy: When you go to conferences and you speak, what are the things that you get asked the most?

Shira Yevin: I definitely get asked to tell the crashing Warped Tour story a lot. I think people ask how they can sort of overcome like shyness … a lot of women don’t like to make asks. That’s always something I talk about … becoming comfortable, like asking for what you need and asking for what you’re looking for is a big thing.

I coach a lot of women on networking and have just launched a new membership that is in a pilot right now called Gritty Club, and we’re doing events, both in person and virtual.

Everything is relationships at the end of the day, even like, you know, I don’t know how you got that opening gig for Tiffany, but I’m sure you developed a relationship, whether it was the booking agent, or the manager, right?

Rockmommy: Yes, exactly.

Shira Yevin: sometimes it’s all it takes is persistence. People ask me, like, ‘how do you how do you do it?’ I just try to kind of break it down I say, ‘look it’s awkward for me!’ I’m definitely more extroverted than most but It’s never not awkward. I was at the Live Nation office and I never met the CEO, though he did look at my investor deck. So I just went up to him.

Did I have to like force myself to do it? Absolutely. Was I nervous? Of course! But I was just like, ‘if I don’t do this, I’m going to regret it forever.’

You know, people say ‘have balls.’ We say ‘have tits’ – you gotta, you know, have some tits about it.

[SEE RELATED: Women Who Rock Founder Melinda Colaizzi Shares on Music, Equity, and Health]

Rockmommy: What are you looking forward to in 2026?

Shira Yevin: We did this big partnership with Warped Tour coming back this year and that was awesome and with [our partner] Mad Hippie Beauty. We did some Warped Warm-Up shows, like we did our own tour leading up to the two Warped Tours. And so we’re potentially looking at …  would our own festival look like? You know, what would our own tour look like aside from Warped Tour and, you know, getting the right partners on board with the right artists and everything. So, you know, I think that’s, that’s a huge, long-standing dream that, you know, we would love to do!

Interview by Marisa Torrieri Bloom, founder and editor of Rockmommy