Neko Case's 'formidable' new album invites multiple musicians for a big sound

If Neko Case had just one word to describe her first solo album in seven years, she would settle on “formidable.”

Fair enough. Writers have twisted themselves into knots trying to describe Case's sound — “gothic Americana” is one iteration — yet it's generally a thrill ride through shifting tones and tempos, anchored by her vivid imagery and titanic voice.

On the “Neon Grey Midnight Green” album, Case was intent on inviting a large number of musicians to join her, and their power is evident. She employs a 16-piece orchestra. Add in 10 other listed players (including herself) and that makes for 26 musicians on the album-ending song “Match-Lit” alone.

“I wanted to remind people of what it sounded like to have a large group of people playing together,” Case said. “That doesn't mean I have anything against synthesizer string sections or horn sections, because those things sound cool when you use them in the right way. And having a whole orchestra is cost prohibitive, especially now. I really wanted to do it because I didn't think I'd have the chance to do it again.”

Maybe it’s not a wall of sound, but the swirling strings on “Wreck,” for example, take her music to a joyful place. Listen carefully for the harp.

Several projects keep Case busy

It wasn't writer's block that kept Case out of the picture for a few years. The pandemic was an interruption for everybody. The Vermont-based singer also records and tours with the band The New Pornographers. She has written the music for an upcoming stage adaptation of “Thelma & Louise.” And she also wrote a memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” published earlier this year.

The book describes a harrowing upbringing, mostly in the Pacific Northwest by parents who conceived her as teenagers and were unprepared and uninterested in raising her. Case says at one point, she was told her mother had died, only to have her show up again a year and a half later with no explanation.

Case was essentially on her own by the time she was a teenager. Music, to a great extent, saved her.

The on-again, off-again relationship with her mother is off. “I don't even know anything about my mother anymore,” Case said.

Pain doesn't disappear, though. “From her I learned to be cruel,” Case sings in new song “An Ice Age.” “I learned the look that goes right past the ones who love you as if there's no one standing there.”

What will be interesting in coming months, as she prepares to take new songs on the road, is whether opening her life to the world with the memoir will draw more people to her music. Her management has seen preliminary signs that it has, but Case isn't sure.

Colin Dickerman, editor-in-chief at Grand Central Publishing and editor of Case's book, has a hunch that it will. From reading reviews of the memoir, he knows it attracted fans who wanted to learn more about the writer of songs they loved. But it also reached people who were interested in the story about overcoming adversity and subsequently said they would check out her music.

“I think it really did reach a bigger audience,” Dickerman said.

Two of Case's new songs honor friends, both musicians, who died recently. One is for Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets, whose songs inspired her to make music before he later became a friend and collaborator. Dallas Good, late singer of The Sadies, who played with Case early in her career, is the inspiration for “Match-Lit.”

The latter, a detailed description of what happens when a match is lit, illustrates Case's often intriguing pathways to songs; she memorably once wrote from the point of view of a tornado. “I don't do it purposely to try and be weird,” she said. “I'm just a noticer, a chronic noticer.”

Sometimes it's up to the listener to determine what a song means to them, rather than try to figure out what Case specifically meant.

“There's a bit of, not withholding, but leaving space for people to come into the song and wear it like it's theirs and for them to make associations about their own lives, to make it about themselves,” she said. “Those are the songs that meant a lot to me, or did when I was younger. I want the listener to feel invited into it.”

Love songs: An exercise in futility?

On “Rusty Mountain,” Case sings about how writing love songs is mostly “an exercise in futility for me.” Slowly it dawns on you that you're listening to a love song. Similarly, “Wreck” — with the memorable line “I'm a meteor shattering around you” — suggests Case protests a bit too much.

“There's all different kinds of love on there,” she said. “I think pretty much every song, save maybe one, is a love song — about music or musicians or specific people here or there. There are love songs about other things, rather than just heterosexual love, which is the thing people write about most of all.

“It's difficult to avoid cliches when you're writing love songs,” she said, “and the people who are good at it are so good at it that you're like, ‘why bother?’ I always think about Louie Armstrong singing, ‘If I Could Be With You,’ and I think, ‘is there a better love song than that?’ I don't think so. Or his version of ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.' The bar of people who write love songs is so high that I kind of feel daunted by it.”

She knows enough people who are gay or gender-nonconforming who don't hear love songs they can relate to. That's a challenge she accepts.

“It made me want to make sure there was room for people, no matter who these people were, to wear the song like a punk rock vest and to feel held onto and comforted,” she said.