Neko Case’s new album is called The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You.

That’s a pretty personal statement and this is a pretty personal album. In the past, Case largely wrote songs that were (at least seemingly) fictional, with stories about colorful characters and criminal activity that often earned her the label of a “country-noir” singer-songwriter. Here, Case seems to be the main character on the album as she sorts through her feelings on being a 42-year old, life-long bachelorette who has spent the majority of her adult life as a touring musician.

Case’s perspective on writing the album can be more thoroughly understood through this excellent interview by Consequence of Sound, where Case describes going through a number of personal issues after the release of her last album, including depression and her father’s death. In the aforementioned interview she states that The Worse Things Get is “really autobiographical because my mind just didn’t have room for anything else.”

Further context can be had by becoming acquainted with Case’s constantly-updated (and frequently, very funny) Twitter account, where it’s nearly impossible to reconcile how she is able to tour, record music, and run a farm in Vermont, with her ubiquitous online presence. She loves animals and nature, is unabashedly foul-mouthed and honest, and easily banters with fans and nationally renowned comedians alike as if everyone in the world is a potential best friend.

From there, we get to the content of the album itself. Musically, Case is on the same path she started treading with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone.  This is meticulously produced folk-rock with heavy emphasis on melodies to show off Case’s phenomenal vocal talent. Thematically, she’s looking at a few things here but chief among them is her level of comfort with her identity as a single woman in her forties, struggling against the societal norms that would compel her to at least have been married (maybe divorced) and and/or a mother by this point in her life.


On “Man,” the first single from The Worse Things Get, we talked about how Case appropriated the stereotypical trappings of “manliness” to point out how she is equally as capable as most men (if not more so) to reside in the provinces of traditionally male-dominated realms. Case actually raises this concern to some degree on each of the first four songs on the album.

On the excellent opener, “Wild Creatures,” Case sings “hey little girl, would you like to be the king’s pet or the king?” She’s presumably speaking to herself as she immediately answers: “I’d choose odorless and invisible, but otherwise, I’d chose the king.” It seems to be another defiant statement of choosing a self-reliant path over conformity, but the postscript somewhat complicates this sentiment: “even though it sounds the loneliest… and my brother’s hands would poison me.” Being an autonomous individual might seem great in theory but it does inherently suggest solitude. Additionally, it makes you more likely to be the subject of envy or disdain for not simply “doing what you should,” especially when you’re treading on the long-established domain of “men,” who tend to be a rather territorially bunch.

The conflict between opting for the unconventional and the resultant isolation is further explored on “Night Still Comes” when Cases asks: “is it cause I’m a girl? If I puked up some sonnets would you call me a miracle?” It’s a brilliantly scathing line but again, it’s immediately followed by indications of detachment, and perhaps all-out reclusiveness, when she states: “swallowed waist-deep in the core of the forest, arboreal feast, let it finish me please.”

On “I’m From Nowhere,” Case continues to derive loneliness from struggling against gender stereotypes as well as from the practical side effects of living a habitually itinerant lifestyle (another reoccurring theme on the album). When she sings “I was surprised, when you called me a lady, cause I’m still not sure that’s what I wanna be,” she’s rejecting the traditional expectation that women act “lady-like” but she then spins it into a joke about how she “remembers the 80’s” and “its puffy sleeves” and she’d “gladly wear the pants into the next century.” It’s a slightly more modest take on the issue, as she ends up at the pensive realization that her life choices have also contributed to her feeling as if she’s “from nowhere.”


Elsewhere on the album, Case re-visits some familiar territory. “Bracing for Sunday” is basically a blueprint for anyone looking to write a Neko Case ballad-noir (“I only ever held one love, her name was Marianne, she died having a child by her brother, he died because I murdered him.”) Neko also covers the Nico song, “Afraid,” and somewhere in a distant universe, two planets collide. It’s a melody that was practically made for Case to sing and its refrain of “you are beautiful and you are alone” is perfectly apt in the context of the rest of the album. “Calling Cards,” “Local Girl” and “City Swan” all keep up the theme of emotional and physical distance, and are all so well-written it’s easy to begin taking Case’s songwriting skills for granted by the end of the album.

