Among the great lyrical wonders of the world are the metaphors and similes of Neko Case. It’s as if she’s never seen anything that she didn’t imagine as something else much more interesting.
Wild animals play characters in her songs. Tornados turn sentient. Temptation is a long black train. She imagines she were the moon. Case once described herself on her Substack newsletter as so exhausted that “I look like a day-old banana peel.” She has a new memoir, “The Harder I Fight The More I Love You,” and in it, the music business becomes a “hungry, exhausting bore,” which is somewhat obvious, as metaphors go.
Much better is how the life of a touring musician is “a Band-Aid way to live” in which “nothing is guaranteed and there is no retirement plan or safety net or insurance unless you have a trust fund.” Languid childhood summers “flow by like thick liquid.” She remembers a long-ago friend, a 10-year-old named Danny, who was so excited to explain the genius of the band KISS that a trailer home in the Pacific Northwest temporarily becomes a “big top with KISS the star in all three rings, eating fire, blowing themselves out of cannons, riding T. rexes, swallowing swords and giving little boys rabies.”
Having spent her formative career years in Chicago, lake winds pound like “a bouquet of cold fists”; and when Case bundles up tightly, she resembles “a stuffed armchair.”
“There are things we don’t have language for,” Case told me in a phone conversation the other day. “There are feelings we can’t put the words to. My mind is most engaged when trying to describe what seems impossible to describe accurately. I want so badly to not be misunderstood that metaphor became a huge part of connecting for me.”
Stories about her mother, for instance.
Their relationship is so vague that Case, as an adult, comes to picture her mother as “a deer, always out of reach.” “The Harder I Fight The More I Love You” — which takes its abbreviated title from her 2013 album “The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You” — is like her music: It’s lonesome when it isn’t furious; and open-hearted and clear-eyed, if only in retrospect. To borrow a simile from Neil Young, you can hear the familiar climbing squall of her singing voice in the book’s prose, like a hurricane.
Regardless of how much you know about Neko Case’s music — which is sorta alt-countryish, sorta Americanaish, sorta contemporary folkish — or her work with her sometime band, The New Pornographers, many of the revelations in the memoir make hard reading. It’s a dark, feral, rustic path from a childhood in a small coastal Washington town to concert stages. Case veers at times into fairytales: She imagines herself becoming a werewolf, “in the fur on my fingers, the catch in my walking gait, my anxious impatience.” You might feel that way too if, in second grade, your father picked you up at school with very unexpected news. Her mother had just died of cancer.
And then, a year and a half later, her father had good news: Her mother was back.
Case is told her mother had moved to Hawaii so her daughter wouldn’t have to watch her fatal deterioration. Being young, Case doesn’t really question the story, not for many years. Until, decades later, when she decides her mother was probably never sick at all.
As a writer and a musician, as friendly and casual as she gets in conversation, there aren’t a lot of light moments. Her life seems touched by more loss than usual. When I called her to talk, she apologized for the phone reception: She was just leaving an ICU in Upstate New York. Two of her friends had just died. Years ago she moved to New England, and talks about life in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom as a no-nonsense communing with nature. Still, in 2017, while she was out of the country recording an album, her home burned down; after a local newspaper reported the fire, she denied there was a fire. She became apoplectic about having her name associated with her address. As she told interviewers later, she begged the newspaper not to use her name because she had stalkers. She said she had spent $37,000 of her life savings on security and lawyers.
That’s not remotely a focus of the book; neither is the sexual assault she describes, being raped at 14 by the 19-year-old brother of a close friend.
Asked about the fire now, Case, at 54, having weathered childhood poverty and unstable-at-best family history, takes the long view: “I understand why the house burned down. I don’t take it personally. If you take it personally, you can’t move on. It was just nature, and the natural element of that fire, that was OK. The part that was not OK was people who wanted to make money off the situation. That’s when depression happens.”
Case said she knew there would be confession in her work; having attended the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, she’d learned raw honesty was a part of the territory. There was also a dose of defiance in the decision: “Being a Gen-X kid in the 1980s, in the Reagan years, music and art was being cut from schools, you were told everything should be about just business. That was loudly put out there to me.”
After college, she moved to Seattle, “and lived in one of the city’s last live-work art spaces, which soon became a condo: I was so (expletive) this place, I’m out of here.”
