We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.
All Neko Case ever wanted was to be useful. One of the great tragedies of her life was watching her father, at retirement age, suddenly made to feel useless. Now 54 — around the age her dad was when he retired — Case insists she is sharper, smarter, and more useful than she has ever been.
Sitting across from her in the Los Angeles offices of Anti, her record label, I see it. She has the zeal of a recently homed pitbull. Case is barefoot, a plaid shirt hanging loosely off her shoulders, a hulking bear ring glinting on her finger. (“I’ve always felt like a werewolf,” she says. “So I asked myself: What animal would a werewolf respect? A bear.”) She looks at it when she feels rage, and it calms her down. Today, however, Case’s eyes are focused entirely on mine; she may have the strongest eye contact in the game. I keep waiting for her to break, or glance to the side, but she keeps her eyes on me like a dog on its food bowl (to follow the metaphor, since this is Neko Case, after all).
When I arrived at the Anti offices, I found Case surrounded by several hundred vinyl copies of her upcoming album, Neon Grey Midnight Green, her name Sharpied across them. She has spent days autographing them, yet her energy is volcanic. She talks less like a singer promoting her first album in seven years than a community organizer, diving headlong into the state of the nation: concentration camps on American soil, the disposability of the elderly, the everyday banality of cruelty. In every way, she is an interviewer’s dream, talking for minutes on end, with effortlessly sharp answers that range from deeply insightful and analytical to borderline life-changing.
“Grief is a gift,” she says, recalling the many musician friends she lost in quick succession over the past few years — Mark Lanegan, the Sadies’ Dallas Good, the Flat Duo Jets’ Dexter Romweber — all of whom left her the gift of memory, clarity, and connection beyond the arbitrary borders of a living body. Her sentences spool into long, sharp riffs, assonant and incantatory, the kind of language that might double as her lyrics. Then, minutes later, she is dismissing Lars von Trier with a flick of her hand: “He can fuck right off.”
This fusion of the political and the personal, the comic and the catastrophic, has always defined Case’s art. Over a nearly three-decade career, she has cultivated one of the most distinctive voices in American song. Her albums unravel like musical picaresques: restlessly digressive, bluntly funny, strange — but never in ways you’d anticipate.
Her latest record, written during what she calls her most alive and connected years, arrives alongside an unexpected turn: a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of Thelma & Louise, for which she has co-written songs. She talks about both projects for so long that her publicist frets she’ll miss her next appointment, the filming of a “What’s In My Bag” segment at Amoeba records. She hugs tightly when we part. And she leaves me with the sense that her greatest gift — her usefulness — lies not only in the songs she writes, but in the way she insists on pushing conversations toward truth, however bracing.
As I walk out of the office, I jot down the phrase that best describes her mood: subversive mirth. A perfectly Neko Case turn of phrase.
I’ve been thinking about the ways grief shows up in your work. The grief of your parents seemed to inspire a confessional mode on The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You…, whereas the grief on Neon Grey Midnight Green seems to be expressed more sentimentally. Why is that?
NEKO CASE: I realized I was writing songs about musicians and about music. You know, we live in a time where people are being commodified against their will, and Spotify has made it so musicians can’t make money. Basically, it just feels like we’re being downsized, like we’re being laid off, fired, erased. I wanted to remind everybody how powerful musicians are. There’s no way AI can write a song that makes you pull your car over and cry.
When you say you feel you’re being downsized, what does that look like materially?
CASE: Doing things in a studio is incredibly cost-prohibitive. Nowadays I can hardly travel to Europe with a band. I can’t do anything that I used to do. So now people rely on TikTok videos and stuff, and I get it, because that’s the way they get the word out, but I want people to get excited about figuring out new ways, because that’s where we are right now. And the new ways might be the old ways. They worked really well. You know, I had the privilege of making this record in a studio and maybe got the last advance anybody’s ever gonna get. And so I wanted to make sure all the sounds on the record were made by real people. That’s not to say that I don’t love a synthesizer, but in this case, I really wanted the breathing organic machines that we are to be on the record.
This album makes the case not only for music as an important resource, but for the validity of musicians as laborers. Where do you go from here?
