The Jump

Shirley:

The Jump is a podcast where I, Shirley Ann Manson, sit down with musicians and talk about the one song that changed everything.

Shirley:

Over the course of two decades, and far too many albums to count, Neko Case has found critical and commercial success as a solo artist and as a member of the band and musical collective, The New Pornographers. To get to talk to this extraordinary fellow redhead about her prolific career as an acclaimed songwriter and performer was a most welcome, fascinating experience for me. Being the absolutely lovely human being that she is, Neko Case talked to me for a whole blissful hour about the mystical sounding song, The Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, from her 2006 album of the same name.

Shirley:

I'm Shirley Manson, and this is The Jump.

Shirley:

Listen fellow redheads, we're sparse on the ground, so first of all my condolences and my congratulations.

Neko:

I'm not a real redhead though. My hair is the color of like a fence post in the Old West, like it's neither gray nor brown, it's kind of like the absence of color. It's like a black hole, but it's dark enough that like my skin color and my body and facial hair made it look like I was always wearing a wig. So I dyed my hair red when I was, like, 16, and I was like, oh my God, that looks like it's supposed to be my actual hair color.

Shirley:

Yeah, I think your-

Neko:

And I never looked back.

Shirley:

... your heart is of a redhead, I can tell.

Shirley:

So listen, I don't want to keep you too long because I know this is the first night of your tour, right?

Neko:

Yeah. I've done that before though, it's okay.

Shirley:

Congratulations though, that's fantastic.

Neko:

I'm stoked to be here. Thank you.

Shirley:

Are you excited?

Neko:

Yes. Yesterday I was picking ticks off of horses, and today I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia making rocks, so it's an exciting life.

Shirley:

You still enjoy it, like it's still thrilling to you, or-

Neko:

Oh yeah, and I love my band very much, so being around them is really ... I don't know, I feel like I'm back in the real world, and it has like a real recharging effect. At home does that too, but you need balance. Like I'm either out in the country by myself kind of rocking back and forth in my underwear going, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, after a while, or here with other people having to respond and give and eat food with them and belly laugh, so you got to get both.

Shirley:

Sure. When you go home do you feel you're cocooning, and then you get out and you're your best self, your version of yourself you're supposed to be? Or what's that relationship?

Neko:

Sometimes I think it would do me good to see the change of a season at home, just once, for the first time in a really long time, but then again at the same time being on the road with my band mates and seeing the audience every night has been ... it's really great. I mean, this is my job, and I chose it over having a family or having a super stable, in-one-place life. And I realized I chose it at the time, but I also didn't realize ... it, just, was kind of happening, so I don't regret that at all.

Shirley:

When did you choose to be a musician?

Neko:

Well, I wanted to be one really bad since I was probably about 15, but it was one of those things where I was poor and a girl and I didn't really have any parents, and so I didn't really know that that was something I could do. I was just super obsessed with music, but if I look back, like as a 15-year-old, I'm like, oh yeah, that's what that person wanted more than anything in the world, even though they didn't know that that's what they wanted.

Shirley:

Yeah. And where did you hear music for the first time?

Neko:

I don't know if it was my parents or my grandparents, but it was basically always happening. There was always music on in the house, so it was just something I kind of took for granted. And looking back now I'm like, oh, they had good taste.

Shirley:

What were they listening to?

Neko:

Well, my parents listened to mostly rock music, and my grandparents listened to country music, but Heart was like the big one for me.

Shirley:

Oh, wow.

Neko:

Heart was my favorite band, and pretty much still are. And we were from the Pacific Northwest, which is, they're from there too, and we were in close proximity to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada because we lived really close to the border, and they were happening there in a really big way and they were charting at the time. This was like late '70s. Because back then there was like four television stations and maybe 20 radio stations, and what we got antenna-wise was mostly Canadian because we lived so far north, so I thought I was Canadian for a long time. And I remember hearing Buffy Sainte-Marie on the CBC, and she was a huge deal to me too.

Shirley:

Incredible.

