To kick off her recent memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case steps into the shoes of her younger self, about to perform a dive bar gig that, as far as her nerves are concerned, might as well be the Super Bowl halftime show. “My job at that moment is to conjure a small dust devil of unreality around us, to pull it up out of a sticky, shiny carpet and flappy, beer-soaked speaker cones,” she writes. “I have to make it out of words and sounds and looks.”
So has been her ethos for the past three decades. At this point it feels wrong to call Case a country artist when her work most closely resembles a feral strain of baroque pop—Nilsson at a truck stop, Kate Bush running with raccoons as well as foxes. Her new album, Neon Grey Midnight Green, arriving right on the heels of her book, is something of a career retrospective, but it is also the 55-year-old Case at her most immediate and daring. Her last foray into autobiographical songwriting plunged into darkness and excavated the muck; Neon Grey sprouts upwards, pushing a newfound wonder for life’s mysteries up through the grass for all to see.
The album’s title, taken from the meeting of slate-colored clouds and conifer forests on the Pacific Northwest skyline, conjures up the familiar sense of vengeance and foreboding found across Case’s other releases. But its overwhelming feelings are gratitude and awestruck revelation. “I’m a meteor shattering around you/And I’m sorry/I’ve become a solar system/Since I found you,” she declares on lead single “Wreck.” Neon Grey was made in collaboration with the 20-piece PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sara Parkinson and arranged by Tom Hagerman, and recorded live with the full band. The result is at once all-encompassing and strikingly intimate. In the past, Case’s crystalline voice stood alone against the foggy, widescreen neo-noir of songs like “Deep Red Bells” and “Curse of the I-5 Corridor.” Amid all the strings and woodwinds and harps, bolstered by the usual guitars and brush-tapped drums, her heartfelt lyricism manifests as one massive floodlight, daring you to gaze straight-on.
Case has spoken about losing several close friends and colleagues in the years since 2018’s Hell-On, including longtime collaborator Peter Moore and Dexter Romweber of Flat Duo Jets, her favorite band. The latter inspired the beautiful “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” retelling a day spent together walking along train tracks. Case’s emotion for him is raw and effusive, until she snaps back to the present to steer her audience away from cliché: “If you think I’m talkin’ ’bout romance/You’re not listening.” She backtracks over herself in these asides and run-ons and revisions, including in the music itself, which frequently changes tempo partway through a song to match the cadence of Case’s memories. The concept of time, via tidal waves or ticking clocks or a spider building its web, reappears across the album like an urgent spectre. That’s the double-edged sword of grief—debilitating as it may be, it can drive a person toward a more fervent truth-telling, a need to lay out exactly who or what was lost and make certain it is not forgotten. If Hell-On was Case’s plea to heed the warnings of nature and the changing planet, Neon Grey is a grand eulogy for lives she’s already said goodbye to, including versions of her own.
Still, Case elides saccharine emotion; in her world, a line as violent as “the steak knife’s journey to the center of a hornet’s nest” passes for eroticism. The soul of her lyrics exists somewhere on the barrier between mundane machinery and organic matter—“in the triangle made by the highway and the exit and the overpass,” as she chants on the enigmatic “Tomboy Gold.” I see it rhyming with the original Twin Peaks opening, where a sawmill blade makes precision cuts to wood from the same forest that birthed the Black Lodge. That spirit moves through lines like, “A neutral tarp to compliment the gleam/Of some glossy martyr’s meat,” and through the junk drawer of references to American self-reliance: plasma cutters and timing guns, frontage roads and boomerang countertops. Case’s most peerless observations underscore that the stuff we think of as uniquely human often reveals our most primal selves. “Sometimes I drive barefooted/To live the ecstasy of animal speed,” she intones on the title track, her voice gentle while the instrumentation grows more dissonant and rabid, until she’s hollering right along with it.
Case’s ambiguous phrases, long a confounding staple of her songwriting, coalesce on Neon Grey to form a coherent dream logic, the kind in which your limbs move at half-speed as a Mad Libs of the day’s events plays out beyond your control. Ghosts un-zip themselves from cacti to show off magic tricks; werewolves eat “miles and miles of the horizon,” with the Minotaur and Labyrinth as dessert and digestif, all set to a bow-legged twangy guitar straight out of a Jarmusch film. “An Ice Age,” one of Case’s finest tracks to date, describes a cataclysmic encounter inside of a women’s restroom, a confrontation of generational trauma and the ways we become unexpected doppelgangers. As she crests a maelstrom of violins and piano, Case takes her time drawing out its climactic scene—“Your mother on the frosty green/A plug-in, blow-mold virgin/Married to an extension cord”—as though she, too, can’t quite process what she’s witnessing. Like Josie Packard trapped in the drawer knob, the image is a campy mix of surrealism and tragedy, the fear of domestic imprisonment undercut by the embarrassment of possessing it in the first place.
Normalcy, for Case, has always been a question mark, and if anything she’s only grown more skeptical of it with age. “Why do people need to feel so important all the time?” she asks on “Little Gears.” If there is one empathetic truth that Neon Grey highlights, it is that finding mutual connection and understanding can morph one’s own self-mythology, like when Case gives the pile of scrap nails representing old relationships a new life on “Rusty Mountain,” or when, once again, she engages in a pep talk to her past self on “Destination.” The whole song is a murderer’s row of standout Neko Case imagery, from “lucky horseshoe pinball” bruises to a compact mirror in an alleyway gutter, but the refrain she keeps returning to is “Closing time never comes”—an uplifting reminder that the work is never over, that there will always be more phenomena to marvel at. It’s not only what keeps us human, but what keeps us alive.
