Neko Case and Nora O'Connor - SOLD OUT

Neko Case

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Five years have passed since Case’s last solo project, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. In the interim, she sang on Whiteout Conditions, the 2017 release from longtime bandmates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs on the case/lang/veirs project.

Recording that record was a revelation, from Veirs’ innovative guitar tunings to Lang’s skills in studio. “I learned so much experiencing the work ethic of those two,” Case says. She considers Lang “probably the most natural producer I’ve ever seen. Watching her work was awe-inspiring.”

She felt lucky to have worked with the people she had encountered across her career—Darryl Neudorf, Tucker Martine, Craig Schumacher, and Chris Schultz among them—who encouraged her to expand her own skills in the studio. But she had also gotten fed up with a world in which women’s accomplishments seemed to vanish from public memory. “The George Martins and Quincy Joneses of the recording pantheon deserve every drop of praise and every project they have received,” Case says. “But we can’t keep telling the same stories over and over. We need more stories, more inspiration, more flavors.”

She set to work on her next record looking for not just new stories but also new sounds. This time, she wanted to put herself in a setting far away from everything she knew. She recalled Björn Yttling’s skill with Lykke Li, Camera Obscura, and his own band, Peter Bjorn and John. “I’ve worked with the same people so long, I never had to step outside my comfort zone,” Case says. “In this instance, I chose to.”

But in the middle of her stint in Stockholm, with the finish line in sight, she received a surreal 3am call telling her that her house was burning and would likely be completely destroyed. She felt panicked and helpless.

The fire had started in the barn, where she kept an assortment of belongings, from artwork to old pianos. \ After the flames jumped to the house, her home was engulfed, too. 

A few hours later, she went into a studio in Stockholm and laid down the vocals for “Bad Luck,” singing the lines she had written long before she realized they would land on her. 

She was hell-bent on not losing sight of the goal, reminding herself there was still beauty in the world and in the process of making music. 

She decided to climb inside her role as producer and wield it more directly. It just meant owning what she was already doing.

The record that came out of this reckoning with lost stories delivers both familiar Neko Case and something different. Death, extinction, exploitation, tides, animals, and adoration all blend recognizably. Case’s trademark narrative gaps, just large enough for listeners to enter each song, likewise remain. As with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone, Hell-On spins away from conventions of story, slipping into real life, with its fierce mess and blind catastrophes. 

“I’m writing fairy tales, and I hear my life story in them, but they’re not about me,” Case says. “I still can’t figure out how to describe it. But I think that’s why we make music or write things. You’ve got to invent a new language.”

There are differences, too. The opening kalimba notes of the first track, “Hell On,” lead into a waltz of deep forces, irresistible as gravity, that refuse to be leashed or controlled (“You’ll not be my master / you’re barely my guest”). This tornado might not love you.

Case planned this record with a commitment to big choruses and a goal of making them even bigger. The results appear in the anthemic “Last Lion of Albion,” a requiem for every landscape and iconic creature (“last tiger of Tasmania / the last she-wolf to suckle Rome”) erased through massacre and marketing. Rounding out the opening trilogy of false possession is “Halls of Sarah,” a song for unwilling muses tormented by poets who love women “as lions love Christians.” 

“Bad Luck,” recorded from the ground up in Stockholm, opens at a gallop and never breaks stride. A song always poses the challenge of when to move away from the groove and how to get back to it. But Yttling pointed out to Case that sometimes the whole song should be the hook—that there’s no shame in exploiting the catchiest part. That became the strategy for bringing “Bad Luck” to life. Longtime collaborators Kelly Hogan and Nora O’Connor came up with backing vocals that build a giddy, knowing call and response into the song. 

The record was born at the hands of some three dozen performers in all, from k.d. Lang, Laura Veirs, Beth Ditto, and Robert Forster on backing vocals, to Joey Burns of Calexico and Doug Gillard of Guided by Voices on guitars, and Barbara Gruska and Matt Chamberlain on drums. The sidelong perspective is part of the known Neko galaxy, but the production is more expansive and edgier, moving into new universes. These are songs that can swallow you.

When Case returned to the US and walked through the ruins of her home, the fire that had blazed after these songs were written became part of the record. For the cover, she made a warrior’s helmet out of cigarettes. Interior and exterior shots of her incinerated house appear on the gatefold and booklet. And a tiny pop-open charred Brothers-Grimm cottage serves as the set for the video of “Bad Luck.” 

It was as if nature invented a landscape for Hell-On after the fact: a melted ladder, seared insulation dangling in ribbons, the internal organs of pianos. She thought it should all be included in solidarity with those who had lost so much in the past year.
And as for those fairy tales she’s writing and the history she’s remembering: “We need them now more than ever. We need stories from all sectors. Stories without endings. Stories with multiple endings. Stories that don’t end happily, cautionary tales, everything. We don’t need Disneyfied stories anymore.” 

A force of nature, an act of a mercurial, forgotten god, Hell-On is a record sealed by fire, filled with love and rage and dangers that might lay waste to everything at any moment. So if you wake up dazed in a smoking landscape, walking through the detritus of your own lost civilization with the smell of ash in your hair, your favorite sweater gone and a new song in your head, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Nora O’Connor

Nora O’Connor has been an in-demand backup singer/multi-instrumentalist for decades, performing around the world with Iron and Wine, Andrew Bird, Robbie Fulks, Mavis Staples, etc. The constraints wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic limited her to touring the backyards of her hometown alone and reminded her that she can hold her own guitar and sing the hell out of anything—-and she can write a song, too. With time to spare at home, she began recording a series of new home demos that slowly became her third solo album. 

My Heart is Nora O’Connor’s long overdue return to center stage after touring and recording with The Decemberists and Neko Case—-among many others. She was joined in the studio by three of her bandmates from Chicago vocal supergroup, the Flat Five: Casey McDonough supplying vocals, bass and acoustic guitar; Scott Ligon on organ, drums, percussion, piano, Wurlizter and guitars (Casey and Scott are also current members of NRBQ); Alex Hall providing drums, percussion, piano, Wurlitzer, mellotron, vibes, and vocals. Steve Dawson also pitched in on guitars, Wurlitzers, harmonium, along with Robbie Gjersoe on dobro, electric guitar and Jon Rouhouse who contributed pedal steel.

O’Connor isn’t new to working solo. She released Cerulean Blue in 1996 and Til the Dawn in 2004 before she carved out a livelihood making other people’s songs sound better. She has no intention of stopping—-in fact, 2021 found her back out on the road with Neko Case and The New Pornographers. But her recent solo shows increased her confidence and stretched her ambition, moving her to experiment with her voice, to play with new sounds and textures, and to envision a next chapter in her long and dazzling career; one where she takes her rightful seat at the table of the luminaries that she has supported for all these years.