The first time Neko Case makes me laugh, we’re sizing up the wigs in David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging” video. On a private tour of the Brooklyn Museum’s “David Bowie Is” exhibition, we both stop at a screen showing the campy visual, in which Bowie serves three different drag looks; I can’t help but notice that his hair in the second one looks a little like Case’s signature mane, wild and red. “David Bowie makes a way better woman than I ever will,” she says, right on time.
Perhaps that comparison is not entirely fair. The 47-year-old singer-songwriter’s hair is far more distinct: On this April afternoon, red-orange waves hide a gorgeous dark grey thicket, as pointillistic in shade as her worn Queen T-shirt. Clad in layered hoodies, dark jeans, and Blundstone boots, Case is excited to be in her Bowie bubble. But she’s equally abuzz about Hatshepsut, the first legitimate female pharaoh and one of ancient Egypt’s more successful rulers overall, who she dreams of seeing in the museum’s large Egyptian collection. (Alas, the area is closed off, and we never get a chance to find out.) “Her history was erased by her step-son, but her legacy was too huge and it was recovered,” Case explains, giving me a brief history anyway.
This bygone era proved inspiring to Case as she was writing her seventh solo record, Hell-On. When we reach a nearby cafe and sit down over two bowls of root vegetables she orders for us to share, she tells me how she became “hypervigilant” in the aftermath of dealing with a pretty serious stalker a few years back. “When I wrote my last record, I was pretty depressed, and just as I was coming out of that, I had to deal with a stalker,” she says. “So then I felt mentally unhinged. I was super aggro and just not a pleasant person to be around. I was like, ‘All right, I’ve got to know: When in history did we start hating women? When the fuck did this happen?’”
Then, in a dark turn worthy of a Neko Case song, her 18th-century farmhouse in Barnet, Vermont, burned down last fall, either because the old electrical wiring in the barn sparked or because the hay for her horses, Norman and Grady Boon, spontaneously combusted (which apparently can happen). Case was in Sweden at the time, finishing Hell-On with her co-producer Björn Yttling, of Peter Björn and John. Right now she’s living in a cabin with her loved ones (including many of her beloved pets), but as of the beginning of this month, she is technically homeless. “Just when you think the rage has cooled in your veins, there’s a brand new flavor that fucking beats your head against the wall every day,” she says.
This kind of spiky dread comes up a lot in our conversations, one part diffusing humor, one part genuine I can’t believe I’m still dealing with this shit-ness. But the new record does not dwell on it too much. There’s the single “Bad Luck,” whose fatalistic chorus must have felt cathartic to record the morning after the fire. But the song does not sound angry or bitter—it’s actually one of her catchiest tracks in recent memory, full of ’60s pop rhythms and beatific harmonies. Throughout Hell-On, Case takes all she’s seen and instills the album’s moodier songs with an earned sense of wisdom. “Curse of the I-5 Corridor,” a winding and mysterious duet with Mark Lanegan, is one of those great “looking back to look forward” tunes, a wistful waltz about what could have been. “I miss the smell of mystery/Reverb leaking out of tavern doors/And not knowing/How the sounds were made,” she sings.
At this point, there’s no denying that Case knows how the sounds were made, considering she put them all together herself. Hell-On stands out as her most eclectic and collaborative album to date, a process kickstarted by her 2016 LP with fellow veteran singer-songwriters K.D. Lang and Laura Veirs. On the first Hell-On song she wrote, “Oracle of the Maritimes,” a mystic slow-burner worthy of Stevie Nicks, Case broke through her writer’s block with Veirs’ help. From there, she wrote with old friends like Paul Rigby, her longtime touring guitarist and collaborator, as well as her New Pornographers bandmate A.C. Newman, who helped her strike power-pop gold on the standout “Gumball Blue” (featuring one of Case’s best one-liners to date: “Sometimes where there’s smoke, it’s just a smoke machine, honey”). Then came the guest vocalists, ranging from go-to harmonizers like Kelly Hogan and Lang, to Beth Ditto playing a badass Southern heroine on “Winnie,” an ode to women everywhere, to Eric Bachmann, who sings his melancholic Crooked Fingers ballad “Sleep All Summer” with Case.
“Collaboration—letting go of control—is sometimes a really important way to serve the song,” she says. “When I started playing music, I never envisioned myself alone on stage with a guitar. I like being in a gang.”
With her people around her and her wryness intact, Case has made a record that beautifully captures her many styles, from unsettling folktales about nature’s wrath, to pop-rock choruses that come around the bend with just a hint of country swagger, to some of the most gorgeously braided vocal harmonies in indie rock right now. Ahead of Hell-On’s release next month, I sat down with Case to discuss her challenges over the past few years and what keeps her going.
Neko Case: About three weeks. I felt so helpless. I have a very good support system, and they had everything under control. I had nothing to go back to, frankly. All the animals were safe and taken care of. I’m sure it would have been way different if they weren’t—I don’t know if I would have even finished the record. I try not to think about it.
