Dear listeners,
Over the past few months, I’ve been reporting a profile of a musician I’ve long admired: the golden voiced, uncommonly poetic singer-songwriter Neko Case. Even though I’ve been closely following her career for about 20 years, I can’t believe how much I learned from reading her stirring, forthcoming memoir “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” which is full of the sorts of illuminating details that have made me revisit her work in a new light.
One particular passage stopped me in my tracks, because it was such a succinct summation of Case’s unique point of view. “My desire, still mysterious to me,” she writes of her early teen years, “was to live in a world where my old gods, like horses and moths, and my new gods of music could coexist, in a pantheon.” (I underlined this enthusiastically and wrote in the margins, “That’s exactly what she did!”) In her music, Case creates an expansive, dreamlike space where fairy-tale logic mixes with the everyday, and where humans are no more or less important than all the other denizens of the natural world. “I’m an animal,” she sings in the bracing, primal 2009 song of the same title. “You’re an animal, too.”
Today’s playlist is a brief introduction to Case’s rich discography, her distinct lyricism and her gale-force voice. It pulls from her ever-evolving, two-decade run as a solo artist as well as her work with the jubilant pop-rock group the New Pornographers. Whether you’re rediscovering these songs or hearing them for the first time, I hope they inspire you to dig deeper into Case’s catalog — and maybe even pick up a copy of her extraordinary memoir.
Have mercy on the natural world,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Neko Case: “Set Out Running”
Case introduced her mighty voice on her 1997 debut album, “The Virginian,” but she came into her own as a songwriter on her follow-up, the haunting 2000 release “Furnace Room Lullaby.” “If I knew heartbreak was coming, I would have set out running,” she sings on this opening number, in a tone that strikes a balance between lonesome pathos and fiery defiance.
2. The New Pornographers: “Mass Romantic”
Case moved to Vancouver for art school in the mid-1990s, and while living there she befriended the musician A.C. Newman, who eventually formed the long-running power-pop group the New Pornographers. Case’s work in the band — exemplified on the bouncy title track from its 2000 debut LP — allows her to show off another side of her voice’s elastic range, proving she is just as adept with sunshine pop as she is with dark, brooding country.
3. Neko Case: “Favorite”
This elegiac ballad — a live staple first released on her 2001 EP, “Canadian Amp” — was the first song Case wrote on her own, and she describes that liberating experience in her memoir. “Before that I had worked with many players to help me shape the songs, which would look like me singing a melody into the air and the bandmate helping me figure out the chords underneath,” she writes. But as “Favorite” “took shape,” she notes, “I could feel something new splitting open in the world. It was like suddenly going from being completely stranded to having a car and knowing you can leave any time you want, that you can go anywhere you want. It was freedom.”
4. Neko Case: “Deep Red Bells”
On this haunting, masterful highlight from her 2002 album, “Blacklisted,” Case draws upon both her fascination with classic murder ballads and her memories of growing up in the Pacific Northwest when the so-called Green River Killer was preying upon young women in the area. She addresses one of his many all-but-forgotten victims in this song, expressing a sorrowful empathy for “all those like you who lost their way, murdered on the interstate while the red bells rang like thunder.”
5. Neko Case: “Hold On, Hold On”
When Case released her 2006 album “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” she described this track as the only “autobiographical song” she’d yet written. When asked to elaborate, she said in an A.V. Club interview, “I mean that the song is actually about me. It’s not metaphorical about other people. It’s not little pieces of my life made into a story about someone else or someone fictitious.” In that sense, it represents another evolutionary step in Case’s songwriting.
6. Neko Case: “This Tornado Loves You”
This opening track from Case’s great 2009 album, “Middle Cyclone” — sung from the perspective of an anthropomorphic, heartbroken tornado — is one of many songs that Case has written when trying to recollect one of her dreams. Her friend and collaborator Paul Rigby talked to me about its composition and cited it as one of many songs in which Case is able to extend her perspective beyond just the human realm. “Getting to know a weather system as a person is pretty cool,” he told me.
7. Neko Case: “The Tigers Have Spoken”
Are there any songs that, regardless of your mood, are guaranteed to make you cry as soon as you press play? This is one of mine, and if the melody so much as pops into my head, I’m a goner. This ode to a tiger killed in captivity — the title track from Case’s 2004 live album — is perhaps her sharpest and most gut-wrenching extension of compassion to the animal world. Someone hand me a tissue!
8. Neko Case: “Hell-On”
This smoldering title track from Case’s most recent album once again showcases her idiosyncratic lyricism and her knack for melding her own singular consciousness with the plurality of the natural world. “I am not a mess,” she sings. “I am a wilderness.”
9. Neko Case: “Night Still Comes”
Case wrote one of my favorite albums of hers — “The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,” from 2013 — while struggling with depression. (“I couldn’t run from being sad anymore,” she told me. “I had to do my time.”) She chronicles that battle with a courageous heart and a dash of dark humor on this rousing tune, banishing her demons with a cathartic chorus.
10. Neko Case: “I Wish I Was the Moon”
Finally, this yearning ballad from “Blacklisted” is one of the most beloved Case songs, and for good reason. In her memoir, she says that she wrote the song shortly before her father died, when “the sadness of my dad’s situation was on my mind a lot.” “I’m so tired,” she sings, before unfurling a lyric that beautifully encapsulates her own particular flavor of imaginative, otherworldly melancholy: “I wish I was the moon tonight.”
The Amplifier Playlist
“The Ultimate Neko Case Primer” track list
Track 1: Neko Case, “Set Out Running”
Track 2: The New Pornographers, “Mass Romantic”
Track 3: Neko Case, “Favorite”
Track 4: Neko Case, “Deep Red Bells”
Track 5: Neko Case, “Hold On, Hold On”
Track 6: Neko Case, “This Tornado Loves You”
Track 7: Neko Case, “The Tigers Have Spoken”
Track 8: Neko Case, “Hell-On”
Track 9: Neko Case, “Night Still Comes”
Track 10: Neko Case, “I Wish I Was the Moon”
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