Neko Case article

[Tracy 2112]

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/07/18/071811-arts-music-neko-case-1-4/

THE DAILY

American Sound
Neko Case's variations on rock and country form their own tradition

By Michael Ames Monday, July 18, 2011

Some singers you hear. But like the schoolmarms used to say, hearing isn't the same as listening — and you really need to listen to Neko Case. 

She sings about cars and trains and murders in American towns. Nature is present in her work, as well — dangerous weather and animals doing animal things. Killer whales maim and kill while sparrows sing and then inevitably die. Cyclones blow and swirl, creatures lurk and gnash, and on album after album and show after show, Case does what she does: deliver pain, beauty and uncertainty in song.

Case is no longer a new story. Her most recent album, "Middle Cyclone," debuted in 2009 at No. 3 on the national charts and No. 1 on the indies. That major release, her third solo effort, earned two Grammy nominations (Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Recording Package), topped Amazon's Best of 2009 Top 100 list and generally ushered Case into the world of stardom.

Not that she necessarily wants the attention. Playing on tour, which she said she loves, Case can nevertheless seem the reluctant performer. If she's not strapped into one of her many guitars, she can stand a bit stiffly, arms stuck out and body swaying like a kid at a talent show. Not that it matters once she leans into the microphone and fills space with a voice that writers have run out of words trying to describe. 

Case's vocal instrument has been called "golden-hued," "siren-like," a "vocal tornado" and "a force that sets off things around it." Each in its own way is an appropriate description of her soulful and sad sound, at once humble and proud. To keep it in tune, she said, she "drinks a lot of water." 

At a July show in Boise, Idaho, she strolled onstage in black jeans and a black sweatshirt and blended into the darkness behind her. Were it not for her trademark neon-cinnamon hair, she could have passed for a stagehand. To start the set, guitarist Paul Rigby and banjoist Jon Rauhouse leaned into the driving notes of "Things That Scare Me," the opening anthem from "Blacklisted," Case's critically acclaimed 2002 solo album. The song, an abstract and succinct artist's manifesto, is almost a haiku: "Fluorescent lights engage / like birds frying on a wire / same birds that followed me to school when I was young. / Were they trying to tell me something? / Were they telling me to run?"

"Blacklisted" became the ne plus ultra of country-noir, a genre that Case arguably invented. The album's second song, "Deep Red Bells," is a swerving, moody hymn. Impressionistic strokes like "it tastes like being poor and small and popsicles in summer" could be widely interpreted, but the mood (straight out of David Lynch) says: Yes, listen to the birds. The danger is real. 

Case wrote "Deep Red Bells" with specific fears in mind — growing up in a Pacific Northwest terrorized by serial killers, first Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, in the Seattle area and then Robert Pickton, the Pig Farmer Killer, in Vancouver, B.C., where Case moved when she was in her early 20s. For the two decades of her youth, these two men murdered anywhere from 50 to 140 women, mostly young runaways, addicts and prostitutes.

"I had to walk home from school when it was dark out. It was a long way to walk," Case told The Daily. "There was always something to be afraid of. It dominated the news, and when you're a little kid, you don't make a distinction of classes of people. You see that young girls are being killed. That could be me. I better be careful," she said. "I always walked to school with a steak knife in my pocket."

Country singers have long relied on the creative alchemy that turns heartbreak into song. Whether it's Loretta Lynn's coal-dusted Kentucky childhood or Merle Haggard's bottom-of-a-glass sorrows, the genre has no shortage of troubled stories. Over the years, in snippets of song lyrics and an evocative autobiographical sketch on her website, Case has dropped hints about growing up hard.

"I was born on an Air Force base in Virginia to some teenage children," she writes. "From about age four to age fifteen, I was raised by dogs and cats. I occasionally intersected with my parents by accident. 'Oh it's you? I have to make you a lunch, don't I?'" 

Hers was not, safe to say, a Kodachrome childhood. She doesn't speak much about it, but the flavor of her memories is clear.   

"My parents very much wanted me to become a crack-whore, but I gravely disappointed them by graduating from college."

Case said she does not consider herself a writer.

"A lot of people call themselves that, and I don't know what the qualifications are, but I'm not going to pretend I am one," she said. "I try not to call myself stuff. At some point I might get there. I'd call myself a musician for sure. I can call myself that."

