If Neko Case had only one phrase to explain her first solo album in seven years, she would decide on “formidable.”
Honest sufficient. Writers have twisted themselves into knots making an attempt to explain Case’s sound — “gothic Americana” is one iteration — but it is usually a thrill experience via shifting tones and tempos, anchored by her vivid imagery and titanic voice.
On the “Neon Grey Midnight Green” album, Case was intent on inviting a lot of musicians to hitch her, and their energy is obvious. She employs a 16-piece orchestra. Add in 10 different listed gamers (together with herself) and that makes for 26 musicians on the album-ending track “Match-Lit” alone.
“I wanted to remind people of what it sounded like to have a large group of people playing together,” Case mentioned. “That doesn’t mean I have anything against synthesizer string sections or horn sections, because those things sound cool when you use them in the right way. And having a whole orchestra is cost prohibitive, especially now. I really wanted to do it because I didn’t think I’d have the chance to do it again.”
Possibly it’s not a wall of sound, however the swirling strings on “Wreck,” for instance, take her music to a joyful place. Hear fastidiously for the harp.
A number of tasks preserve Case busy
It wasn’t author’s block that saved Case out of the image for a number of years. The pandemic was an interruption for everyone. The Vermont-based singer additionally data and excursions with the band The New Pornographers. She has written the music for an upcoming stage adaptation of “Thelma & Louise.” And he or she additionally wrote a memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” revealed earlier this yr.
The ebook describes a harrowing upbringing, principally within the Pacific Northwest by dad and mom who conceived her as youngsters and had been unprepared and bored with elevating her. Case says at one level, she was advised her mom had died, solely to have her present up once more a yr and a half later with no clarification.
Case was primarily on her personal by the point she was a teen. Music, to an awesome extent, saved her.
The on-again, off-again relationship along with her mom is off. “I don’t even know anything about my mother anymore,” Case mentioned.
Ache would not disappear, although. “From her I learned to be cruel,” Case sings in new track “An Ice Age.” “I learned the look that goes right past the ones who love you as if there’s no one standing there.”
What will probably be attention-grabbing in coming months, as she prepares to take new songs on the street, is whether or not opening her life to the world with the memoir will draw extra individuals to her music. Her administration has seen preliminary indicators that it has, however Case is not certain.
Colin Dickerman, editor-in-chief at Grand Central Publishing and editor of Case’s ebook, has a hunch that it’ll. From studying opinions of the memoir, he is aware of it attracted followers who needed to study extra concerning the author of songs they liked. Nevertheless it additionally reached individuals who had been within the story about overcoming adversity and subsequently mentioned they’d take a look at her music.
“I think it really did reach a bigger audience,” Dickerman mentioned.
Two of Case’s new songs honor mates, each musicians, who died just lately. One is for Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets, whose songs impressed her to make music earlier than he later turned a good friend and collaborator. Dallas Good, late singer of The Sadies, who performed with Case early in her profession, is the inspiration for “Match-Lit.”
The latter, an in depth description of what occurs when a match is lit, illustrates Case’s typically intriguing pathways to songs; she memorably as soon as wrote from the perspective of a twister. “I don’t do it purposely to try and be weird,” she mentioned. “I’m just a noticer, a chronic noticer.”
Typically it is as much as the listener to find out what a track means to them, reasonably than attempt to determine what Case particularly meant.
“There’s a bit of, not withholding, but leaving space for people to come into the song and wear it like it’s theirs and for them to make associations about their own lives, to make it about themselves,” she mentioned. “Those are the songs that meant a lot to me, or did when I was younger. I want the listener to feel invited into it.”
Love songs: An train in futility?
On “Rusty Mountain,” Case sings about how writing love songs is usually “an exercise in futility for me.” Slowly it dawns on you that you just’re listening to a love track. Equally, “Wreck” — with the memorable line “I’m a meteor shattering around you” — suggests Case protests a bit an excessive amount of.
“There’s all different kinds of love on there,” she mentioned. “I feel just about each track, save perhaps one, is a love track — about music or musicians or particular individuals right here or there. There are love songs about different issues, reasonably than simply heterosexual love, which is the factor individuals write about most of all.
“It’s difficult to avoid cliches when you’re writing love songs,” she mentioned, “and the people who are good at it are so good at it that you’re like, ‘why bother?’ I always think about Louie Armstrong singing, ‘If I Could Be With You,’ and I think, ‘is there a better love song than that?’ I don’t think so. Or his version of ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.’ The bar of people who write love songs is so high that I kind of feel daunted by it.”
She is aware of sufficient people who find themselves homosexual or gender-nonconforming who do not hear love songs they will relate to. That is a problem she accepts.
“It made me want to make sure there was room for people, no matter who these people were, to wear the song like a punk rock vest and to feel held onto and comforted,” she mentioned.
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David Bauder writes concerning the intersection of media and leisure for the AP. Observe him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
