Neko Case brings her latest album Hell-On to the Maritimes in April.
Celebrated singer-songwriter Neko Case will perform in support of her latest release, Hell-On, at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Tuesday, April 16 and at the Capitol Theatre in Moncton on Wednesday, April 17 at 8 p.m.
Co-produced with Björn Yttling (Peter Björn and John) and featuring guests A.C. Newman, Beth Ditto, k.d. Lang, Laura Veirs, Mark Lanegan and Roberts Forster, Case’s seventh album was released earlier this year.
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 bandmates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs on the case/lang/veirs project.
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. She recalled Björn Yttling’s skill with Lykke Li, Camera Obscura, and his own band, Peter Bjorn and John. “I’ve worked with the same people so long, I never had to step outside my comfort zone,” Case says. “In this instance, I chose to.”
The two met over breakfast in Washington, DC, and decided to team up. By the time she went to Sweden in 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 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 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 studio in Stockholm and laid down the vocals for “Bad Luck,” singing the lines she had written long before she realized they would land on her.
She was hell-bent on not losing sight of the goal, reminding herself there was still beauty in the world and in the process of making music. She had been reading a lot of ancient history, including Adrienne Mayor’s The Amazons, and thinking about how for millennia, women have been more central to events than the average history class admits. “We were always there, we were just erased. And I knew it. As a little girl I knew it. As a young person I knew it,” Case says. “Now I know it anew with a ferocious, righteous, razor- sharp tribe of witnesses, and it makes me feel like a super-powerful human being. It makes me feel joy. There’s an inheritance there that’s really important, and I want to share it.”
She decided to climb inside her role as producer and wield it more directly. It just meant owning what she was already doing.
The record that came out of this reckoning with lost stories 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.
Tickets for both performances go on sale Friday December 7.
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