Barely halfway into the prologue of her new memoir, Neko Case has already confessed to performing while in the early stages of a yeast infection, her touring diet disaster of fries, white bread and cola, and concerns the audience will be eyeing her poorly applied concealer. There’s every reason, she writes, to not be brave enough to be on stage at the microphone, and yet, “I can’t help it.”
As Case, 54, candidly points out, for a girl who grew up in abject loneliness, the prospect of failing or faltering in front of an audience was no big deal. Despite her efforts (“I would contort myself all sorts of shapes to try to please her,” Case writes), even her mother faked her own death to run off to Hawaii with a new boyfriend, leaving Neko with her pothead dad. And Buffy, the wiry-haired dog named after singer Buffy Sainte-Marie that Case was given seemingly as compensation for her mother vanishing, couldn’t fill a mom-shaped gap.
From her hotel room in New York City, where she’s working on a Broadway adaptation of “Thelma & Louise,” Case says, “The book’s not really about my mother, it’s more about the situations that were unavoidable. I was crazy about my mother, but she was a damaged person, and she wasn’t going to try to fix that or take responsibility for that. So, it’s more about where you find your footholds despite massive roadblocks.”
She adds, “I think I’m still the same person I would have been if I had a loving relationship with my mother. I just would have been a lot more trusting probably.”
Born to teenage parents, the unintended consequence of their first sexual encounter, Neko was a child raised by children. And yet, there was nothing fun about a household of ill-prepared youngsters with no money and their future plans scrambled. Between her father’s shifting between ramshackle houses plagued by mildew, trailer parks and a remote reservation surrounded by rattlesnakes and not much else, it would be romantic to imagine a young girl might develop a fierce imagination to overcome the loneliness. If this were a fairy tale, perhaps, but since it’s not, the truth was eating raw pasta or cake mix because her father never stocked the pantry nor prepared food, spending 10 hours a day alone with the nearest neighbor a mile away during her stepfather’s work trips, and trying to pretend her mother’s “death,” followed by her reappearance years later, was even vaguely normal.
For Case, her autobiography isn’t centered around a specific person or event. Rather, “it’s more about where you find your footholds despite massive roadblocks.”
(The Tyler Twins/For The Times)
Her mother’s vanishing-returning-neglectful presence is one aspect of Case’s story that colors the way she approaches or recedes from the world, and her capacity to trust men. She was raped by a friend’s older brother at 14, and soon after, was tasked with cleaning up her mother’s wounds, the result of being raped by a man she knew. It could cower any woman, but Case hardened and bristled into a take-no-crap, determined, independent force of nature. Living in near-poverty in a series of poor apartments, or out of a ramshackle touring van for weeks on end? Bring it on, this is liberation. Over the years, then decades, friends and friends-of-friends became her band family — the people who bring their instruments, a shared passion for melody and a readiness to collaborate whatever the result.
And the worse things got, the harder she fought; the harder she fought, the more her musical superpowers shined. Indeed, the title of her memoir, out Jan. 28, harks back to her sixth solo album of 2013, the Grammy-nominated “The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You” for best alternative music album.
That album, sometimes harrowing in its confessions of darkness (“I wanted so badly not to be me,” she sings in “Where Did I Leave That Fire?”), makes much more sense in the context given by this oft poetic, unvarnished, generous autobiography. For fans of Case, who have traced her trajectory through punk bands to the New Pornographers, solo and with Neko Case & Her Boyfriends, lyrics that only hinted at grief or trauma will be seen in a clearer light through her memoir’s unflinching recollection. Often left with only her pet dogs or cats, drawing horses with a single-minded obsession to have her own, it makes sense that Case still identifies more strongly with a wild, genderless spirit than the tropes of femininity imposed by magazine photo shoots and music marketing teams.
To this day, she shares her home with a motley crew of horses, dogs and cats — either rescued or invited in because they arrived one day and refused to leave.
“One of my horses just passed away,” she says. “He was very sick, and so his brother went to live down the road at my neighbor’s house for now, because she has many horses. Horses are very group oriented, and they don’t like to be alone. So, she was kind enough to let me bring him down there to live with a big herd of mares so that he wouldn’t be mourning and sad.”