CASE: I myself am feeling stuck, but I’m not deciding that’s my state. I’m like, “Okay, who can I call? Who can I brainstorm with? Who is the person who can invent a new technology that can make us feel good about the way we’re putting our music out there?” That’s the kind of innovation we need. It’s just so important to keep that creative joy and subversive mirth going.
More musicians are taking their music off Spotify. I know that’s not a possibility for everyone, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it, right?
CASE: Well, it is a possibility for me, and I could do it. But I have a 50/50 relationship with my label that I’ve been with for over 20 years. They have asked me not to because it would kneecap them in the way they’re doing things right now. Because our relationship is so great, for now, I’m staying. But I do not want to be there, because I’m not into robbing people or genocide or idiot billionaires.
You lost a lot of your musical friends and collaborators in quick succession in the past few years. Can you tell me about some of them?
CASE: When I first started working on this record, I was in Phoenix, spending time with Jon Rauhouse because he was dealing with cancer treatment. I went there for a month and a half and hung out.
When I drove across the country back home, Donny Gerrard, who is known for being in Mavis Staples’ band, passed. He was a huge part of my life when I was young because he was in a band called Skylark from Vancouver, BC. I got to work with him several times with Mavis, and he was such a sweet person. He’s one of those musicians who is on everything and who we all worship. Elton John loved him. He was such a professional, such a wonderful person. I didn’t know him well, but, man, his death hit me hard. I just thought about poor Mavis, who’d lost her sisters and, you know, her brother, and she’s still out there doing it.
And then right after that I got home and my friend Dallas Good passed away unexpectedly. He was one of my earliest great peers, collaborators, inspirations, partners in crime, and family. He was far too young. He died of heart failure, and it was so unexpected, so jarring.
Then people just kept dying. It was one person after another. People say it’s just the age I am, ’cause I’m in my 50s, but I don’t think that’s it. People were leaving at the time we needed them most. It can be really dispiriting, but, you know, death is not frightening to me. I’ve been a friend of death. You know how some people are afraid of people with cancer? I’m not afraid of that. I’m not afraid to talk to people who are dealing with hard things or to joke about cancer with somebody who has cancer. People need people, and there’s something about being accepting of grief, because grief will give you these immense gifts. And it’s not the reason that you do it. You do it because you’re a human and you need to go through the processes you go through to learn and to grow. Grief is very misunderstood and avoided as though it’s some sort of torture, but it isn’t that. It sometimes feels that way, but it’s necessary.
Tell me more about the gifts that grief brought you.
CASE: It brings you certain memories or clarity. I often dream of people after they die, and they tell me things. I can’t prove that that’s a real thing that happened, but I will wake up and feel absolutely calm and even joyful, and am able to continue in a way that feels like somebody I love gave a little bit of themselves to me so I could keep going. It is so humbling, heavy, and beautiful, and it’s part of our humanity, and, you know, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Having such a spate of people dying, though, I’ve had to really breathe through it. There were also times where I felt like a bad friend because I couldn’t be there to support everyone all the time.
Tell me about the women you sing about on “Destination,” the album’s opener. They seem important.
CASE: The song’s about women, queer people, and gender non-conforming people that I really latched onto. They weren’t worried about the male gaze, and so their swagger was so much more authentic. They were so much more capable. I realized that’s what I’ve been wanting to feel, but I’m not pulling it off like them. You know, I’m so in awe of this way of being, and I’ve also been so disappointed by not being taken seriously by men. I’ve felt like a man myself; I’ve felt genderfluid.
“Genderfluid,” that’s not an expression I’ve heard you assign yourself until now.
CASE: That is because people much younger than me have made it possible to say. I would have just used the term tomboy or said I was a dude. But then again, I am one, and I feel partly that way, but I just feel more like a soul. I see the conversations and the expansion of language as a massive gift. Genderfluid makes absolute sense to me. I’m not particular about pronouns or anything for myself.
It’s kind of like how people are asking me a lot about this record. They’re saying, “Well, you’ve produced it for the first time.” And it’s like, no, I’ve produced most of my records, but I put myself as the sole producer on this record. The whole thing was my idea and my vision. I had the veto power, I chose all of this, I did all of this. This is completely mine. I did not do it alone, but it’s time to own it because there are very few women or people who are differently gendered who do this. It’s the same with being genderfluid — being more open about that. I’ve always been very feral in trusting my own instinct, but being able to clearly describe to somebody has felt important.
