a day ago
Neko Case Shares New Song From Upcoming Album
Neko Case is sharing her upcoming album Neon Grey Midnight Green's most poignant elegy, 'Winchester Mansion of Sound'. Inspired by Case's late friend and collaborator Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets, the song musically draws inspiration from Robbie Basho's 'Orphan's Lament'— 'the saddest song ever,' says Case — as well as the classic 'Down Down Baby' nursery rhyme. The latter struck her as both comforting and a little melancholy, a bittersweet melody, like nostalgia itself.
Plagued with a sort of intuition about death, Case penned the piano epic about two years before Romweber's 2024 passing when she found herself worrying about him. As Case wrote in her recent memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, the first time she heard Romweber's pioneering psychobilly group, 'something unlocked in her that day, the way making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside of her body.' She called it 'not a romantic love, but an all-consuming one'—a common thread across her memoir and her new album.
Arriving September 26, Neon Grey Midnight Green' is Case's first new music this decade, following 2018's Hell-On, an eclectic piece that The Guardian called 'a pitch-perfect roar of female defiance.' Her latest is no less urgent but carries a deep blue streak of sentimentality in its incandescent blaze. More than any of her past albums, Neon Grey Midnight Green was laid down live with a full band – even breaths and shirt-sleeve rustlings were kept in the final mix as a reminder that 'humans were here.' Recording primarily took place at Case's own Vermont studio, Carnassial Sound, with additional sessions in Denver, Colorado with the PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra and in Portland, Oregon with Tucker Martine.
'There are so few producers who are women, nonbinary, or trans,' says Case, who identifies as gender fluid and uses she/her pronouns. 'People don't think of us as an option. I'm proud to say I produced this record. It is my vision. It is my veto power. It is my taste.'
Listening to Case's music will teach you about this world— human nature's cruelty, perseverance and terrifying beauty, but the natural world as well — the moon and the stars, bees, lions and magpies. Should you encounter a wayward soul who has never heard her music, you might respond, 'Well, she once sang from the perspective of a tornado,' as if to say: there's no physical form that could stop her potent voice and evocative storytelling.
Case's memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You was released in January and reached #5 on the New York Times nonfiction best sellers list. Raised 'by two dogs and a space heater' in Washington state, the book's vibrant wordplay and unflinching humour were a familiar balm to fans; as The Washington Post wrote in a glowing review, it 'hits you in the same places her songs do: heart and gut, funny bone and sad bone.' Case has also been hard at work composing the musical adaptation of the 1991 Academy Award-winning motion picture Thelma & Louise after being personally selected by the original screenwriter and Academy Award winner Callie Khouri. Said Case of her memoir: 'I hope my story will cast a spell of love, invite everyone inside, and smash the illusion that we have no connection to each other.'