Case also had an older dog who died the same week. But she still has her dog, Coco, and two cats, Chet and Marcia, and then a new cat, Dennis, who just showed up at the house. “Chet is not pleased about it, but Dennis is so lovable that I hope Chet gets used to it,” Case says.
For a woman who grew up spending long hours and days alone, it makes sense that Case thrives in the company of wild creatures, whether animal or human. She completed this memoir during the pandemic, while working on her upcoming album and her first Broadway musical. “Thelma & Louise,” the stage adaptation of Ridley Scott’s 1991 movie, is helmed by its original screenwriter (and Oscar winner), Callie Khouri, who has a knack for music-oriented projects, including “Nashville” and “Patsy & Loretta.” Trip Cullman, a renowned theater director, and writer Halley Feiffer made a dream team. For Case, it was a world away from working on her own album and a memoir.
“It’s like a hydra, like a three-headed monster!” she says with a hearty laugh. “But the record is about the musicians, and writing fiction is a different place to be from the memoir, so I kept them separate.”
Case had intended her first book to be the fictional one she’s been working on for years, but publishers were determined that it be a memoir. Will we see another Neko Case book soon?
“I’m gonna finish it, it’s a road trip story, and then try to get it published,” she says. “I have a very nice book agent, so she likes it and says she’s gonna help me out. So, hopefully I will find some time to finish it, which would be really nice, but I’m pretty booked solid for the next couple years, so it probably won’t be for a while.”
As it always has been, music is her priority and her lifeblood. It was a love affair that began as far back as she can recall.
“I just took for granted that music was always there. The music I was listening to shaped me. I listened to what my parents and grandparents listened to at first. I listened to music around the clock.”
Everything from country to folk, punk, rock and blues drew young Case into a musical orbit. Those same influences reverberate throughout her eclectic albums — unmistakably threaded through with her gravelly, gorgeous voice.
“Wild Creatures” was Case’s most recent release in 2022, arriving 20 years after her gothic, bluesy-country “Blacklisted.” In between, there was “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” her critically lauded 2006 album (boasting the TV soundtrack favorite “Hold On, Hold On”), “Middle Cyclone,” which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts in its first week of release in 2009 and scored a couple of Grammy nominations.
For fans of her music looking for technical or psychological dissection of her work, Case doesn’t interrogate her songwriting approach, nor her lyrics and albums in the memoir. She acknowledges that she doesn’t want to interfere in listeners’ experience of her music. However, in 2018, she recorded a “Song Exploder” podcast with Thao Nguyen, breaking down “Last Lion of Albion.”
“I hope that it makes people feel seen,” she says of her new memoir. “Not just women, but anyone.”
(The Tyler Twins/For The Times)
“Thao is one of my favorite musicians, and a lovely person, so it felt like a nice chat with a friend. I don’t feel guarded about those things. it’s an interesting way to look at music, to really dissect one song. But I always worry that I’ll ruin it… I want people to dance around in it and make it theirs,” she says.
The memoir is likewise an offering to both know Case more deeply, and to read between the lines, dance around in it and resonate with the complexities of being a creative human.
“I hope that it makes people feel seen,” she reflects. “Not just women, but anyone. We’re expected to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives at 18 or 19. … And for kids who are neurodivergent, I think it is often a lot harder.”
Case has referred to her “ADHD brain” in her Substack “Entering the Lung,” which has over 22,000 subscribers to date.
She continues, “I wrote the whole memoir, and wondered, ‘Did I leave something out?’ ”
Her interview with The Times is one of the first she’s done, other than for book publishing sites, so she confesses she hasn’t formed preconceived answers, nor considered any missing parts.
“I’ve only talked about it a couple of times, so I haven’t formed thoughts on it yet,” she says. “This is all new to me, it’s very ‘whoa.’ ”
Perhaps Case has also, unwittingly, summed up the book reviews to come too. Readers and critics will discover that her memoir is revelatory, relatable and, in its confessional rawness, “very whoa.”