But even that realization didn't take hold until she was past 30, after more than a decade of recording and performing, when she had "no more day job," she said. A self-described professional, she continued to wrestle with themes of her own becoming. Her solo albums offer repeating loops of gloom and self-doubt, checked by the strength that set her free from ruin — from the grisly fates that awaited all those Tacoma runaways.

"Vengeance built me hastily," she sings on her latest album. "And I dragged the clanging notion that I was nobody, nobody ... nobody."

It's been awhile since Neko Case became somebody, and to the fans that follow her on tour or on Twitter (24,609 and counting), she opens up bit by bit. Online, she shares photos, like the one of the lizard that lives in her Santa Cruz rehearsal space. "Her name is Liz," she said. "Liz the lizard. Not very creative."

She is touring twice this summer, and being on the road brings out her characteristic mix of humility and pride. "I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I, Neko Case, could be part of something so grand," she wrote. "I have become equal parts truck driver, gladiator, and mule. It has been no bed of roses, and clean gas station toilets are few and far between, but I wouldn't have it any other way."

The camaraderie she shares with her all-male band and her backup singer and right-hand woman Kelly Hogan is infectious. A lot revolves around facial hair. In Boise, Case teased Rauhouse for his "whale baleen" beard and introduced Tom Ray as playing "on beard and bass." She recently told her fans that, "No matter how unattractive I may feel at times, I can always look in the mirror and think 'I have a great shaped chin for growing a beard.'"

Onstage, she plays the deadpan absurdist. On a live album, "The Tigers Have Spoken," she suggests that her Toronto audience consider feeding their unwanted children to tigers in the city zoo. Boise found her sleepy at the end of a long, hot day and a dry furnace drive from Reno. Stage-bantering with Hogan, ever the Ed to Case's Johnny, she shared her completely unrelated wonderment about whale lice.

"Whale lice are so big, they are the size of crabs. They are like big, little crabs," Case said, smirking. "This song goes out to the lice on the whales."

Nerdy hipster humor could be an innate talent, or a mutated carryover from her years spent in the Northwest punk scene. In Seattle and Vancouver, where she sang with a half-dozen bands and recorded with indie stars the New Pornographers, Case became a punk-nerd-indie-rock heartthrob. (In a poll conducted on Playboy.com in 2003, Case was voted the "Sexiest Babe of Indie Rock.") But as she grew out of punk's self-seriousness and what she has described as its poseur macho politics, she landed in the nearly opposite culture of classic country.

She spouts off on Twitter. A June 11 post said, "Supermarket terrifies me while blowing my mind! It contains SO LITTLE FOOD! It's all brightly colored clown chow! We are lazy motherf******." Another announced that she had found the perfect use for the hotel TV and offered a photo: clothes hanging to dry on a blank flat-screen.

Ubiquitous reality-TV shows haven't exactly make her feel better about TV sets, at home or in hotels. "I don't think it speaks well of us," she said. She finds reality game shows — "desperate, anti-human, compassion-stunting" — particularly cruel. Arts and music, Case contends, provide a more constructive sort of distraction.

Almost like a summation of this worldview, "Things That Scare Me" ends like this: "The hammer clicks in place. / The world's gonna pay. / Right down in the face of God, and his saints / who claim your soul is not for sale / I'm a dying breed, who still believes / hunted by American dreams."

Case holds onto her own definitions of success. In 2008, she told The Stranger, "I never want to play an arena, and I never want to be on the MTV Video Music Awards, much less make a video with me in it."

Yesterday's appearance at the Pitchfork Music Festival was the last of Case's current tour. She goes on one more tour this summer, from August 7 to 23. Otherwise, she's in her new home, a Vermont farm where she records in a rickety old barn, grows her own food and buys much of the rest from neighbors. A new album is in the works — she, Hogan and the band are testing out new pieces on the road — and she expects to be recording by wintertime.

It sounds like a plan, sounds like a life. But of her career at 40, Case isn't so certain. "I don't really know where I'm at right now, but I'm OK with that. It's transitional, but I don't really know what that means," she said. "I don't have any words for it yet."

[mjk73]

I can help her keep warm on those long cold Vermont winter nights.