Neko:

And then of course Fleetwood Mac and Queen was huge, but then I also really liked Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn and ... I didn't really separate genres in my mind, it was more like our house or grandparents' house, those were the genres.

Shirley:

Oh.

Shirley:

Did you ever in your wildest imaginings think that you would be put in the same category or have been described as sounding like some of your heroes, like Loretta Lynn and some of these great country voices? Did you ever ... I mean, when that happened, did that not blow your mind?

Neko:

Yeah. When it's happening to you and it's something you're really into it's almost like there's a weird blind spot where you can't see it or you can't feel it, it's almost like this weird catch-22. I remember asking this country music legend once, I was like, gosh you worked your whole life for this and you're in the Country Music Hall of Fame, what is that like? And he was like, I can't really describe that, I sometimes still think I should have remained a postman for the United States Army. He's like, I was really good at that. And so there's this weird dichotomy where like you cannot see the good things happening directly to you if they're happening directly to you, you kind of have to-

Shirley:

Is it denial, or a refusal to accept that you can possibly be as great as all these great artists?

Neko:

Well, my family were really not into vanity in a way that was kind of over the top. Nobody even talked about themselves, like, about general things in their lives because they thought that was too vain. They were really into being humble I guess is what you'd call it-

Shirley:

Sure.

Neko:

... but I didn't know that my grandmother was in a harmony singing band until I'd put out like my second or third record. And I was like, why would you think that you shouldn't tell me that? And she was like, well, I don't know, it just never came up.

Shirley:

Wow.

Neko:

They were just so strange about those things, so …

Shirley:

So what we're trying to do on this show is talk to people who have these extraordinary careers and talk about a moment in their lives where they feel that something changed for them and they found their real, sort of authentic voice as an artist. And I'm convinced that you have probably had many of these points in your career, but you've chosen the title song from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, which I find really surprising. It was not what I expected at all for you to pick.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Shirley:

First of all, where were you when you wrote this song?

Neko:

Well, I was driving back from visiting my grandmother, who I was just talking about, in northwestern Washington state, just below the Canadian border, and we were on tour. And I remember just ... we had a day off somewhere, so I, we were near where my grandmother lived, so I took the afternoon to go visit her.

Neko:

I think I had figured out what my sound was probably earlier, but this particular thing I felt very present for, in a way that I remember. But in this song the person who really made me love music is the person I was writing about. And you know how you kind of have a dictionary in your mind, it's like a picture dictionary, like wherever you grow up or where you're from. Like if I were to have a picture in my mind for tree it would be like a Douglas fir tree, those were the trees that were everywhere when I was a little kid. So every single thing in that song is my first picture dictionary thing, which is really heavy to a person. The images are very heartbreaking, but also very comforting at the same time. And I always mourn things before they happen, and I wrote the song kind of about my grandmother dying before she died.

Neko:

But I felt it so hard that day when I was going back to the tour from visiting her, and it really felt weird to be alone driving through this part of the world that I've driven through 700 million times. And I was all by myself and I had to pull over and cry about it and write some things down and ... I think I'm just trying to say, what do I do with this grief? It hasn't even happened yet. Is this what being clairvoyant is? What is this when you grieve things before they happen? Because that's always what I do, but it doesn't mean I can change anything or stop anything or ... It's just something I do.

Shirley:

Do you do it to prepare yourself do you think?

Neko:

I guess so, because when my grandmother actually passed away I wasn't sad because she was sick for a long time and she hated it, so when she passed away like there weren't any questions between us. You know, she was my person. She was my family that when she passed away I didn't wonder if she loved me, there was no dangling problems that I never had the answer to. There was, like, a lightness that happened. It felt a lot better.

Shirley:

So were the words finished before you started working on the music?

Neko:

They were pretty much finished before I started working on it, and then of course some things changed. Not much, like not in meaning, just in cadence. Like just to fit a melody better, a word here or there, but-

Shirley:

Sure, but the words were written in the car on your way home?

