Straight.com Case strips it down: an interview with Ms. Case on her career and recent accolades. It’s interesting that she notes that Blacklisted is the record she picks as her first mature piece – while I personally adore everything she’s done, the songs on Furnace Room Lullaby are the ones I respond to most strongly.
The Tigers Have Spoken was the one that got to me. All of her other work is still catching up. I haven’t given the rest of it the close listen that it deserves. I’m still trying to figure out how I learned of all of these different artists (musical and visual) who have a direct link to Jon Langford. At this point Jon Langford is such a recurring figure in things that I like that I sometimes think I spend a lot of time hanging out with the guy. Although I haven’t realized it yet. A similar figure from a generation earlier is Mick Farren. I was aware of disturbances caused by Farren for years before I found out that there was one person behind all of them. I’d like it if Farren and Langford became pop icons like WS Burroughs. All this by way of saying that I became aware of Neko Case because of the Jon L connection.
PS, Neko Case also weirds me out because she looks quite a bit like my mom when Mom was in her twenties. I have all sorts of profound and preverbal memories of this Neko Case look a like.