It’s still a big hole in the ground. Mind you, my insurance company has been amazing, but it is not a fast process. It’s very strictly controlled, and there are so many things that I just have to repurchase, because everything’s gone. There are really surreal moments, like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to pack my suitcase... oh, right.” There’s a lot of really great humor that comes out of it, too.
And honestly, it’s just stuff. My house burned while Puerto Rico was underwater, right after Houston, right before all the fires in California. So many people lost so much more than I did. I didn’t lose Jeff [her boyfriend]. I didn’t lose the critters. They’re all OK. It’s a happy ending, really.
The album cover, showing you on fire and covered in cigarettes, makes it clear that you’re comfortable joking about the fire already.
Well, the cover wasn’t the cover of the record for a long time. I had taken a bunch of pictures in my house after I got home, and some of the images were so beautiful and fit the title. There was a print of the Grand Canyon in my living room, and the fire had burned it through the back of the wall, and it was the most beautiful tableau of this crazy disaster. We were gonna use a picture of that, but this was just a more immediate image.
Yeah. I was like, “That’s my fucking news, I’ll report it if I want to.” It’s a really personal thing. Some people reaching out were just being kind, and then there were people who were just being assholes.
Every human being deserves to have things that are personal, because you can’t have mental health without that. Especially somebody with stalkers. There were so many lines that were crossed. I called the local paper [St. Johnsbury, Vermont’s The Caledonian-Record] while my house was burning, and I said, “I understand that you report fires. Please, take my name out of the story.” I was begging the editor, and he kind of scolded me, “Well, my house burned down, and I didn’t care.” I was like, “Dude, I have a child [her boyfriend Jeff’s daughter]. My life is in danger. Do not print this.” He didn’t care. I lost my shit. I called him “cunt.” It was horrible.
Men will treat you like a child about things that you obviously have authority over. Women are not allowed to protect themselves; it’s a repeating cycle in my life that I get to live over and over and over again.
[When reached for comment, Caledonian-Record editor Dana M. Gray stated, “The newspaper’s coverage of the fire involving Neko Case’s [house] was handled no differently than any other structure fire that we respond to as part of our public safety reporting,” adding that the fire required the deployment of resources at taxpayer expense.]
There have been a few [restraining orders]. But people who aren’t balanced don’t care about restraining orders. And then there was everything I had to do via the law to get the restraining orders validated. Basically you go to court and validate every single thing about what’s wrong with the situation, and you give the stalker everything they want. The laws are insane and have nothing to do with what should actually be happening in that situation.
It feels punk rock to say, “Yeah, the government doesn’t care about me,” but you really know it’s true when you’ve rearranged your entire existence and spent your life savings just to keep away from a stalker. It is a poison that fucks with your quality of life, and I don’t accept it. I rage against it. I don’t know how to get it out of myself—like if I could take a maple syrup tap and stick it in my side and bleed it out, I would do it. If I have to get it operated on without any anesthesia, I would do it, just to get this rage out of me.
I don’t know why people don’t take it seriously. A friend the other day sent me a profile of the guy who shot up the Waffle House and killed those people. He was massively into Taylor Swift, but that [incident] had nothing to do with her. It’s terrifyingly similar to my situation.
It’s not talked about enough, and huge, and shitty. I know a lot of men who have been stalked as well, and they feel the same way. But with women it creates this by-product of the easiest, most played-out trope that we’re crazy. It’s like, “No, we’re lacking a very basic freedom to protect ourselves.”
Well, I keep getting repeatedly shat on, and maybe it’ll just be me, but I don’t think so. There are a lot of younger ladies that are fucking loud, though. They make my life complete.
There are so many women on Twitter who are educators and activists, and I find a lot of inspiration from them, especially young native women. Because not only are they taking the time to explain what it is about feminism or about liberalism that doesn’t include them, they’re explaining colonialism from the ground up in a way that makes it clear that feminism and human rights are the same thing. It’s a big deal. I’ve learned more in the last year shutting my mouth and hearing them talk. I’m not tooting my own horn, I’ve got a long way to go. But hearing what these women have to say, it’s just plucking at strings that have always been there but kind of dormant.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely.
I came upon Adrienne Mayors’ book [The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World]. She is essentially the person who proved, with the help of many other historians, that Amazons were not mythical, they were actual people. With DNA testing, they were able to figure out that all these warrior bodies in these graves were women. They traced them to actual people, to female horse cultures all across the world. They’d always been there. These societies were more matriarchal, and merit was based on your abilities, not your gender. They were an unstoppable force. They were just fucking efficient and highly mobile. These cultures thrived for many, many years. It was so validating to me. It pulled me out of a really dark place.
Dude, I’m such a fucking futurist. [laughs] I don’t know if I would even identify as a woman if they didn’t fucking hate us so much. I’d love to not even think about it, but I can’t abandon my post.
