Neko Case: Nature Woman

04/03/09 12:20pm

by Steve McLean (CHARTattack)

Neko Case was suffering from an ear infection and drinking tea to combat it in her downtown Toronto hotel room three days after the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama in late January. But she was still in good spirits despite her ailment, and her voice sounded in fine form on a KEXP radio broadcast performance the next night in Seattle.

Here are excerpts from her half-hour conversation with CHARTattack news editor Steve McLean:

CHARTattack: I understand there was wind blowing through the barn when you recorded the "piano orchestra" on your new Middle Cyclone album.
Neko Case: There was wind and birds and frogs. It was awesome. It was really great to have to let go of control freakness and just say, "If the boiler comes on, it comes on." But it's more like, "If the bird comes home to feed her babies, the bird comes home to feed her babies. We're not going to stop what we're doing." And it worked out really nice. You can actually hear the robin at the beginning of the solo of "Polar Nettles," which is really nice.

Does the half-hour of ambient sound at the end of the record come from that as well?
Yeah. That comes from the pond down at the bottom of the hill where the spring peepers were out singing. So I just went down and recorded about four minutes and then we looped it.

There's so much space at the end of a CD that we thought, "Why don't we fill it with something nice? We'll give the listener a little bit of ambient bathtub sounds for relaxing album listening." It's like you've been to the spa, now here's your bathrobe. Just chill out.

It's around 37 minutes. We thought it would be a crime to waste all that space on the CD, so we thought we'd put frogs on it. They sound kind of crickety, but they're called spring peepers. I don't know what their actual scientific name is, but that's what Vermonters call them.

What's with your focus on wind, nature and animals on this album?
That makes me feel comfortable and soothed. I think that's the world that my imagination likes to go to. You kind of decorate your imagination for how you like to relax, and I think that's just what I'm into.

You say in your bio that you had to come to terms with the notion of loving people as much as animals and nature because you grew up in a way that made you love one but not the other. Can you elaborate on that?
I wasn't really around people. I was around animals all the time. It wasn't like people were bad, it was just that animals were what I was around. My parents were gone all the time, and I was an only child, so it was me and dogs, cats, goats, whatever. And we often lived in the middle of nowhere, so I was just friends with them. I felt a lot of empathy for them and they for me.

Now that you're around people constantly, has that changed?
Yeah. I'm learning how to be a good human animal and use my instincts. I like becoming more of a social animal as I get older.

Is there any progress report on The New Pornographers?
Apparently we have a shitload of demos that we're about to hear. And Carl [Newman] just put out his record, which is awesome. I listen to it all the time.

He wouldn't let me sing on it, though. I begged him and he was like, "No." I see his point. He doesn't want it sounding like The New Pornographers, so I got it. But it didn't stop me from bugging him about it anyway — mostly for fun. My feelings weren't actually hurt.

I haven't heard them [the Pornographers demos] yet, but Phil has. He's the studio engineer who we record with all the time, and he's very optimistic. Carl is freakishly productive, so I don't doubt that they're probably up to par with the other ones. I don't know how he does it, but I like it.

Do you have any idea when you might get together and start recording it?
No. I've heard I'm supposed to get demos in about a month, which blows my mind considering that his record just got put out. It's like, "When do you find time to do this, vampire man? Are you just hanging upside-down in the closet all night writing songs or what?" He doesn't sleep, I don't think. He's just up 24/7.

I read your blog and saw that you were in Toronto for the U.S. election.
That was a big deal for me. I thought I was going to feel very remote and left alone. I voted early before I left, but it was so moving to see that Canadians still loved us and they were rootin' for us. I thought I loved Canadians before, but now I'm getting all teary. Don't make me talk about the election. I can't deal.

I had a photo shoot the day of the inauguration and I couldn't watch it. I was like, "Don't tell me about it. We can't watch it because I'm wearing make-up today." Every time I see Jude [Coombe] from Starfish Entertainment, we both sob and we can't even look at each other.

It was so moving. There were like 35 people and everyone was crying. They had this big election party and I walked home that night from the studio. It was like 1:30 in the morning and there were people in the streets crying and singing and going "Yeah!" I was like, "This is so awesome. If we could just get those Canadians excited enough to get rid of Stephen Harper."