It's important to note what happened for me in college and what I hope happens to most people, which is that you meet many people and a good number of them turn you onto new music. I think my first exposure to the New Pornographers came in the Fall of 2003, in Paris, a friend in the study abroad program making me a mix that had "The Slow Descent into Alcoholism" on it. At the time, there really wasn't anything that sounded like them. They were a supergroup. (I say "were" because, while they're still good, I think most agree their first 3 albums represent their glory years.) At least to all of us, Neko Case was the star of the group (later we might concede Dan Bejar as attaining MVP-status). Upon returning to New York in 2004, I found they had blown up to a certain degree, and Broken Social Scene had emerged, as a sort of copycat supergroup except from Toronto instead of Vancouver. The Unicorns were also making a name for themselves, and the Arcade Fire debut was not far off in the distance. I wanted to be Canadian and every Canadian I met was super cool. It was probably a good time for that country. Suffice to say, Mass Romantic, Electric Version, and Twin Cinema all stand alongside one another, but Neko's singular highlight probably remains "Letter From an Occupant," off the first album.
Later I became aware of her solo work. I wasn't aware until now that she had two solo albums prior to her work with NP. Regardless, of course I wanted to see NP live, but they were not on tour, and in any case I don't think Neko toured with them. Apparently she did in 2017, and I'm terribly sad to have missed that. But by that point I had seen them at least a couple times and they were not as powerful a live force as Broken Social Scene (they had played a $5 NYU show while touring You Forgot it in People and I remember that being one of the best of many great $5 shows).
In 2004, she was in between Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, about to put out the live album The Tigers Have Spoken. Maybe she was testing out new material in this tour. In any case, her solo work is very different from NP. NP is power pop dialed up to 10 (or at least was back in those days). NC solo is "alt-country" or "folk." I got tickets for a friend and myself just because I wanted to see her, 50% for the music and 50% because I had a crush on her. I wasn't familiar with her solo work, and it was not as easy to listen to it on a whim as these days. I see now she had been voted the "Sexiest Babe in Indie Rock" by Playboy Magazine about a year earlier. She does not write about this in the book but I have to think she did not take it as a very exciting compliment. Regardless I was not exactly the most mature person in the world and fantasized that we might meet and she might see something in me.
The show was good, and after she said she would be at the merch table. A line quickly formed. I should have waited, and gotten one of her CDs and asked for an autograph, but we were poor college students and most of us got music through sharing burnt CD-Rs. I kept a journal where I would get autographs of famous people when I could and I should have just asked for one there. But instead for some reason, I disregarded the line, and no one seemed to say anything, including her, but before I could say anything I was pulled away by security. She seemed to say no, don't do that, and they probably should have just told me, you know there's a line, you have to wait, but I was unceremoniously removed from the venue, and as I was pulled away I shouted, "I love you!"
This anecdote does not make her memoir, and it would not make my memoir, either, but it feels appropriate to note for this post; perhaps one day she'll read it, and peruse some other materials on this blog and see something in me, but I digress.
***
***
Of course then, I loved this book, and it will go on the Best Books list whenever I get around to updating that post. It's nearly perfect. The only thing I would have liked to see was more material on NP, and what her work in that band means to her. It's not my place to assume, but from the spare references included here, while she does get songwriting credit on her songs, it feels like Carl Newman's band--that's his world, and she's just living in it, randomly every few years.
I did get Fox Confessor Brings the Flood when it came out in 2006, and it is justly considered her masterpiece--but that also seems to ignore the strength of the 4 albums after, which are remarkably consistent, and arguably even better. This year she put out Neon Grey Midnight Green, about 9 months after this memoir, and so we might say in 2025, Neko Case has reached peak acclaim. The album is just as excellent as all that came before, and the memoir cuts deeper than anything she's done to this point. She's just a beautiful person, through and through, and should be considered a national treasure.
***
For personal reasons, the chapters documenting her time living in Chicago were most interesting to me, and I was curious to find out if it was anywhere near where I am now. It was not far off:
"My dear friend Judge had found a great apartment on Maplewood Avenue in Humboldt Park for us. It was spacious, with high ceilings, old wood floors, and bizarre pink plastic tiles in the bathroom, of which only a couple had cigarette burns. The two of us set to homemaking with a passion. We painted the living room 'Shakespeare Green' and the entry room 'Klondike Blue,' and then kept on trying other colors until we eventually became the reason that Home Depot no longer lets you return paint. There was a back porch, which was lovely to sit on, and Judge arranged tin cans upside down on sticks in the planters so she could record the beautiful, calming percussion sounds of the summer storm rain falling on them." (198-199)
There's not that much material about it, and Case has moved around a lot. If there's a spiritual center of the book it's probably Tacoma, WA, followed by Vancouver. She lived in several isolated locations in remote parts of Washington with her parents. She loses her mother at a very young age. It's devastating but I won't say anything beyond that.
