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Neko Case Survived It All
The songwriter’s unusual tell-all skips the gossip, revealing a life in music as the solution, not the plot.
Left completely alone at the small house in Keller for 12 hours each day, with the nearest neighbor a mile away, she wanders around the surrounding terrain: forests of tall grass, a swimming hole lined with potato-sized stones, bats and birds that “dip into the river to drink like they were stitching the water to the sky.” If Case’s descriptions of that place’s insects and animals are characteristically lush — she’s a loving observer of nature — so is the way she writes about her profound loneliness. Once she’s wrenched her way through childhood and into Tacoma’s punk scene, making music becomes “a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside my body … a new kind of love that hit me like a lightning bolt from the sky.” That may be a little overwrought, but it’s hard not to get onboard after witnessing the dreary trudge of her early life. A major record label scouts her, then retreats; an extended road trip in Canada with an early bandmate of hers, Carolyn Mark, is a way to “forget all the sad husks of myself I’d left scattered behind me.” Here, the book begins to sound more like a typical music memoir, with the usual stream of shout-outs to collaborators, musings about what it’s like to tour, and bursts of drama, like an incident that led prim country-music institution the Grand Ole Opry to ban her for life.
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