One morning, when she was about 7 years previous, Neko Case stood on her entrance porch, closed her eyes and wished with all her would possibly to see a horse.
It was a tall order. She and her mother and father lived within the coastal metropolis of Bellingham, Wash., and none of their neighbors had been equestrians. However, because the musician recollects in her new memoir, “The Tougher I Battle the Extra I Love You,” the younger Case “clench-focused as arduous as I may,” and when she opened her eyes one thing unbelievable had occurred: Two attractive horses, ridden by two ladies, got here clomping instantly towards her. Within the midst of a tough childhood, this stands out as one fleeting second when she believed irrefutably in miracles, fairy tales and the likelihood that good issues may occur to her.
“At 52 years previous,” she writes, “I can nonetheless see the horses clear as day.”
A cult-favorite singer-songwriter with a gale-force voice and a spiky, irreverent character, Case has been releasing acclaimed solo and collaborative albums for practically three many years, and has constructed an adoring fan base. However readers don’t have to be conversant in her music to be moved by her uncooked, unflinching memoir, which chronicles her impoverished and at occasions surreal upbringing in addition to her lengthy journey towards self-confidence. It’s a e book that mixes defiant humor with an unsentimental resilience that recollects Cheryl Strayed.
“I wasn’t going to go tabloid,” Case stated with a dry shrug, sitting in a sales space on the Cosmic Diner in Manhattan on a latest, chilly Saturday morning. “I by no means had intercourse with well-known individuals, so.”
Nonetheless, the e book depicts Case’s adolescence as a minefield of emotional trauma. In a cellphone interview, A.C. Newman, her longtime bandmate within the power-pop group the New Pornographers, recalled a mutual buddy as soon as marveling of Case, “For her to attain what she’s finished, contemplating the place she got here from, it’s like profitable a marathon with one leg.”
On the diner, Case, now 54, wore a dark-blue button-down, and her predominantly grey mane was skunked with a streak of flaming auburn. At one level she interrupted herself to look — respectfully — at a neighboring desk’s breakfast order. “That’s a handsome pancake,” she stated. “I don’t need to stare a gap of their pancakes, however wow.”
Case has these days develop into an everyday at this Midtown restaurant, splitting her time between New York and her Vermont residence due to one other thrilling venture she’s engaged on close by: She is collaborating on the songs for a musical adaptation of “Thelma & Louise” that she hopes is sure for Broadway within the subsequent 12 months or two. “I used to be the audience for that film,” Case stated of the 1991 hit. “I used to be precisely the fitting age. I noticed it trillions of occasions.”
Callie Khouri, who wrote the movie’s Oscar-winning screenplay and can be writing the musical’s e book, was a fan of Case’s music and chosen her personally to work on the musical. “Her music has such scope, sonically and lyrically,” Khouri stated in a cellphone interview. “She’s such a righteous, true-north artist and particular person.”
Case is plain-spoken concerning the monetary realities of being a working musician; she stated she wrote the e book primarily as a result of she wanted one other supply of revenue whereas the pandemic stored her from touring. Later in 2025, she will even launch her first new album in seven years, which she described as an express rebuttal to what she sees because the digital period’s dehumanization of her business. She deliberately employed extra musicians than ordinary; some tracks characteristic a whole orchestra.
“I needed all the things to be performed by actual individuals,” she stated, “to indicate how we fill area in a different way.”
Followers of her off-kilter, country-tinged albums just like the Grammy-nominated 2009 launch “Center Cyclone” are unlikely to be shocked that Case writes uncommonly vivid and lyrical prose. Her mom’s pale-green station wagon, for example, seems like “a nauseous basking shark.” The grasses of northern Washington home “grasshoppers the dimensions of staplers with underwings like striped blushing flamenco skirts.” On a category journey, when her father packed an insufficient lunch (a couple of unhappy slices of cheese), a instructor’s aide gave her a pitying look and the younger Case “dragged that disgrace round like a moist wool cape.”
Probably the most startling revelations within the e book are about Case’s mom. The musician writes that when she was in second grade and her mother and father had been separated, her father picked her up from college at some point, burst into tears and informed her that her mom had died of most cancers. She was shocked.
An emotionally somnambulant 12 months and a half later, her father simply as instantly introduced that her mom was alive and, truly, they had been on their approach to see her simply then. When mom and daughter had been reunited, Case writes that her mother and father knowledgeable her that her mom had been sick with a doubtlessly deadly illness and fled to Hawaii for remedy, so her daughter wouldn’t need to see her endure. Case was too younger and susceptible to query the story. “I forgave her with such determined haste, I didn’t even have time to be mad,” she writes.
Her mom flickered out and in of her life for the subsequent a number of many years, however even once they had been dwelling beneath the identical roof, Case got here to expertise her mom like “a deer, at all times simply out of attain,” she writes.
After a closing, failed try at reconnection when Case was in her late 30s — her mom moved in along with her when she was dwelling in Tucson and instantly left with no phrase — Case lower ties along with her mom for good. Shortly after, as she writes within the e book, she had a revelation: Maybe her mom had by no means been sick in any respect. The thought was without delay crushing and profoundly liberating.
“There was a lot I may have forgiven,” she writes. “Nevertheless it was the grift of her that floor that down — that love held out to bounce earlier than me, at all times snatched again simply as I reached out my arms for it.” (Makes an attempt to succeed in Case’s mom for remark had been unsuccessful.)
“I suppose I used to be an over-sharer out of desperation, like, ‘Please, discover me,’” Case stated, noting that there’s nothing within the e book about her childhood that her closest mates don’t already know. Newman, although, is relieved that others “can now learn her story” and perceive the scope of what she has endured. “Typically, when Neko was being form of arduous to cope with, I’d at all times have that behind my thoughts,” he stated. “Like, I can’t let you know guys, however holy [expletive].”