Her father is not much more helpful, despite being fiercely protective. Case becomes something of a "latch-key kid," which many of her generation often bemoan and also take as a point of pride. It's in this setting that she becomes a dreamer, and starts to recognize that the world outside her family might provide greater love and validation. She falls in love with horses from a young age, at one point "manifesting" two of them, out of nowhere in a random spot in her town where they wouldn't normally be seen. Later she goes to a state fair with a friend and they enter a competition, and again I won't say more but Case does still consider it one of the best days of her life.
She has a traumatic experience as a teen, and there is a deeper sadness to the troubles she had to endure in her early life. She does know, however, what her purpose should be, and she persisted and grew as an artist and musician, to the point that she has only kept getting better, some 30 years after she started. Many bands flame out and their earliest work remains their strongest but Case has never rested on her laurels, so to speak. After this memoir, I will not be surprised if she has yet another renaissance of sorts, stretching towards greater heights yet.
***
There's not much else I can say about this except to highlight a couple of other passages, and acknowledge that Case's literary talents arguably eclipse her musical ones--I think she comes about as close to reaching the Patti Smith-level as a musician can. Even though Michelle Zauner may occupy a similar space, I did not know what "psychopomp" meant until reading this, despite it serving as a Japanese Breakfast album title:
"A large swath of Slavic tales feature what's called a psychopomp, an animal or a trickster god who acts as a guide to the protagonist in the story. A sort of left-field Greek chorus. As a teen, I had only the thinnest understanding of what 'psychopomp' meant when I first heard the word, but I knew immediately that I wanted to be one. In the old tales, the psychopomp doles out the clues--cryptic but always correct--that allow the protagonist to solve an important riddle or find the path out of the forest themselves. Like a psychopomp, I wanted to inhabit a den in the forest and possess the answers to transformation and growth that I'd croak out now and then to visitors. That sounded like a dream come true. I still remember the day someone I trusted told me that humans can't be psychopomps. I was crushed. I didn't have a library or internet at the ready, so I just sat in that sad little diaper of truth longer than I should have...thirty-some years? When I finally looked it up, it turned out the working description of 'psychopomp' I'd had was less incorrect than 'incomplete.' If I had understood psychopomps to be animals that help you solve a problem or find a path, other sources describe them as 'conductors of souls' to the afterlife. Among many other ways of being, as it turns out, psychopomps can perform all sorts of other tasks and roles too, including being singers." (241)
Now having understood that, Psychopomp is sort of a perfect title for that Japanese Breakfast album.
So too Case deserves to be a New York Times bestseller, but it does not have the same "hook" as Crying in H Mart. This has a lot of similarities to that book, but they have different sub-topics (family recipes; horses as divinities). And while Zauner comes to grips with the love that her mother gave her, and recognizes it as a beautiful thing, Case is not nearly as lucky. Her relationship with her mother is exceedingly strange, certainly about as unusual and confounding as anything I've read before. She still finds a way to make peace with her upbringing--or if not peace, at least acceptance and understanding. Both of her parents have their own personal tragedies that she comes to discover and leave her with a deeper appreciation for their perceived failings. And as with personal trauma, shedding the long-term pain and discomfort associated with horrible memories is often an iterative process:
"There are so many dumb cliches out there about rape. A few seem like they might be meant to help you process it but are actually ways to gloss over the messiness of what happened. They use words like 'resilience' and 'character.' One of the bad ideas is that forgiveness is the ultimate act of courage. It's not. I don't believe forgiveness is something you can actively do with any realness or sincerity. It's not a tangible 'act,' in the same way that justice is not an act. Maybe forgiveness and justice are somehow the same state of being.
Maybe forgiveness comes later, and maybe it never does. Maybe you are so evolved you can feel it right in the moment of betrayal. I have forgiven people and events before, and it's usually after a long time and self-searching about something completely different. Forgiveness seems to be a sweet, brief rest at the crossroads of other things. It's almost a divine by-product. It's not a tiny golden diploma you bestow upon someone. Forgiveness takes many forms and may be as simple as the moment something no longer has power over you.
That doesn't mean there aren't good ideas about forgiveness and its beauty, but if something doesn't stir anything but contempt in you, there's a reason. Trust your contempt. Dissect if you can. The reason your contempt is tapping you on the shoulder may be in there, and be valid, or it may not. If you can't find it, it's OK. That doesn't mean you should canonize your rage, either, just make sure you take it seriously. If you learn nothing from something horrible, you are human, and that doesn't make you soulless or cruel. Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson." (132-133)
Like Rebel Girl, I think this book has the capacity to change lives and make readers into better people and offer a gentle guiding hand through the darkest patches of existence. Like many books in this category, it underscores the importance of following one's dreams. None of these books would exist if the women writing them had given up on that. They might have moved on to live fulfilling and rewarding lives in other arenas, but we would not have the gifts that they bestowed upon the world. Of course, they've all found their ways towards some version of success, and even if we struggle to find our own, the compassion inherent in their work is a reminder that often, all is not as hopeless as it seems.
