Neko Case: A Kind of Hardness
Winter 2008
A few years ago I walked into a friend’s store and heard a woman singing Hank Williams’s “Alone and Forsaken.” It’s not a song anyone takes up lightly. In his sometimes fictional memoir How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life (2000), the late guitarist and American music scholar John Fahey described hearing Williams perform it at an imaginary last show on a riverboat on the Potomac: “First thing Williams did was curse and swear at us. ‘Why dontcha all go home?’ he yelled into the mike. ‘I hate every damned one of ya’.... At some point in the show he sang ‘Alone and Forsaken’ and while he did that many of us almost died of grief and fright”—which is what happens in the 1981 film Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave. Played by the Canadian country singer Sneezy Waters, Williams has dropped into a nowhere roadhouse on New Year’s Eve, 1953, and given the crowd everything they could ever think of wanting; then he ends his first set with the death song, his every word seemingly making a more complete silence, and when he’s finished no one can speak. Fahey quotes the first line of “the greatest song of despair ever written”: “We met in the springtime.” He stares at his own page: “By the fifth word you know it’s all over.”
Williams never made a formal recording of the song. He sang it in 1949 on the Johnnie Fair Syrup Show on KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana; MGM didn’t acquire the Johnnie Fair transcriptions until 1955. The profoundly spooky band 16 Horsepower—at his most elusive, as on the 2000 Secret South, leader David Eugene Edwards sounds like a circuit preacher who worships God, morphine, and women, sometimes in that order—would seem to have been formed to reach the point where they could play the song and disappear, but when they recorded it in 2002 it all but broke their hands, coming out tinkly, stupid, scared of itself.
“Who’s singing?” I asked my friend. “Neko Case,” he said. I was surprised; I’d have thought I would have recognized her voice anywhere. That day I realized I didn’t know her music at all, and I began to listen as closely as I could, to put her records on and not listen to them at all, to find out what was there.
Neko Case was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1970, grew up in Tacoma, Washington, went to college in Vancouver, played drums in punk bands, moved to Seattle; by the time she took leave for Chicago in 2000, she had two ambitious, cramped country albums by Neko Case and Her Boyfriends and the New Pornographers’ thrilling debut album Mass Romantic behind her. None suggested she could look a song like “Alone and Forsaken” in the face.
She isn’t up to Williams; unlike him, she doesn’t sing as if she’s already dead. As the first track opens on Canadian Amp, an eight-song album Case recorded in her kitchen with such Chicago compatriots as Kelly Hogan and Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family, she walks out of the rain that falls over the music as if she’s anyone’s bad conscience personified. With her own acoustic and electric guitars counting off the cadence, she seems to stand a few steps back from the curling melody, making it slow itself to accommodate her; deep in the background, you can hear thunder. Williams has given up, the life beaten out of him; when he sings “Alone and forsaken by fate and by man,” your soul can curdle, knowing that no one can reach this person, that no one can help him, that nothing will ever be better. Case sings the line with shock, indignation; fullthroated, she moves through the song with a building defiance.
As it always is when Case is at her best, her tone is preternaturally clear. Whether on “Hold On, Hold On” from her own Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, from 2006, or all across the New Pornographers’ never-hold-still Challengers, from 2007, that clarity is a kind of hardness, and that hardness communicates a sense of knowing. Listening, you feel she has thought her way through her music, that she knows what she’s talking about, that she has earned what she knows—but without the distance of a melody that does not reveal where it’s going, she can’t say what it is.
That is why her solo albums before Fox Confessor Brings the Flood are hard to remember, and why that album itself finally comes down to a single song, “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s a big, expansive piece of music. It seems to begin in the clouds, its point of view omniscient, the singer seeing all around her life, as if everything’s been resolved, and with such strength that when, halfway through the piece, she tells you she’s left a party, the specificity is jarring: Suddenly, anything could happen. Her own reverberating guitar takes you into Duane Eddy country, forty miles of bad road and there’s no other kind of road you’d waste your time on: every other road has directions, stop signs, lines that tell you which side is yours and which isn’t.
With a melody that holds back its secrets from the singer, the composer, as well as from the listener, Case can sing her way into and through a song with a sense of constant invention, knowing that just as the incidents a song might dramatize could have turned out differently, so could the song itself. The lack of a settled theme or goal in the melody opens up the possibility that the song could reverse itself, take on a new body, a new face, at any moment. Thus on “Hold On, Hold On,” Case lets go; she has no choice. Events are rushing by too fast to keep, and so she stomps her way through the music with big gestures, a ringing guitar solo, driving fast around the turns. If the song has a subject in its words, it’s how she learned what she knows, and what it’s worth to her—how empty she’d be without the knowledge she’s fought for.
Case begins “Hold On, Hold On” deliberately, in the voice of a person who knows precisely what she means to say. “My own blood is much too dangerous,” she wrote; as she sings, it’s “much toooooooooo...daynge-russ.” The song cracks with the word; the territory opens up. As Case picks up the pace, the dramatist in her gives way to the explorer; her voice is more transparent with every line, a stream that shifts, eddies, plunges, and you feel as if you can see to the bottom even as it rushes past too fast for you to see any single thing at all.
Except in the New Pornographers, where Case is one voice among many, where the songs she sings are usually written not by her but by leader A. C. Newman, giving her the distance that in her own music she finds in a certain kind of melody, on records with her name on them these moments—the clarity, the hardness, the knowledge, all caught not in the full presence of a song but in its glance—are rare. That increases their value, and that is why her music is like a treasure hunt.
Originally published in Oxford American, Winter 2008