One of Our Greatest Singer-Songwriters Is Back With an Extraordinary New Album
Neko Case has never been one for love songs. Straightforward examples of the form are pretty rare in the repertoire the now 55-year-old artist has built up across nearly three decades as a singer-songwriter. (They’re a bit more common for the Vancouver-born indie “supergroup” the New Pornographers, of which she’s been a member nearly as long.)
She goes directly at the subject on her eighth solo album, Neon Grey Midnight Green. It’s titled after some characteristic atmospheric hues in the Pacific Northwest, where Case mostly grew up, often left to her own devices by parents too young and damaged to care for or even really love her, as chronicled in her harrowing bestselling memoir published earlier this year. On the ninth track here, “Rusty Mountain,” she sings, “Love songs mostly sound the same/ An exercise in futility, for me/ There’s a few who get away with it/ They’ve some divergent insight I can’t find.”
From there she goes into her frequent mode of protest against a culture, particularly the rock-music culture she came up in, in which all a woman is supposed to hope for is to be a muse to some guy who’ll write a song for her: “Take your radio and shove it!/ All your ‘he’s’ and ‘she’s’ and rhyming ‘love’ … We all deserve better than some love song.” The arrangement is mostly acoustic, with ornamentation from other instruments entering only cautiously, as if scared of what might happen if they come on too strong.
But then there is a twist. The song pivots to address someone else, someone other than the usual suspects: “And now that someone really loves me … It took some divergent insight long in finding/ But now you’re here.” There is even a surge of orchestral strings. And at the end of the song, when Case repeats, “We all deserve better than a love song,” it becomes clear that the better thing is actually, simply or not-so-simply, love itself.
Neon Grey Midnight Green offers all of the qualities listeners have come to expect from a Neko Case album: Her nonpareil voice brings its vast scope of tones and timbres from husky lows to belting peaks, which can kick you in the groin as readily as they can swaddle your bleeding heart or transport you across oceans. Undulating melodies defy you to sing along as the hook of one verse snags upon the turning whirligig of another, and standard terms like bridge and chorus are outmoded by the way Case constructs musical soliloquies to probe the extreme specificity of her thoughts. The title track, right in the middle of the album, presents suites of changing moods like weather systems, or rounds of a fight, as tense drones give way to Heart- or Led Zeppelin–style guitars over which Case shouts, “I’m not your backdoor man! … Not your … girl!”
Then there are the expected, fablelike songs about nature and its beasties—including the body-dysmorphia shaded “Baby, I’m Not (A Werewolf),” which culminates in the incredible declaration, “I ate every story, I ate every myth/ And when I finished with the minotaur/ I ate the labyrinth,” as well as the prototypically Neko Case, mostly waltz-timed “Little Gears,” about watching a spider spin a web more perfect than any artwork, and wondering, “Why isn’t that enough!?/ Why do people need to feel so special all the time/ So above it all?” (As she once titled a song, “People Got a Lotta Nerve.”)
But on this album, some things also have changed. The record begins with the sustained note of an orchestra tuning up. The presence of this cinematic-scaled ensemble is the biggest formal development on Neon Grey Midnight Green compared with any of Case’s previous albums—the PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra, an extension of an existing project based in Denver, has been assembled in this particular form just for this album by Case’s friend, the violinist and arranger Tom Hagerman (also of the band DeVotchKa).
The self-assurance evinced by this choice is matched by Case’s decision to bill herself for the first time as the sole producer of the album, which was also the first recorded at her farm in Vermont in her own home studio, Carnassial Sound. Carnassial: adj. “of teeth, adapted for shearing flesh,” as in carnivorous—Case is nothing if not on-brand there. But the strings, woodwinds, and horns of the Chamber Orchestra introduce something less barbed than her most familiar, lonesome, film-noir sound. It’s a warmth, a grandeur, a romanticism her music’s always hinted at but never quite unleashed as much as it does here.
The first words she sings, on opening track “Destination,” are “Hello, stranger.” It’s a musical salutation that calls back to a 1937 song, now a bluegrass standard, by foundational country band the Carter Family, as well as to a 1960s R&B classic. But above all, it recalls a foundational song of Case’s own, “Hold On Hold On,” written 20 years ago, which she’s called her first autobiographical song. It begins, “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers/ I know it’s unkind, but my own blood is much too dangerous.” Those words staked out some of the boundaries (so much more understandable post-memoir, as so many listeners now know the back story) that made Case back in the 2000s seem like such a fearsome but sad but ultracool lone wolf—or lone orca, or cheetah, lion, mosquito, mockingbird, or sphinx, as the case may be.
