Neko Case

As if cosmically enacted, every handful of years Neko Case breaks to the surface with a new album and reminds listeners that she is one of our greatest living songwriters - perpetually becoming more fearless and adventurous. This has been true throughout her more than twenty-five-year career, during which her ferocious indie-rock and country-noir sound has swelled and shrunk to fit the mood, but the walloping impact of the universes she creates has never wavered. Listening to Case’s music will teach you about this world— human nature’s cruelty, perseverance and terrifying beauty, but the natural world as well — the moon and the stars, bees, lions and magpies. Should you encounter a wayward soul who has never heard her music, you might respond, “Well, she once sang from the perspective of a tornado,” as if to say: there’s no physical form that could stop her potent voice and evocative storytelling.

Arriving September 26, the Grammy-nominated iconoclast’s ninth LP, Neon Grey Midnight Green, is self-produced and her biggest-sounding and most intimate-feeling album yet. Initially entering the music scene as a drummer, Case harnessed her songwriting prowess and figurative and literal voice in 1997 with breakout debut album The Virginian. Followed by the elegiac Furnace Room Lullaby, the jangly melancholy of Blacklisted and touching covers of Loretta Lynn and The Shangri-La's backed by The Sadies on her first live album The Tigers Have Spoken, the experience of these early records led to the baroque and spectral masterpieces Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2006) and Middle Cyclone (2009) and the raw and heavy inward reflection on 2013’s The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.

Neon Grey Midnight Green is Case’s first new music this decade, following 2018’s Hell-On, an eclectic piece that The Guardian called “a pitch-perfect roar of female defiance.” Her latest is no less urgent but carries a deep blue streak of sentimentality in its incandescent blaze. The album pays tribute to the musicians, producers and activists who have passed away in recent years, all artists Neko was lucky enough to call not just influences but close friends. She rises on the shoulders of her musical heroes, using the tools they lent her to create her most inspired work. From the witchy, rageful punk of the title track to the stirring strings on “Oh, Neglect…” to the classic country waltz leading “Little Gears,” Case and a large cohort cover an astounding amount of sonic ground with locked-in vigor. More than any of her past albums, Neon Grey Midnight Green was laid down live with a full band – even breaths and shirt-sleeve rustlings were kept in the final mix as a reminder that “humans were here.” Recording primarily took place at Case’s own Vermont studio, Carnassial Sound, with additional sessions in Denver, Colorado with the PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra and in Portland, Oregon with Tucker Martine. “There are so few producers who are women, nonbinary, or trans,” says Case, who identifies as gender fluid and uses she/her pronouns. “People don’t think of us as an option. I’m proud to say I produced this record. It is my vision. It is my veto power. It is my taste.” Neon Grey Midnight Green’s most poignant elegy, “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” was inspired by Case’s late friend and collaborator, Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets. Plagued with a sort of intuition about death, Case penned the piano epic about two years before Romweber’s 2024 passing when she found herself worrying about him. As Case wrote in her recent memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, the first time she heard Romweber’s pioneering psychobilly group, “something unlocked in her that day, the way making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside of her body.” She called it “not a romantic love, but an all-consuming one”—a common thread across her memoir and her new album. Musically, “Winchester Mansion of Sound” draws inspiration from Robbie Basho’s “Orphan’s Lament”— “the saddest song ever,” says Case—as well as the classic “down down baby” nursery rhyme. The latter struck her as both comforting and a little melancholy, a bittersweet melody, like nostalgia itself. Entering in the back half of the record, “Louise” is a contemplative song of pleasure, one written and sung wholly for the feelings of the singer, resplendently luxuriating in taking a moment to not have to give a thought to the rest of the world. Case isn’t anti-romance, but as she croons on the sprawling highlight “Rusty Mountain,” where the heart of the record seems to live, “We all deserve better than some love song.” The rare love song in her catalog, Fox Confessor’s “That Teenage Feeling” states outright that it’s a romantic notion she borrowed from a friend, her longtime collaborator Paul Rigby. “I want everybody to have a love song that they relate to,” says Case. “It’s also a love song from musicians to other musicians, like when someone you’ve never met gave you something so huge, you can never repay them for it.” 

Also a collaboration with Rigby is “Wreck,” the album’s first single and an exploration of the soul-shattering feeling that is finding love with another fallible human being. “I know it’s selfish / But you’re the sun now! / And it’s a big job / One you didn’t apply for... / But maybe you want this too? / Do I look like the sun to you?” she enquires as the music lifts to the sky.

Aided by a trance-inducing electric guitar part and a ticking clock, the psychedelic closing track “Match-Lit” takes place within a dream world. Tucked at the end is a clue to the song’s inspiration: Case and multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry close harmonizing “Love Is Strange,” made famous by Mickey & Sylvia, the Everly Brothers, and others. They’re singing to their old friend Dallas Good; both bonded with him over a love of the Everlys and Mickey & Sylvia. Good, who passed away in 2022, was the singer and co-founder of the beloved Canadian rock band The Sadies, who often played with Case early in her career. “He made being a musician seem possible,” she says. “He really loved women and treated me the same as other musicians. I was a peer, and that was something I really needed.”

Her memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You was released in January and reached #5 on the New York Times nonfiction best sellers list. Raised “by two dogs and a space heater” in Washington state, the book’s vibrant wordplay and unflinching humor were a familiar balm to fans; as The Washington Post wrote in a glowing review, it “hits you in the same places her songs do: heart and gut, funny bone and sad bone.”  Case has also been hard at work on original music for the forthcoming Thelma & Louise Broadway musical after being personally selected by the original screenwriter Callie Khouri. Said Case of her memoir: “I hope my story will cast a spell of love, invite everyone inside, and smash the illusion that we have no connection to each other.”