photo by Dennis Kleiman
Neko Case
Issue #27
She’s just as much the girl next door as the mysterious artist whose code you want to crack. Her latest album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, is filled with magic moments and a cast of dark yet humorous characters.
By Emili Vesilind
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Every music junkie has a shortlist of singers whose voices have the power to conjure memories, or even emotional states, from the back catalogue of their lives. Think of Kate Bush’s howl, Corine Tucker’s warble, or Nico’s whisper. But few voices that have emerged over the last decade have proven as evocative as Neko Case’s. Most fantastically, the singer-guitarist possesses the ability to make you yearn for an era that occurred well before any of us were born. And her music — an improvisational mix of classic country, indie pop, gospel, and Appalachia — is as distinctive as her commanding voice.
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Case’s first studio solo album in four years (she’s also a singer for the genius pop-rock group the New Pornographers), capitalizes on her talents for writing Patsy Cline-era melodies and for storytelling — this time, in a style akin to unraveling fairy tales. “The actual stories are from experiences in my own life, then I borrowed characters from Eastern European fairy tales,” Case says. The album is populated with surreal characters, including the fox confessor, a borrowed creature Case says is “the observer who sees everything, and a woodsman, a sparrow, and Old John the Baptist. “I was interested in how fairy tales became fairy tales. Have you noticed that there are no new fairy tales? That fascinates me,” she says. “And the way my grandma tells stories is very fairy tale-like, even when they’re about family members.”
Utilizing animal imagery in her songs is nothing new for Case (her last album was the brilliant, live The Tigers Have Spoken in 2004), and she credits her fascination with animals to her upbringing. “My family is very reverent of animals. They were referred to by name in our house and slept in the bed with you. There’s also a lot of farming in my family — lots of dairy farms.”
Born in Northern Virginia in 1970, Case, an only child, moved to Washington state with her mother and father (who was in the Air Force) when she was barely out of diapers. At 15, she quit school, left home and got into in the local punk scene. “Being a kid, [punk] has a lot more appeal. I was practically homeless, and all the kids I knew were into live music,” she says. “I worked in clubs and used to go out every other night to see bands. A lot of the bands weren’t very good, but Girl Trouble was a really big deal to me. I also liked the Fastbacks — they had ladies and they weren’t trying to be punk.”
After attending the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver, where she studied photography, Case moved to Seattle. When in Vancouver, she played drums for Cub, and in Seattle, she dove into the music scene as the drummer of Maow, an all-female indie-rock band. “There weren’t many ladies in the scene,” Case says. “After a while, I felt there wasn’t anyone representing me.” She characterizes her shift into country- and gospel-tinged music as being “very gradual,” adding, “Early rocknroll/punk rock bands still had a lot of singing and melody. Not like the mid-1990s political people. When I saw Fugazi, I thought they were awesome … but they were a little self-righteous.”
During her stint in Maow, Case chanced upon an album by Bessie Griffin & Her Gospel Pearls, an old gospel outfit that she credits with making her “wish she could sing.” After writing and recording a few solo songs with friends, it became resoundingly clear that she could. Maow’s label, Mint Records, “was kind enough to put it out,” she says.
Case, a pale-skinned, girl-next-door stunner, was quickly crowned one of the new queens of the burgeoning alt-country scene, a label she loathes. “It sounds like a cop-out,” she says. “It sounds like it doesn’t want to have anything to do with country music, which is rather disrespectful.” Her first solo album, The Virginian (1997), was more country than alternative, and saw the then-27-year-old covering songs by Loretta Lynn and the Everly Brothers.
Furnace Room Lullaby followed in 2000, but it wasn’t until 2002’s Blacklisted that Case found her legs. “I think it was the first record where I wrote most of the songs and played lots of instruments on it,” says Case, whose main instrument is a four-string tenor guitar, but was never formally trained in music. “That record was very scary, in the way that this one was scary. I’m in the spot where I’m hoping to God that people get it and don’t think I’m a huge bummer. People think my music is dark, but Fox Confessor and Blacklisted have a sense of humor.” Case lets out her sharp, unexpectedly husky laugh and adds, “You just always hope that the next album won’t be the album of backlash!”
On the new album, which Case co-produced with Darryl Neudorf (who also produced New Pornographers record Mass Romantic), she composed songs without the safety net of traditional song structure. There aren’t more than a couple of sing-along choruses on Fox Confessor, but there are tons of one-time-only magic moments. “I wanted to get in and say what I had to say and get out,” she says. “I always think of it as the Freddy Mercury Treatment — Queen had these parts that had incredible melodies that would only happen once.”
Though Case created a dark cast of characters for Fox Confessor, she claims she’s not represented by any of them. She also says there’s only one overtly autobiographical song on the album: “Hold On, Hold On,” a cryptic, gorgeous song where she sings, “In the end I was the mean girl / Or somebody’s in-between girl / Now it’s the devil I love / And that’s as funny as real love.” “I don’t really ever put myself in my songs,” Case exclaims, then pauses, seemingly deciding the statement is too strong. “I guess I would be the narrator. Obviously, I have to write about some of my own experiences. But I’m pretty private.”
Case, who lives in Chicago, says she hates making music videos, is indeed private — a quality she gleaned from her brief upbringing in a heads-down family. “Talking about my self seems completely unnatural sometimes,” she says. “You can’t be ungrateful, but I’m from a very modest background. [Doing press] sometimes seems like I’m doing something unholy. I would give anything to be a fly on the wall. That’s why it’s good to have a dog — he doesn’t want to talk about me, he wants to go for walks.” Case’s private version of hell involves getting her picture taken, a necessity when promoting new projects. “Photo shoots are just my least favorite thing. It kind of feels like you’re hogging.”
That same modesty, Case admits, used to be a hindrance to her songwriting. “You have to work really hard on not censoring yourself,” she says. “I used to censor myself, even on things that I knew no one would hear.”
If publicity and videos are her thorns, Case’s big, blooming rose is playing live. “I love being on tour and playing live,” she says. “I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t like touring. It gives me a chill to think about it. I don’t have a significant other, no kids, not much of a family, so I like it.”
When she isn’t attending to her solo career, Case is rendezvousing with the Vancouver-based New Pornographers — in which she is billed as a “guest singer,” despite being a constant member since the band’s inception. “We get together and do things a few times a year to make a video, tour, etc.,” she says. The band, headed by Carl Newman of Zumpano and Dan Bejar of Destroyer, recently released its third album, Twin Cinema, a solid, straight-ahead indie-pop record. “It’s a lot more physically demanding to tour with the New Pornographers,” Case says. “The singing is much louder and it’s way harder. I don’t play guitar, but I play tambourine the whole time, which is incredibly difficult.”
Case will spend the remainder of 2006 on tour, supporting one or the other of her projects. But like the Fox Confessor himself, she may be ducking the tough questions when offstage. “If you’re lucky enough to chance upon the Fox Confessor, he knows everything,” she explains. “But he might not give you a straight answer. Or maybe your human brain isn’t large enough to understand it. Or if he did tell you, you wouldn’t even hear it.” Case pauses, reaching for one more possibility. “Or maybe you’re supposed to learn the lesson yourself.”
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