When requested if any of those revelations had been tough to reveal in such a public method, Case simply shrugged. “A lot has been finished to me the place I haven’t been thought-about,” she stated. “I don’t have any guilt.”
CASE’S DISTINCT VOICE is as mighty as a canyon; she usually sings like somebody hollering right into a void and pausing to let her echo confidently resound.
“We had been all form of shocked she may sing so nicely,” Newman remembered. He met Case within the tight-knit Vancouver indie music scene within the mid-90s, when she was enjoying drums within the punk trio Maow. When he heard her sing at a buddy’s wedding ceremony round that point — she belted out a rendition of the College students’ 1958 doo-wop tune “I’m So Younger” — his jaw dropped.
“That’s after I needed to work along with her,” Newman stated. “I felt like I used to be getting in on the bottom ground of one thing, like I’d discovered this buddy who had an unbelievable voice, however no one else knew about it but.”
Case’s debut album, “The Virginian,” recorded with a rotating backing band she cheekily dubbed Her Boyfriends, got here out in 1997. “It sounds terrified to me,” she stated now. “I’m identical to, ahhhh! Singing on 10 the entire time. No dynamic in any respect.”
However Case discovered acclaim as she honed her expertise over her subsequent few albums. Studying tenor guitar — a four-stringed instrument initially made for banjo gamers — unlocked a singular sound and sensibility in her songwriting. Newman marveled at her fast inventive development over that interval: Every album, he stated, “felt very very like a leap ahead.”
Nonetheless, Case’s temporary forays down the music business’s extra mainstream avenues made her really feel that she didn’t fairly belong. Within the e book, she tells her aspect of a long-rumored story concerning the Grand Ole Opry. Whereas enjoying an outside competition on its plaza in July 2001, getting ready to warmth stroke, she stripped right down to her bra.
“It wasn’t an act of punk-rock defiance,” she writes. “I simply had an animal want to chill down in any method attainable.” The Opry administration lower the ability and after her truncated set “delivered the basic line,” Case writes, “‘You’ll NEVER play on this city once more!’” (Representatives for the Opry stated the occasion predates its present administration crew, and that “Neko Case is most welcome on the Grand Ole Opry and is among the many many artists we’d like to welcome for an official Opry debut in 2025.”)
“I thought of what males needed to do to get banned from the Opry,” she writes. Jerry Lee Lewis dropped an expletive on the air. Hank Williams received so wasted, he failed to indicate up. She finally chalked the incident as much as sexism, however she thinks the state of affairs for feminine artists in nation music is now “worse than it’s ever been.”
“Ladies have truly been demoted,” she stated on the diner, pointing to incidents just like the so-called “Tomato-gate,” a 2015 controversy by which a radio programmer advisable limiting feminine artists’ airplay, likening them to “the tomatoes of our salad” in a commerce publication.
“It’s not true at all,” Case stated unequivocally. “Individuals don’t flip off their radios as a result of girls come on the radio.”
However she has seen firsthand how tough it’s to problem the total power of the business. “The gatekeepers are so thick, and so they’re all over the place,” she added. “I at all times really feel like individuals simply want to begin a brand new nation music.”
Over time she’s finished simply that, and past. Case’s songs have a spaciousness and a way of risk that far exceed the confines of style. Her music is deeply in contact with the expansiveness of the pure world, and that offers her narration a form of shape-shifting energy: She has written songs from the attitude of killer whales and tornadoes, wronged, aching girls and gruff, swaggering males.
“Her songs have at all times been little motion pictures to me,” stated her longtime buddy Paul Rigby, a Vancouver-based musician with a jazz background who has been collaborating with Case since 2006. “There are issues which are primarily based in actuality, however there’s additionally fantastical stuff. I believe it’s crucial to her to attempt to perceive what she thinks is her half on the planet.”
NOT LONG AFTER “The Virginian” was launched, a significant label got here courting. “Image it like one thing out of a fairy story,” she writes. “There’s a knock on the door, an interesting stranger stands outdoors, and so they need to grant you all of your needs!” It was like she was a baby blinking horses into existence once more. The label flew her to Los Angeles, wined and dined her — after which the deal instantly fell via.
“It was such a farce,” Case stated, as a waiter cleared her empty breakfast plate. However does she ever marvel what would have occurred if she had been on that promised quick observe to success? “I don’t suppose I might have gone very far,” she admitted, “as a result of I simply didn’t have the boldness or the abilities but. I wouldn’t have develop into actually well-known and gotten bizarre or something. I believe I simply would have gotten kicked out early.”
As an alternative, over the course of practically three many years, she’s painstakingly constructed one thing extra enduring and true to herself. “She’s an individual who is aware of so deeply who she is, and makes no bones about it,” Khouri stated. “She’s not an individual who’s herself and questioning what the world is pondering of her. She’s standing her floor, looking on the world and saying, ‘Shouldn’t all of us be attempting to do higher?’
Case now is aware of that she didn’t truly make these horses seem all these years in the past by magic. That doesn’t imply they weren’t necessary, although.
“As time went on, I started to grasp in a brand new method the looks of the horses after I was a child,” she writes. “Not as one thing that will swoop in and repair me, however as a power pushing me to maintain orienting myself towards the cinnamon scent of what was proper and good for me.”
“It was like an engine that was working so arduous on a regular basis,” Case stated of her drive, and that fixed thrust of inventive momentum. “I used to be at all times working away from issues, too, like I simply very a lot didn’t need to be in my previous life.”
“The momentum was so nice in me that I didn’t ever cease to try to perceive it,” she added. “So possibly that’s what stored it going.”