That’s how she ended up in Chicago in the late ’90s, during the nascent years of her career. “I wanted to live somewhere where the place wasn’t being sold off by the yard.”
She stayed for three years.
“A lot of the people I still work with I met during that time,” she said. Jon Rauhouse, her guitarist, she met through her friends at the Chicago label Bloodshot Records. The label’s publicist, Kelly Hogan, became her backup singer and longtime stage foil. (Hogan now performs as part of Mavis Staples’ band.) Case recorded her first albums while living in Chicago. “I wanted to go where there was a real art community and Chicago became this very welcoming haven.” On the side, she bartended at the Hideout. “Though I was always on tour, so I couldn’t do many shifts. Which meant I was the one who ended up working like the Christmas shifts. Everyone went home to their families and I didn’t have any family in Chicago, so I’d end up bartending and eating brownies with the regulars.”
Chicago is one of several stops in the memoir, which is unlike Case’s music in an important way: The book is as direct as her song writing is cryptic. She writes about her father smoking weed daily. She writes of being raised “by two dogs and a space heater.” She writes about performing while she has a yeast infection. When the publishing house Hachette approached her during the pandemic, she told them she was thinking about writing fiction. “They said we’d pay for a memoir. So memoir it is! I’m not complaining, if I hadn’t gotten writing jobs I would be in a darker place. But writing about myself is not my first choice — that’s not something I’d naturally want to do.”
Her next album, her first in seven years, arriving this fall, is about the decline of organic-sounding music. She said it’s not a concept record, “though since I started (the album) I lost more people than I lost in my entire life and they were all musicians and it is gutting and I think of them as irreplaceable, which is funny because (the music industry) is trying to replace all musicians with AI and streaming right now. They don’t want to pay musicians. It’s become a constant hammer of doom. Yet, at the same time, there’s a sense, a yearning inside the body that can not be quenched. Nature finds a way. The ‘Jurassic Park’ thing. Musicians will go around AI, make you feel things and feed you.”
After that record (though she can’t say exactly when), expect a stage musical based on the 1991 Ridley Scott classic, “Thelma & Louise,” a collaboration between Case and Callie Khouri, who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay. The pair, who have been friends for years, have been working about a decade on the adaptation and are close to done.
What you should not expect from Case, ever, is the typical rock star confessional.
Though she calls herself “an oversharer from way back,” when she began writing the memoir, she looked to a pair of model autobiographies brimming with sadness and loss: Rickie Lee Jones’ underrated “Last Chance Texaco” and Patti Smith’s classic, the National Book Award-winning “Just Kids.” Case offers a bit of red meat: She recounts the story of how she came to strip down to her bra during an outdoor festival at the Grand Ole Opry. (A tale that culminates with her hearing that corniest of showbiz reprimands: “You’ll never work in this town again!”)
But most of the book, she says, was written using the lessons she learned from taking classes with the cartoonist (and former Chicagoan) Lynda Barry. “Lynda is really the only writing teacher I have ever had, and what I think I drew from her was how to decide what’s worth remembering.”
Meaning, this is not the kind of pop-music memoir that fixates on the feeling of that first hit record, or even that first $200,000 car wrapped around a tree. Instead, Case spends quality time on picked-over issues of Mad magazine. Her father’s much-listened-to copy of Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” The free-floating sense of fear in the 1980s about Washington State’s the Green River Killer. The flimsy paper plate piled high with potato salad at a family gathering.
“The minor things people might not see as important are the gateway to the more emotionally charged things,” she said. “They’re probably the most important things.”
Talking to Case, and reading her book, you get a taste for metaphor and confession. You wonder what you would save from a house fire. Kind of like listening to her music, you see everything around you as some vaguely defined key to your past. You see everything as something else. Before I could stop myself, I blurted that I once had “Star Wars” action figures I set up on a bedroom dresser …
“Keep talking, keep talking,” she said. “I did, too. I did, too.”
But they always fell, so every day, you set them up all over again.
“Yes! I remember, I remember …”
Everything would collapse, every single day, no matter how hard you tried.
“Exactly, exactly,” she said. “Because their little feet, they didn’t stand a chance. Unless, of course, you would glue them into place. But then again, that’s just not you, is it?”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Neko Case will talk about her memoir “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You” in a book launch event presented by Exile in Bookville and the Fine Arts Building at 7 p.m. Feb. 4 at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $50 (including a pre-signed copy of the book) at fineartsbuilding.com
