To open her memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Neko Case recalls her early days onstage, trembling before a dive-bar crowd that felt as daunting as the Super Bowl. “My job at that moment is to conjure a small dust devil of unreality around us,” she writes, “to pull it up out of a sticky, shiny carpet and flappy, beer-soaked speaker cones. I have to make it out of words and sounds and looks.”
That’s been her mission ever since. Though once labeled alt-country, Case has long since built her own hybrid form—part baroque pop, part feral folk, like Nilsson stranded at a truck stop or Kate Bush running wild through the woods. Her new album, Neon Grey Midnight Green, released alongside her memoir, feels like both a summation and a rebirth. Where 2018’s Hell-On plunged into darkness, Neon Grey reaches toward light, finding awe in grief’s aftermath. The title evokes the meeting of storm clouds and pine forests in the Pacific Northwest—a familiar palette of mystery and menace—but its prevailing emotions are gratitude and revelation.
“I’m a meteor shattering around you,” she sings on “Wreck,” her voice luminous amid an orchestra of strings, woodwinds, and harps arranged by Tom Hagerman and conducted by Sara Parkinson. Recorded live with a 20-piece ensemble, the album feels massive yet intimate. Case’s voice, once a beacon cutting through noir fog, now glows at the center of a vast constellation of sound.
Loss shadows these songs—friends and collaborators like Peter Moore and Dexter Romweber, whose memory animates “Winchester Mansion of Sound.” Her affection is raw but unsentimental: “If you think I’m talkin’ ’bout romance,” she warns, “you’re not listening.” The music itself mirrors her memory’s shifting tempo—songs slow, quicken, and pivot midstream, echoing the uneven pulse of reflection. Time recurs throughout as both specter and teacher, pushing Case toward truth-telling, toward making loss legible.
If Hell-On pleaded for harmony with the natural world, Neon Grey mourns the lives and selves already lost. Yet it refuses sentimentality; Case’s imagery remains tactile, violent, and strange. “The steak knife’s journey to the center of a hornet’s nest” becomes eroticism; highways, plasma cutters, and overpasses mingle with spiderwebs and forest light. In her hands, the machinery of modern life turns mythic. “Sometimes I drive barefooted,” she murmurs, “to live the ecstasy of animal speed,” her voice soft as the band behind her grows wild.
Case’s dreamlike logic has never felt sharper. Ghosts unzip from cacti, werewolves devour horizons, and Greek monsters wander through Jarmuschian landscapes. “An Ice Age,” one of her finest songs, captures a surreal confrontation in a women’s restroom—a fusion of camp and heartbreak where domestic fear and absurdity intertwine. As she sings, “Your mother on the frosty green/A plug-in, blow-mold virgin/Married to an extension cord,” she sounds both awed and bewildered, like she’s watching her own vision unfold in slow motion.
By the end, Case questions the idea of normalcy itself. “Why do people need to feel so important all the time?” she asks on “Little Gears.” Yet Neon Grey insists on connection—the transformative kind that turns scrap nails into sculpture on “Rusty Mountain,” or that lets her speak tenderly to her past self on “Destination.” “Closing time never comes,” she reminds us. There’s always more to discover, more to love, more life to live—and that endless search is what keeps her, and us, moving forward.
About the Author
