Neko Case and the Art of Soft Rebellion

Neko Case has enchanted listeners with her earthy original songs and lusty voice for decades.  In her astoundingly raw and gritty new memoir, The Harder I Fight The More I Love You, the 54-year-old Case  comes to terms with the wild sadness that has always shadowed her and reverberated through her music; a despair brought about by her vindictive and heartless mother whom she confesses never loved her. She knows music has saved her life.

She writes: “Making music is a soft rebellion in a world that always at your shoulder asking, ‘What makes you think you’re so important that someone should listen to you?’ It’s a question that can get leveled at you in a hundred different ways, but its intent is always the same: to defeat you before you try. I grew up believing I was nothing and sometimes my own significance wracked me with pain. But, luckily, somewhere down the line, I came to realize if I’m nothing, and have nothing, what is the real risk of putting myself out there?”

The reckoning pushed her forward, despite the reality that she was a damaged child.  Her mother didn’t just ignore or neglect her; she targeted her for her own twisted malevolent games.  Sometimes her mother would extend an olive branch and watch Case grab for it only to pull it back just when her daughter bit, leaving her devastated.  She never forgave her mother for such cruelty.

Both Case’s parents drank excessively and abused drugs. They were high school lovers in Bellingham, Washington and when her mother got pregnant, they married; a union which would unravel quickly.  Case explains: “My family was already unhappy, and we were going to get unhappier.  Our miserableness enacted itself as a series of moves from one tiny old house to another, our path around Bellingham like the jagged part of a water-damaged ceiling that eventually was going to cave.”  Case had an infatuation with her mother’s beauty, which stood in stark contrast to her internal nastiness.  She knew early on her mother was detestable: “She was not like cats and dogs and grass and the sky.  I would come to realize she was not my world, just an actor in it, free to come and go as the storms moved her.  She was not a guarantee.”

Her father wasn’t much better.  He was silent, sullen, and oblivious to her emotional havoc.  She began relying on herself for sustenance, no easy task for a little girl.  But each thing she found was glorious. First, there was her ecstatic love of horses. And then Mad Magazine. Suddenly, there was a friend down the road whose mother cared for her with a tenderness as if she were her own. She cherished her clock radio that gave her access to Portland’s rock stations and found television wondrous too. So was nature, in which she often lost herself. Driving came and soon enough she was listening to music in her battered-up used car riding the highways listening to Crazy Hazy Kisses, feeling like she had “tapped into some feral vein that ran to the center of the earth…”

Music quickly rose to first place amidst all her affections. She started to think of herself as having an artistic bent and began making collages while becoming infatuated with the works of Edward Hopper. Much later, there would be a Margaret Cho special on television that felt revelatory for her in showing her a path forward towards defining her own life in a way that resisted the meanspiritedness of her mother’s demonic head games or her father’s perpetual malaise. She would work to remain pure of heart and we revel in each joyful step of her transcendent journey and mourn her setbacks.

Teen-age friends followed, and make-out parties and getting high, and realizing that though she was attracted to boys and they to her, they weren’t her everything as they seemed to be for other girls. She describes herself today as half woman and half man and leaves it at that. She refuses what she considers to be our sterile notions of gender as not being expansive enough to include her.  We hear briefly about a long-term boyfriend she calls Jeff, who she lists her acknowledgements, but tells us almost nothing about him or their union, as if to do so would be to degrade herself.  She is an entity unto herself and needs no additions to complete her. When she speaks of her family, she is usually referring to her longtime bandmates or her beloved horses whom she claims treat her with a tenderness she cherishes. She insists they understand her fragility.

 One image from childhood remains embedded in her memories. She is a little girl and looking in the mirror and admiring the way she looks in a bandana she has neatly tied around her hair.  She too, like her mother, is very pretty. Startled, she hears her mother’s cold mean voice castigating her for staring at herself and calling her vain.  This memory will impede her later in life with boyfriends, strangers, music executives and concert promoters, causing her to question her validity and worth to those around her.

She recalls her mother’s anger that day was particularly virulent and possessing enough fury to extinguish her.  Case describes it as feeling “more like a malevolent gas of some unhinged spirit that hissed through her teeth.  I was terrified.  She flared and faded in front of my eyes.”  After this incident, Case recalls trying to become an invisible child, hoping her indistinguishableness would prevent her mother from hurting her again.

Her mother eventually left her with her father and went off and married someone else. Her father would come home from work and grunt while sitting stone-faced in an easy chair, seemingly oblivious to her presence. There often wasn’t any food in the refrigerator for her to eat. Her father was drinking more during this time; the two of them entombed into a miserable silence.  But Case, for reasons that seem to have something to do with her survivor’s fortitude, refused to stop looking for some sort of epiphany about what possibilities lay in store for her.

Case teaches herself how to play the drums and soon enough knows how to play. She begins playing in a band and we know it is all starting for her. She remembers hanging posters on her bedroom walls of the guys in bands she worshipped at the time but recalls even back then resenting these “girly-girly pastimes” that seemed to be leaving some of what she was out:

“Boys in bands would replace horses in my daydreams and conversation: musicians like Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Adam Ant, and Joan Jett, resplendent with their dark eyeliner and bright leathers. It was like the gods of my own private mythology got jostled away from me. On some level.  I resented the boys in the bands even as I hung their posters. I thought it was because they had usurped the rightful place of my main, loyally held passion, but what’s obvious now is that I wanted to be the boy in the band and just didn’t have a way of acknowledging it. My desire, still mysterious to me, was to live in a world where my old gods, like horses and moths, and my new gods of music could coexist, in a pantheon.  But such a world didn’t exist, and the pull to be ‘a girl’ was too strong.  I couldn’t do it.  And in becoming one, I abandoned the gods of my childhood and so, for a long time, broke my own heart.”

But Case would go on to find a way to be both a woman and the main ‘boy’ in the band. Her long, triumphant career speaks to her decisiveness and insistence on charting her own course, whether going on solo tours, or collaborating with the New Pornographers, with whom she has performed with for decades. She’s proud of her evolution as a songwriter too, penning song lyrics that feel no compulsion to tie things up neatly for public consumption. She likes the way her voice glides and slides, and sometimes slashes and burns, with everything aching together. This Grammy-nominated singer believes she found her true footing as an artist with her fourth album, “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” which is famous for it’s stunning single “Hold on, Hold on.”

I was surprised by how much this work affected me and how eloquent a writer Neko Case is. It’s an astounding first memoir filled with great insight, honesty, and bravery that pierces your heart.  Reading interviews she’s given over the years, I stumbled upon a proclamation she once made to an interviewer that seemed to say more than she intended to: “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers.  I know it’s unkind, but my own blood is much too dangerous.”