There’s a special challenge to being an artist in this increasingly fractured cultural
age; a delicate balancing act, between being of your time, and striving for
timelessness. Few contemporary artists even try. Neko Case is an exception.
Case’s last album, 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, brought her to that
nexus where critical acclaim meets commercial success. But Case’s impact can’t
be measured merely in chart placements or press plaudits. It’s her ability to
connect – on an uncommonly deep and meaningful level – with her audience.
She’s one those artists, you see: the kind whose songs linger in your head, your
heart and soul long after the record has stopped spinning.
While Case’s creative evolution has made for an impressive story so far, she’s
about to write the most remarkable chapter in that continuing saga with the
release of her sixth studio album, Middle Cyclone.
The tornado that blows through the title and several songs on Middle Cyclone is
an apt metaphor. Neko has famously taken her own twisted route, lighting for a
time in the South, in the West, in the Northwest, in Canada, flirting with as many
musical styles as homes. She is settled—or unsettled—in Tucson for the
moment, with dreams of moving full-time to the former dairy farm she owns in
Vermont. She recorded the new album in both locations, as well as studios in
Toronto and Brooklyn.
For Case, the beauty of making music, of creating, is that it remains a
mysterious, confounding and, occasionally, contradictory process. “When I
toured for Fox Confessor one of the things I said in interviews about that record
was that I don’t like writing love songs, that I can’t write them,” she recalls. “Of
course, as soon as I said that, I ended up writing a bunch of love songs.”
It should be noted here that Case’s “love songs” are not the typical boy- meetsgirl
variety, as the opening track, "This Tornado Loves You,” dramatically attests.
“What would it be like to be pursued by a force of nature?” asks Case. “That’s a
frightening and exciting prospect.”
Case resists the temptation to see the tornado as metaphor for something more
personal, like a destructive relationship from her past. “Of course, I’m fine if
people want to interpret it that way, but for me, the song is very literal,” she says.
Neko is equally earnest when she sings exultantly about the revenge of caged
animals on their keepers, in the polemic “People Got A Lotta Nerve.” The lyrics
we’re tempted to read as ambiguous and layered (“But you seemed surprised
when it pinned you down/ to the bottom of the tank… I’m a man-eater, and still
you’re surprised when I eat you”) are in reality the plainest. Neko’s killer whales
and elephants really are killer whales and elephants. But with a magician’s gift for
misdirection, she keeps us off balance, questing and questioning.
Like the old tale of the scorpion and the frog, Case’s message here seems to be
that instinct is immutable. It’s an idea she explores further on the anthemic “I’m
An Animal.”
“I feel like one of the real tragedies is that, as a species, human beings are
constantly trying to deny or sublimate our natural instincts,” says Case. “And I’ve
made a conscious effort not to do that, but to trust myself, both in my life and in
my work.”
Instinct runs through Middle Cyclone as a theme and a goal, most often and most
forcefully as the instinct for love. “But,” notes Case, “only in the sense that the
songs are about the need for love -- no matter how cool you think you are. What
other people might call ‘love songs’ I think of as homages. They can be to a
person, a region, a feeling, even sad feelings.”
That notion is captured vividly on “Pharaohs” – a kind of cousin to Fox
Confessor’s “That Teenage Feeling” – as Case’s character pines wistfully for an
idealized romance that seems to exist only in the imagination: “You kept me
wanting…like the wanting in the movies and the hymns,” she sings, “I want the
Pharoahs, but there’s only men.”
As you listen to the album, Case’s evolution as a writer is, at times, almost
overwhelming. The modest lyrical aims of her debut LP - - released just over a
decade ago - - have been continually outstripped with each successive effort,
and Middle Cyclone continues that trend in spectacular fashion.
And then there are the songs she didn’t write. Having covered everyone from
Bob Dylan to Aretha Franklin, Case’s ability to re-make the material of others has
long been celebrated. On Middle Cyclone she again flexes her interpretive
muscles re-imagining a pair of early-‘70s gems: Sparks’ “Never Turn Your Back
on Mother Earth” and Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me.”
Sparks’ 1974 song was an obvious choice, fitting perfectly into the foreboding
nature-oriented theme of the album. “Plus, I just love Ron Mael’s lyrics,” says
Case. “Sometimes I go to the Sparks website and just read their songs as poetry.
‘Cause they’re bizarre and really controversial, and tongue-in-cheek and funny –
all at once.”
With the Nilsson tune – an emotional farewell to his ex-wife originally included on
his 1974 party album Pussycats – Case felt a deep tug in funny-sad couplets like:
“I’ll miss you when I’m lonely, I’ll miss the alimony too/Don’t forget me…just for a
little while.”
“The song has a Roger Miller and Ray Davies quality to it,” says Case. “That
heartbreaking comedy line that punches you in the gut and makes you cry that
much harder.”
Case decided the only way to record ”Don’t Forget Me” was to turn the original’s
grand orchestral arrangement on its head. She began answering ads on
Craigslist advertising free pianos, gathered half a dozen of them up in her
disused Vermont barn, and invited a group of friends and fellow musicians to
form a ragtag “piano orchestra” to play on the song.
Middle Cyclone is awash in similar moments of sonic inspiration and homespun
creativity. In one magical interlude we hear the sound of birds chirping, just as
Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin begins a midi sax solo. “Which I think is so hilarious,”
says Case of the charmed collision. “We’ve got natural robins and unnatural midi
sax. But somehow they work perfectly together.”
With Neko’s indefatigable touring band (guitarist Paul Rigby, bassist Tom V. Ray,
vocalist Kelly Hogan, multi-instrumentalist Jon Rauhouse and drummer Barry
Mirochnick) building the bedrock of the tracks, Case was able to bring in a
collection of friends and fellow travelers including M. Ward, Garth Hudson, Sarah
Harmer, and members of The New Pornographers, Los Lobos, Calexico, The
Sadies, Visqueen, The Lilys, and Giant Sand, among others. “Everyone who
worked on the record had their input and sculpted things,” says Case.
Ultimately, for Case, the songs and themes on Middle Cyclone express a long
internal struggle, a pitched battle between nature and nurture. “Things like
animals and nature, they’re located in the tender receptor of my brain. And I’m
just now trying to come to terms with the notion of loving people as much as I
love those other things - because I grew up in a way that made me love the one
but not the other.’
“So, I guess I’ve been working that out for myself, and these songs are my way
of reconciling those feelings.”