Neko Case connects with her audience on an uncommonly deep and meaningful level. Her songs linger in your head, your heart and soul long after she’s left the stage or the record has stopped spinning. For Case, the beauty of making music, of creating, is that it remains a mysterious, confounding and, occasionally, contradictory process. “ I’ve said in interviews that I don't like writing love songs, that I can't write them," she recalls. "Of course, as soon as I said that, I ended up writing a bunch of love songs." Neko Case's "love songs" are not the typical boy- meets-girl variety. "The songs are about the need for love -- no matter how cool you think you are. What other people might call ‘love songs' I think of as homages. They can be to a person, a region, a feeling.” Case's evolution as a writer is, at times, almost overwhelming. The modest lyrical aims of her debut LP - - released just over a decade ago - - have been continually outstripped with each successive effort, and she continues that trend in spectacular fashion on her most recent album, last year’s Middle Cyclone.