The penultimate song on The Worse Things Get is “Where Did I Leave that Fire,” which was featured in the stunning “trailer” for the album released earlier this summer. The track begins with what sounds like a submarine attempting to use radar, (which, is odd, as you would think that underwater would be one of the last places one might find that fire). These detailed production elements, however, build suspense and give the record an underlying sense of menace as if it were recorded in the aftermath of some mysterious disappearance. (Listen also to the vague space-radio transmission sounds between the two choruses on “Wild Creatures.”)

The “fire” here seems to be a reference to a sort of inner strength or spirit and the song ends with the absurdly whimsical set of lines: “I do believe we have a fire lady, you can pick it up if you come down with ID.” With fire presumably re-obtained, Case then ends the album on an upbeat note with “Ragtime,” a celebratory track where Case seems to have found peace with her sense of identity: “I’ll reveal myself invincible soon, I am one and the same, I am useful and strange.”


One of the most memorable tracks on the album though might be “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” an entirely a cappella song telling the story of Case witnessing a young child being sworn at and neglected by their mother. The song is meant to serve as a reminder to the child that this event, which they might not even remember, actually happened and will probably end up shaping the person they become. She sings, “you’ll hear yourself complain, but don’t you ever shut up, please kid, have your say, cause I still love you, even if I never see you again.”

The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You is a lovely-sounding mouthful of poetry but it also might be a somewhat logical statement.

I was an English major in college but I had to take at least one “math-type” credit to complete my degree.  I chose a “logic” class because it seemed to be the least “mathy” of all of the math class options. I don’t remember much from that class (which always reminds me of Patton Oswalt’s “Physics for Poets” bit) but I do recall something called the “transitive law.” It’s the one that says: if A = B, and B = C, then A = C. So if “The Worse Things Get” = A, and “The Harder I Fight” = B, and “The More I Love You” = C, then, according to the transitive law of album titles, what Case really might be saying here is: “The Worse Things Get… The More I Love You.”

Bad things happen sometimes, kid. Your mom might swear at you and neglect you, you might struggle against the inequality inherent in the system, you will get lonely, your parents will die. But the worse these things get (the harder she’ll fight, the harder she’ll fight) the more Neko Case will love you.

The last couple of weeks, Mac has posted about the new singles from Neko Case and Okkervil River, wherein he joked that I might have fainted upon hearing that both acts were releasing new albums on September 3. He was actually, probably, understating my reaction. Neko Case and Will Sheff are two of the most talented, and completely underrated, songwriters working in music today and finding out that we’d be getting an album’s worth of new material from both of them, on the precipice of "my favorite season," is some of the best news I’ve received in a year already fraught with good news re: music.

Okkervil River is, without a doubt, my “favorite” band. I could write for days about Sheff’s poetic lyricism, the over-arching thematic concepts of their albums, their classic folk-rock melodicism, and a band, that despite featuring a rotating cast of Austin-based musicians, is consistently flawless. Case (who some might know as a perennial contributor to the New Pornographers, but who you all should also know as a brilliant solo artist in her own right, as well as a highly enjoyable Twitter-follow) is gifted not only with a heart-stopping voice but an incredible talent for telling dark, country-noir stories from a variety of perspectives.

These new songs from Case and Sheff exhibit what they do so well in their capacity as songwriters. Both songs happen to rip gender stereotypes up by the roots and place their narrators in positions that are refreshing and unexpected.


On “Man,” Case, who is, assuredly, a beautiful 42-year-old woman, sings of being a “man” in no uncertain terms. She immediately lets the listener know what type of “man” she’s referring to here. This isn’t an “identify crisis.” She’s talking about all of the stereotypes and trappings that go along with being “the man” in any particular situation, where “man” refers not just to actual, sexual “gender,” but a status. A position of power and confidence that could potentially be adopted by a human born with female parts just as easily as the more traditional masculine figure.

On her last album, Case did a terrific job of telling stories from a number of points of view, between an “animal,” a “tornado” and a “man eater,” proving that existing in a particular condition shouldn’t necessarily limit a songwriter to writing from a particular perspective. The cross-dressing photo that accompanies the song on the official video feed sets the mood for the point of view here. We’re talking about the “man’s man,” fit with cowboy hat, mustache and lighter. This isn’t the “runt of the litter.”  There’s no “proxy” here. You’ll deal with her (or “him”) directly.

