Neko Case defies genres as she expands into new ventures

Mar. 22—Neko Case is juggling a lot of projects, many of which are in a delicate stage of completion. And a few weeks ago, on the day she talks with Pasatiempo, she's headed into the studio to lay down lead vocals for her upcoming solo album for the first time since her 2018 release, Hell-On.

She doesn't know when the album will come out, and she's also working on a musical and a book project that she can't yet talk about.

But Case, who possesses a spine-tingling contralto voice, doesn't have to say much to pack the house. She sold out the Lensic Performing Arts Center months ahead of her March 30 show, but she's clear about one thing: She always loves to play Santa Fe.

"There are places that are lovely to go to and places we do well in," she says. "That's one of the great things about Santa Fe. And who doesn't want to go to Santa Fe?"

The friendly and funny Case will hit New Mexico in between stops in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Dallas, both fitting destinations given that her professional life began with a love of country music. She left home as a teenager in Tacoma, Washington, and explored her musical dreams as a punk rock drummer; she later attended Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada.

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Neko Case

7:30 p.m. March 30 (call for ticket information)

Lensic Performing Arts Center

211 W. San Francisco Street

505-988-1234; lensic.org

Despite her talents, she says she wasn't a Don Henley-type of singing drummer.

"I didn't start out that way. I would kind of scream-sing," she says of her tenure in punk rock bands in the Pacific Northwest. "I didn't get a microphone until my second band, I don't think."

Case says she didn't consider herself a musician at that point. She was making music and playing in bands. She was even writing songs and met lifelong friends — like Carl Newman, her future bandmate in the New Pornographers — very early on. But if you ask Case, her confidence in her artistry was still a long way from awakening.

"I didn't realize that being a musician was my job. It took me way longer to come to that conclusion than it should have," she says. "I didn't start calling myself a musician until I was in my 30s and had to put it on my tax forms. And then I said, 'Well, I guess it's official now.'"

In the beginning, she says, her creativity had an urgency. She had these impulses and wanted to get them out. She wanted to get good at performing. Her debut solo album, The Virginian, was released in 1997 while she was still in college, and Newman is one of the musicians credited as "Her Boyfriends."

On that album, she plays one track, "Bowling Green," popularized by the Everly Brothers, and another track called "Honky Tonk Hiccups."

She was also recording her parts for the New Pornographers first release, Mass Romantic, around that time, and her solo work would later blur the boundaries between genres. Case has said that the title track of her second album, Furnace Room Lullaby, was her attempt at writing a Louvin Brothers (Americana bluegrass duo from the 1950s) song, and notes that today, she still feels like a country artist.

"I didn't like the term alt country. I was like, 'That sounds like a website for a hat fetish,'" she says of early labels given to her music. "I felt like it was country music, and I still do. People don't think of country music outside of classic country or modern country. They don't realize that country music, like every other genre, can evolve and be other things and sound different."

Case's playfully dark sense of humor comes through on "Margaret vs. Pauline," a track from her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.

Two girls ride the blue line

Two girls walk down the same street

One left her sweater sittin' on the train

And the other lost three fingers at the cannery

Case's star began to rise in 2000 just ahead of the New Pornographers, her Canadian rock super-group, but she says that was due to her solo album being released just before Mass Romantic.

"I don't know that there are a lot of 26-year-olds who have a concept for what it's going to be like when you're in your 50s," she says when asked if she ever could've imagined still making music with the New Pornographers decades later. "I don't know that there are a lot of people who sit around thinking about that, like, 'That's going to be sweet.' But it is pretty sweet."

It's so sweet, in fact, that Case can pick and choose when she wants to work on new projects. She was part of Continue as a Guest, the New Pornographers latest release, but she didn't tour with the band because she was busy with other work.

She says it's been that way since her earliest days with the band.

"My record came out before, but it wasn't like a race. We didn't think about music that way," she says. "It was a very small population of people in a very large country. If you wanted to have a bass player in your band, you were going to have to deal with the fact that they were also in two or three other bands. It was a very communal potluck way of doing things. And it was really healthy. It wasn't a competitive thing. It was more like a barn-raising thing."

Case also released case/lang/veirs in 2016 with fellow singer-songwriters k.d. lang and Laura Veirs. She says she hangs out with lang and Veirs and they love working with each other, but a follow-up is still to be determined.

As she's followed her muse, Case has moved all over the continent. She left the Pacific Northwest to live in Chicago for a few years. Then she moved to Arizona, where she recorded several albums, and she moved to Vermont, where she lives today.

"I missed mountains," she says. "I lived in Vermont as a kid and always wanted to go back."

Case revealed that she's working on a musical, something she never expected to do, and that it's an "all-consuming beast" of a project. She looks forward to sharing more in the near future. The same is true of her book; she says she's not sure what it might become.

"I don't know the exact shape of it yet," she says. "The layers of the cake are made, but we have to frost the cake. It tastes good so far. But now it's about presentation, like it was The Great British Bake Off or something."

Confidence took a long time to build, Case says, but now she has seven solo albums and a career-spanning retrospective, Wild Creatures, to tour behind. She has more than her share of crowd-favorite songs to choose from for a set list on any given night, and finally earned her confidence as a songwriter as recently as a couple of years ago.

"It was probably getting into my 50s," she says. "You kind of stop giving a shit in a way. Not in a bad way, like you don't care about anything. But you're free to care about what you really care about."