On this album, though, that “hello, stranger” is followed by the phrase, “you remind me of someone.” And that’s because these songs, not for the first time but much more straightforwardly and unabashedly, are full of people. Not people always masked as forest creatures or mermaids or pirates or phenomena of physics, though certainly the songs still contain many of Case’s usual visionary metamorphoses, but at the forefront, individuals she cares or has cared about. In all kinds of senses—the platonic and the artistic and the familial and yes, even the romantic—most of what she offers here are love songs.
Perhaps this willingness to dare sentimentality comes partly from the confidence gained in the process of writing the memoir and making her stories public in a more open way than before, though most of the songs would have been composed in and around (or even before) that writing. It might partly be the feeling of being “young again” that Case sings about here, which she’s explained in interviews as a liberated and renewed selfhood after having made it through the foggy “second adolescence” of menopause. She’s also identified herself as genderfluid for the first time, crediting a younger generation for giving her language for the unfixed identity she’s always felt (though for her that extends beyond sex and gender even to species). Finally, though, there is also just the “gift,” as she’s said, of having to deal with grief, for the many friends, collaborators, and sources of inspiration she has found herself losing now that she’s in her 50s.
As a listener about the same age, I understand those life passages all too well. This week alone, while listening to Neon Grey Midnight Green, circumstances have brought me up close to the punishments being endured by an older, wonderfully sharp colleague in the late stages of terminal cancer, and by a brilliant middle-aged artist friend going through a dangerous mental health crisis in part because the economic supports are not there for them the way they used to be.
One of the people Case memorializes on this album was another member of my own artistic community here in Toronto, the guitarist Dallas Good from the band the Sadies, who often accompanied Case in her early days and among many other things co-composed “Hold On Hold On” with her. Good died without warning of heart failure in 2022, at only 48. In the closing song here, “Match-Lit,” she sings about a dream she had after his death that she also described in her book, in which he appeared to her, said, “Watch this!” and disappeared inside a cactus. “Oh, this parlor trick,” she sings. “We understand and are beloved of its magic.” The magic she mostly means, we understand, is music. To underline the point, in the final seconds Case and Richard Reed Parry (of Arcade Fire and another close friend of Good’s) sing in high, almost horror-movie voices, the words “love, love is strange,” from the mid-1950s Mickey & Sylvia song she and Good were both fond of. (It also appears in the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, so it’s a bit of a Gen X secret handshake.)
Along with Good, Case pays tribute to her friend and hero Dexter Romweber of the band Flat Duo Jets, on the song “Winchester Mansion of Sound”—the title a reference to the huge and strange architectural marvel the Winchester Mystery House in California. Many of the songs are also crafted to honor musicians in a time when the economics of streaming, touring, and other necessities of the trade are threatening their livelihood.
But other songs make homages to, or at least open dialogues with, even more personal figures. Readers of her book will quickly notice the specters of her father on “Tomboy Gold” (an eccentric double saxophone–backed track reminiscent of some of the experiments with voice and instrumentation on Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters) and more perilously of her mother on “An Ice Age.”
Perhaps my very favorite song on the album is also its most straightforward and traditional love song, “Wreck,” presumably addressed to the longtime partner and farm cohabitant she jocularly refers to in her popular Substack newsletter as “ManFriendJeff.” The music there positively romps, compared with the waywardness of many of the songs, and the lyrics have a similar energy that reminds me of the poet Frank O’Hara in his most ecstatic-yet-wry romantic moments:
Please come back soon
Sooner than you want to
It’s the only thing in this whole world
That will please me
I know it’s selfish
But you’re the sun now!
And it’s a big job
One you didn’t apply for …
Then there’s the tantalizing taste of “Louise.” It’s presumably from or at least adjacent to the Thelma and Louise stage musical adaptation Case has been working on with the film’s original screenwriter Callie Khouri for a decade, recently workshopped in London’s West End and hopefully someday Broadway-bound. Meanwhile we have this love song, presumably for Louise from Thelma, and isn’t that like a dream come true?
Still it always comes back to music and musicians. The “stranger” in “Destination,” the road-tripping and club-going “you” the song addresses—with one of the album’s most accessible melodies, a true welcoming-in— might be any number of musical peers, predecessors, and successors Case admires, especially the women. On the great tour bus of the soul, she sings, “You’re the real destination,” and that’s where the strings come in, even a harp playing glissandos, in all their movie-palace lushness, as Case sings, “You somehow live free of men’s eyes?” And “most of all,” she adds, “I love you because you don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt/ Waiting for the world to catch up/ And see you for your worth.”
We might not know who she’s thinking of there. But for any listener who’s been paying attention all these years, the description matches exactly what most of us have forever thought about Neko Case herself.
Slate
