Neko Case: Sometimes Your House Burns Down & It's Flat 'Bad Luck'

Neko Case was hell-bent on getting outside her comfort zone for her seventh solo album, Hell-On. It had been five years since her last solo release The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, and – despite having played pivotal roles on lauded albums with her indie-pop band The New Pornographers and her case/lang/veirs project alongside k.d. lang and Laura Veirs in the interim – she was determined to try something new, to not cover the same sonic ground she’d already been traipsing.

To achieve this Case set off intrepidly to the Swedish capital of Stockholm, where together with co-producer Bjorn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn & John fame), she crafted an album of immense depth, defined by meticulous production, fully fleshed songs and of course her inimitably expressive voice which, as always, flits from gargantuan velvet-clad power to coquettish sensitivity with ridiculous ease. 

“I wanted new sounds, and I really loved projects that Bjorn was involved in and of course his own band,” Case reflects of the process. “There are similarities between his own stuff and The New Pornographers and I wanted to work with somebody different in a different place, and like I said I wanted someone who would bring brand new sounds. I wanted to branch out a bit.”

But it wasn’t just on the sonic side she was seeking change: having long ago morphed away from the alt-country stylings of her early work, she was striving to perfect more traditional song arrangements as well. 

"I just try to leave a lot of room for people to personalise a song for themselves."

“I like hooks and catchy moments so as always I made sure there were plenty of those, but I also usually like things not to be cyclical. Sometimes I write very linear songs, so I wanted to dabble more in the songs that have choruses, etcetera. You can still be telling a story.”

And tell a story Case does. Hell-On contains the most lyrically evocative songs yet from a writer renowned for her rich storytelling and deft narratives, although her last couple of albums have found the songwriter delving into more personal territory and clearly mining her own past for inspiration. 

“There’s always an element of autobiography in everything I write,” she ponders. “You’re writing from your own perspective no matter who you’re trying to be in a song, so you can’t completely leave yourself out. I just try to leave a lot of room for people to personalise a song for themselves too, so that things aren’t super specific but there are moments that are."

Case attests that when it comes to creativity and songwriting, the ease of the process is dictated by pesky life situations. 

“Sometimes it comes easily, depending on how hard I’ve practiced being in the moment. Being an adult there’s a lot of your life that gets in the way and you have responsibilities and work and all kinds of things, so I don’t get those moments as much as I’d like. But I do have moments where it flows pretty easily, and then maybe a quarter of the song is really difficult to finish.”

Which is why she really enjoyed 2016’s case/lang/veirs project so much, with that creative pressure being split three ways.

“Yes! I really enjoyed not being the sole decision maker,” Case enthuses. “I really liked ceding a bit of control and seeing the new ideas that come with being with other people, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work with Bjorn [on Hell-On].

The songs were pretty much finished and some guitars and vocals had been laid down before Case sojourned to Stockholm for the Hell-On session, but even from afar she was able to harness the internet and rope in a stellar array of guests to appear on the album, including lang and Veirs, Mark Lanegan, Beth Ditto, Doug Gillard (of Guided By Voices) and even some backing vocals courtesy of our own Robert Forster. 

“Well it’s really nice working with these folk, and it’s a lot easier to pull them in now that technology makes it so easy. A lot of people worked in studios down the street from their house – or in their house – and contributed, so it’s really nice because it really brings the world of these people together. A lot of these things were turned in or done while I was in Sweden and they were wherever they where at the time, so it felt very global. It was fun.”

This new long distance way of working also facilitated Case’s first ever co-write with AC Newman, her vocal partner-in-crime from The New Pornographers, on the upbeat Gumball Blue. 

“Yeah, which is dumb considering we’ve been in a band together for a thousand years,” she laughs. “But it’s a very funny song. We’ll write again together for sure, we both had fun, but I think if we’d tried to do it earlier it would have been a lot harder, just because we aren’t in a studio that often together.

“And we’ve never been in a studio that often, just because there’s two bands going all the time for me, so the fact that he can work on something in his house and send it to me and then I work on something and send it back, it makes it so fluid and you’re not on the spot when you want to think of something. So yeah, we’ll totally write together again."

Joey Burns from Calexico is another whose touch is all over Hell-On, having been present at the initial sessions in Tucson, Arizona. 

“Well, Joey specifically just loves being in the studio. He’s a kid in a candy store, and he really loves to go in and play instruments that he doesn’t normally play – it’s really fun for him. I love it, I love watching him getting nuts in the studio – he loves to play music, and it’s a very exciting and contagious feeling.”

One of Hell-On’s defining moments is a duet with former Archers Of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann – an erstwhile member of Case’s touring band – on a cover of the gorgeous Sleep All Summer, penned by Bachmann and originally recorded by his solo alter-ego Crooked Fingers. 

“The first time I ever heard that song I had to pull my car over and cry on the side of the road because it’s so beautiful, it’s just the perfect song,” Case sighs. “We would sing it live and it’s just really gorgeous and I believe in that song so hard, and I thought, ‘Ah, what can it hurt to ask?’ and he was, like, ‘Sure, why not!’

“So he worked hard to make sure that it didn’t sound like the version he had done before or the version that other people had done – because a lot of people have covered that song because it’s so great – and it was a really lovely thing.

“It was a very practiced version because we did do it a lot live, and it was very simple and it was really easy to put together in the studio and it really flowed. And a lot of people are really responding to it and they’d never heard it before, and that was the goal – I want more people to hear it, because like I said before I just believe so much in that song. And I just think Eric is the greatest.”

Another pivotal song Bad Luck was influenced in the studio by news that Case’s beautiful 18th century farmhouse in Vermont had been completely razed by fire, somewhat strange given the catchy song’s lyrics include a litany of untimely life events (albeit none as bad as your whole house being destroyed). 

“The album was almost finished when the fire happened. I sang the song Bad Luck the day my house burned down and I was very stunned, and I think it changed the way that that song sounded. And it did in a good way because I was speaking to the sound engineer and I said, ‘I dunno, I think my singing sounds rather flat,’ and he said, ‘Maybe that’s how someone sounds when their house burns down?’

“And I realised that was true, so I decided that I wanted the backing vocals to be much louder than the lead vocal and I think in the end that sounds really exciting to me, but I don’t know if I would have made that decision otherwise. So I highly appreciate that, and I think it’s a nice run-off from that experience.”

Case is now deep into the touring cycle for Hell-On, and fortunately she enjoys sharing her music with her devoted fans as much as she does creating it. 

“I like them both very much – they both can get a little exhausting, but you have to spend trillions of years working out how to strike a balance,” she chuckles. “Which I probably still haven’t done, although for the most part I think I get it pretty good and it feels good.

“I don’t really prefer one over the other, it’s just that sometimes you need to be alone and working on something and going into some very deep minutiae, or making a singular human sound with other people for other people is a really high feeling – it’s kind of two opposite ends of the same enjoyment.”

Even the tyranny of distance can’t stop her from loving the long trip Down Under to share her musical joy, her impending run of shows merely the latest she’s done both under her own steam and with The New Pornographers. 

“Yeah, I’d tour there every year if I could! Twice even!” she gushes. “It’s just that it’s so expensive, that’s the only thing that keeps me away. I love the beach, the music lovers, the environment – there’s nothing to not love about it, I love coming there and can’t wait to be back!"

Neko Case tours from 9 Mar.