Neko:

Most of them in the car, yeah. And then I worked on it for a while afterward. And there were so many loose ends that needed to be connected in a way that seemed, not seamless, but at least elegant, which is a word I hesitate to use. But-

Shirley:

When I look at the lyrics there's a quote, "It's not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder when the death of your civilization precedes you," and these are in quote marks.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Neko:

I always wanted to write things that weren't what people expected. I wanted them to be more like stories, not necessarily verse, chorus, verse, chorus, but a little more linear and a little more fairytale-like.

Neko:

There's a character in Russian folklore called the Fox Confessor, who is a psychopomp, which is a creature in a story who leads the main character to a quest or a path to understanding something.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Neko:

I didn't know what a psychopomp was when I wrote the song, but it's just that. It's always a non-human ... you know like Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when they meet the faun when they go through the wardrobe?

Shirley:

Yes. Yup.

Neko:

Kind of like that character.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Neko:

I think that he knows the answers to everything, but he'll kind of point to different paths, and he shows up in a bunch of them, but I borrowed him for this particular thing. I always notice the animals and the nature of wherever I am, and I take them very seriously. And I don't think of myself as outside them or better than them or beneath them, I just feel like we're all sympathetic cells to each other.

Shirley:

How do you feel now when you read the lyrics of this song or perform it, do you ... like what's your experience?

Neko:

Well, this particular song sometimes I get kind of choked up, which I don't often do. Usually the choking up or the big feelings are happening when I'm writing the songs, but playing them they become a whole new thing, like when you make a record you kind of let that go and you let that become what other people want it to be.

Shirley:

Now you co-produced this track, right?

Neko:

Yeah.

Shirley:

So how did that work? I mean, you wrote the song, you took it to, you said ... was it band practice, or …

Neko:

No. Paul Rigby and I made a demo of it and it's like, this is how this is going. I think it finally became itself when Howe Gelb came in and played just some crazy guitar notes on it.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Neko:

I didn't want it to be too pretty, like it's not a pretty song, and-

Shirley:

You failed. It is pretty.

Neko:

... but it's still melodic. And he came in and put very dark flavors in there, and I'm like, that's more what it's like.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Neko:

Sometimes the art of producing is editing-

Shirley:

Yeah, of course, yeah.

Neko:

... where you just, you go down every rabbit hole, but then you realize, okay, three out of five of those rabbit holes are appropriate for this song and do something in serve of the song, whereas those other two rabbit holes are just ... I don't know what they are, but they're not working, so …

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Shirley:

Is your career or sort of you connecting with an audience, connecting with fans, creating a band, has that been your form of self-care, like your sort of like you're creating a family bond?

Neko:

Yeah, absolutely. And I have ... I didn't get a real boyfriend until I was 45 years old, and for a while I was like, aw, it's probably not going to happen for you, you're probably not going to have a partner, and then finally I found somebody. But I was okay with not finding somebody after a whole lot of feeling sad about not finding somebody. But I always did have the family of my band mates, like it always was the very grounding part of my life, and that is definitely the family I chose over having my own child by myself. And now my boyfriend has a daughter, so she's my daughter too, and so I always think about my stepdad because I think I was raised to be a stepdad, I wasn't raised to be a mom. And I'm like, I feel so good about that. I'm excited, and I feel like I'm a pretty good stepdad.

Shirley:

I bet you are. I love that.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Shirley:

I can't thank you enough for today, and I wish your tour the most blessed good health and happiness and joy. I'm going to find you one of these days and I'm going to force you to have a cup of tea with me.

Neko:

Let's do it.

Shirley:

All right, lots of love. Thank you.

Neko:

Pleasure. Thank you, you too. Bye-bye.

Shirley:

Bye.

Neko:

Take care.

• MUSIC - ​FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD (NEKO CASE) *​

Shirley:

The Jump is an original series from Mailchimp, and I'm your host, Shirley Manson. It's produced in partnership with Little Everywhere, executive produced by Dann Gallucci, Jane Marie, and Hrishikesh Hirway. Original music composed by Hrishikesh Hirway. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.