KCP Presents is very pleased to present three-time Grammy Award nominee Neko Case in a special concert to showcase the singer/songwriter's newest work.

Five years have passed since Case's last solo project, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. In the interim, she sang on Whiteout Conditions, the 2017 release from longtime band mates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined country/pop singer/songwriter k.d. Lang and alternative/folk artist Laura Veirs on the case/lang/veirs project.

Recording that record was a revelation, from Veirs' innovative guitar tunings to Lang's skills in studio. "I learned so much experiencing the work ethic of those two," Case says. She considers Lang "probably the most natural producer I've ever seen. Watching her work was awe-inspiring."

After their national tour together, Case found similar transcendence in October 2016 sitting on a panel at the first-of-its-kind "Woman Producer" summit in Brooklyn, NY. Between discussions and performances from a diverse group of women who produce music from around the world, she wondered how it had taken such a long time to get to that moment, and why so many female pioneers had been forgotten.

"The George Martins and Quincy Joneses of the recording pantheon deserve every drop of praise and every project they have received," Case says. "But we can't keep telling the same stories over and over. We need more stories, more inspiration, more flavors."

She set to work on her next record looking for not just new stories but also new sounds. This time, she wanted to put herself in a setting far away from everything she knew. So she teamed up with Swedish producer Björn Yttling and went to Sweden to record during the fall of 2017. Case had already written songs with longtime collaborator Paul Rigby, laid down vocal and guitar tracks at WaveLab Studio in Tucson, and built Carnacial Singing, her recording space here in Vermont.

But in the middle of her stint in Stockholm, with the finish line in sight, she received a surreal 3am call telling her that her Northeast Kingdom house was burning and would likely be completely destroyed. She felt panicked and helpless.

The fire had started in the barn, where she kept an assortment of belongings, from artwork to old pianos. A friend had managed to get the dogs to safety. After the flames jumped to the house, her home was engulfed, too.

A few hours later, she went into a Stockholm studio and laid down the vocals for "Bad Luck," singing the lines she had written long before she realized they would land on her.

Case is now stoic about the fire. "If somebody burned your house down on purpose, you'd feel so violated. But when nature burns your house down, you can't take it personally." The month before the blaze, Hurricane Harvey had slammed into Texas and flooded Houston. Her home burned just as Puerto Rico was plunged into a nightmare by Hurricane Maria and wildfires incinerated California. "In the big picture, my house burning was so unimportant," she says. "So many people lost so much more: lives and lives and lives."

Case's new record, Hell-On, came out of all of this reckoning with lost stories. It delivers both familiar Neko Case and something different. Death, extinction, exploitation, tides, animals, and adoration all blend recognizably. Case's trademark narrative gaps, just large enough for listeners to enter each song, likewise remain. As with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone, Hell-On spins away from conventions of story, slipping into real life, with its fierce mess and blind catastrophes.

"I'm writing fairy tales, and I hear my life story in them, but they're not about me," Case says. "I still can't figure out how to describe it. But I think that's why we make music or write things. You've got to invent a new language."

And as for those fairy tales she's writing and the history she's remembering: "We need them now more than ever. We need stories from all sectors. Stories without endings. Stories with multiple endings. Stories that don't end happily, cautionary tales, everything. We don't need Disneyfied stories anymore."

Case will be performing at Fuller Hall at the St. Johnsbury Academy, on Thursday, September 27, at 7:00 pm. Tickets on-sale via Spotify.


Posted 4/20/18