In a world where English pronouns like “him” and “her” are (slowly) becoming increasingly interchangeable and meaningless, it’s a smart and straight-forward piece of assertiveness where you can almost see the “men” in the room struggling to argue: “but you’re not… but… you… but…” Case’s assumption of the persona seems to be equal parts mocking  (“a woman’s heart, is the watermark, by which I measure everything”) and empowering (“you didn’t know what a man was, until I showed you.”)

This boldly adopted point-of-view does an affecting job of describing the conflicts that arise when a “woman” attempts to assert herself in the realm of “men” (and, like writing, and comedy, and other forms of entertainment, the music industry is still generally a predominantly male-centric world where women are marginalized as being “cute” or as novelty acts.)

You'll be able to find this song on Case's new album, which is brilliantly titled "The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You."

On Okkervil River’s newest song, “It Was My Season,” Will Sheff takes a much more subtle approach to exploring an atypical songwriting perspective.


Of note is the fact that Sheff has revealed that Okkervil’s new album, The Silver Gymnasium, will “take place in 1986 in a small town in New Hampshire.” (If you’re a geek for conceptual, literary folk-rock, that alone should be enough to make your day.)

The song tells a fairly straightforward story about a couple struggling through a not-entirely-identifiable adversity. A few things are clear though: we’re definitely in the 80’s (see: “can you hear his VCR weeping?” and “below the Atari, well I could feel your heart was just going.”) and some sort of clandestine, amorous situation is afoot (see: “our parents were freaking” and “what was I thinking?” and “we’ll meet on the weekend, your dad won’t be home.”)

The first person in the song seems to be romantically involved with someone of potentially lesser social stature (“come out of your trailer, and into the dark!”) who has a stern father with a military background (“they crossed his wires completely, when they made him fire that gun.”) There also seem to be some “stakes” here if the couple is eventually found out; possibly that they’ll be separated from each other if they’re not careful (“if they take me out of school, you out of town.”) It’s in the last lines of the song though where the narrative is suddenly flipped on its head and the listener is forced to re-visit everything they've just heard.

“They say that I’ll go to college, and you will stay home, and watch while I’m leaving, and the cold will just creep in… oh, Jason, I know.”

The final line of the song isn't placed in quotes (as Sheff is known to do when switching perspectives mid-song), which would lead one to believe that it’s the narrator who is lamentably singing to “Jason” before the song abruptly ends. This likely leads us to one of two conclusions: that the narrator is female, or the narrator is a gay male. Either way, it’s an incredibly fun twist on which to end the song, which would have been perfectly enjoyable even without a last-second revelation about the identity of the narrator.

Sheff has certainly sung from the perspective of females in the past, in part, on “Hanging From a Hit,” and in full, on “(Shannon Wilsey on the) Starry Stairs” and “On Tour With Zykos.” If this is the case for “It Was Our Season,” then Sheff continues to be one of the few songwriters that seem secure, or simply imaginative, enough to write songs as a male from a female perspective. It’s possible that hearing the song in the context of the full album may reveal the complete story. However, at this point, I’m actually leaning toward the second theory of a gay male narrator, which makes things even more interesting.

There certainly seems to be a sense of urgency between the narrator and “Jason.” It could just be because they’re young and naïve but it seems to be something even more than that: the secretive nature of the relationship, the high stakes, the vague sense of regret upon the couple going their separate ways toward the end of the story. It’s the second-to-last section of the song that really supports this interpretation for me though. While the band harmonizes a repeated set of lines, Sheff, as the narrator, begins singing of “looking back on it now” and remembering “how mixed up he got,” before they “got him sorted out.” He then states that “it’s fading out” and he “hardly thinks about it now” before landing on the final piano-driven set of lyrics in which he tells Jason that he “knows.”

We know that this is the lead-off track on The Silver Gymnasium, and without more, it’s pretty difficult to guess where this is all going. At the moment, however, it certainly seems like it might be going in the direction of a man (or woman) who was once in love with a man, and has seemingly moved on from that part of their life for reasons unknown.

I know that it's the first day of summer, and I'm all for enjoying it. But I also kind of can't wait for September to get here.