Neko Case

Neko Case was born to parents with the Ukrainian ancestry in Alexandria, Virginia. When she was a little girl, her family used to travel from place to place often and it was Tacoma, Washington, where they spent the time enough for Neko to call it her native town. At fifteen, the girl left her parents to live alone and at the age of eighteen she first tried her skills behind the drum kit playing for several punk rock bands. She started singing in 1994 after joining the Maow trio. In 1998, Case graduated from the University of Art and Design in Vancouver. This made her student visa no longer valid. However, by that time she had already opened her talent fully to the Canadian audience and received six nominations to the prestigious awards of British Columbia Country Music Association, and Georgia Straight. In 1997, Case recorded her debut solo album, The Virginian. This CD would have become just another top quality country release if it was not for the singer’s amazing voice that made this album a true revelation. The follow-up long player, Furnace Room Lullaby (2000), harvested a multitude of praiseful reviews including those from the influential The New York Times, GQ, Esquire, Interview, People, and Time periodicals.

After such an impressive start, Case sank deeply into the concert activity arranging her solo tours and performing as a supporting act for celebrated musicians like Nick Cave and Bad Seeds. Besides, the music career of a young artist was not limited by her solo project. Thus, she joined her efforts with Carolyn Mark to perform country music as The Corn Sisters duet. Neko also became a member of The New Pornographers, a pop-rock group to rise to prominence. Between the tightly scheduled gigs and fuss around the relocation to Chicago, Case squeezed the time to escape to the studio. In the early 2002, she released a fresh album called Blacklisted. The performer stated that she wanted to produce an experimental work; and this attempted seemed to achieve good results. For the first time in her career, Neko wrote the largest part of the material and played a number of instruments including guitars, piano and percussion. The album appeared to convey a profound feeling of home sickness and nostalgia, which made it even better.

In 2004, Neko Case signed up a contract with Anti Records to release a concert album that was entitled The Tigers Have Spoken, a collection of fragments of joint performances with the Canadian outfit The Sadies. Following that, the singer once again returned to the studio to work on the subsequent CD. This forced her to leave The New Pornographers for a while. The new effort, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, saw the light of day in 2006 and did quite well in the Billboard charts reaching the fifty sixth position and enlarging the singer’s audience. In a year, Neko Case added to her discography Live from Austin, TX. After recording her vocal parts for The New Pornographers album, Challengers, she launched the preparation of her own new long player. It was recorded in Tucson, Brooklyn, Toronto and even at the singer’s own farm in Vermont. The outcome of this massive labor became the album under the title Middle Cyclone, released in March 2009.