Neko Case Survived It All

In 1982, a series of women’s and girls’ bodies started to appear in the fields near Route 99 in Washington. The victims, at least 49 in all, were mainly sex workers and runaways living on the margins. Trained to harass and arrest the kind of people ending up in shallow graves across King County, the police officers who might have solved the mystery of the U.S.’s second-most prolific serial killer failed to connect the dots. It wasn’t until 2001 that an arrest was made; prior to then, the murderer was like a figment of the imagination.

And, specifically, a figment of Neko Case’s imagination. In her memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, the Green River Killer is a nagging presence: on local TV news, in her grade-school nightmares, in a brush with psychosis that convinces her she’s being stalked by someone like him. His young prey, she writes, “were like dry sticks being fed into a savage furnace forever.” Barely parented and prone to aimless, hours-long walks under the grayed-out Pacific Northwestern sky, Case wouldn’t have been an unlikely target. It’s not the first time she has written about her hometown killer. In 2002’s “Deep Red Bells,” she sang about a handprint on a driver’s-side door that “tastes like being poor and small / And Popsicles in summer.” It’s a typically cryptic song from Case. In her book, she’s making the connection clear. Being poor and small — she knows that taste.

An early aughts indie breakout who matured into a steadily working singer-songwriter, Case treats her distinctive contralto, elastic and candy-colored, with a sense of gravitas. Her songs involve dark folktales, animal encounters, and bad uncles. The characters she sings about, autobiographical or not, have a past they’re trying to shake off. In this world, a vulture might laugh under his breath “because you thought that you could / Outrun sorrow.” In between solo albums, she sang with the New Pornographers and in other bands, like the supergroup she started with k.d. lang and Laura Veirs. Then, in 2021, after COVID-19 shutdowns made touring impossible, she started a Substack called Entering the Lung. “I 100% needed the money,” she told The Guardian soon after. “It definitely saved my ass. It got me through a period where I thought I might lose my house.” The newsletter was also more forthright than her songwriting, a place for something loose and everyday. As she predicted early on, it eventually led to a memoir that’s equally candid. “When you’re writing a song, you want there to be gaps that hint at what the sense is,” she told Publishers Weekly. “Whereas with a book, you want to be clear: you want the story to make complete sense to people.” It makes for something unusual: a musician’s autobiography where the most riveting parts, the engine driving it all, don’t really have to do with her wild young days in a small-city music scene or her gradual rise to fame. This is more a survival story; a life in music is the solution, not the plot.

The rash of murders that spooked Neko as a child is one gothic detail of many. At the center is what Case describes as “a stunt so bizarre I’m reluctant to even tell it as it’s completely unbelievable”: her mother’s apparent death from cancer and reappearance a year and a half later. “Your mommy is back, and I don’t want you to think she’s a ghost,” her father says when he breaks the news. The incident is papered over and barely explained, but young Neko, overwhelmed with “dumb animal joy,” swallows her questions and forgives her immediately. Afterward, Neko moves carefully, “like if I made too much of a fuss I’d wake us from the dream.”

By that point, her parents, who had her when they were “seventeen and eighteen and poor as empty acorns,” had separated. Neko bounces between their homes in a small city and a place called Keller, a dot on the map near the dig site where her mother and her second husband, an archeologist, work. 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. Waiting for her mother to come home feels “like being captive in an hourglass.” In her dad’s house, a dilapidated “yellow-brown smear,” things are even worse. The curtainless window in his bedroom is like “a frame for clown-faced killers.” Food is hard to come by. Painfully bored and unable to connect with her father, she eats dehydrated potato flakes from the box and keeps the radio on.

What could have been an uncomfortably bleak story is tempered by Case’s writing, which gives the highs and lows of her life a fairytale dynamic. Her menacing uncle, who comes to live at her father’s house, “kept a knife-sharpening whetstone hanging on his belt” and blares tapes from fire-and-brimstone preachers all day. A baby rabbit’s whiskers “buzzed like a Norelco shaver.” And the animus between Neko and her mom is a pulse of “negative electricity” that reaches a peak as she becomes a teenager and realizes her efforts to win her parent’s favor will never work. Her mother is “a deer, always just out of reach.” Eventually, with her father in Alaska for work, her mother struggling with alcoholism, and a disturbing set of family secrets beginning to come to light, Neko, still a minor, finds a way to live on her own.

Ever since she was a kid with a clock radio, Case was crazy about music. It’s “a huge cliché for a musician’s story,” she writes, but she’s not shy about the metaphors she uses to describe her salvation. 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.

In Tacoma, Case gets a car, a boyfriend, and a first band, the Del Logs. She’s an odd, raw creature — wearing men’s long johns and a fake-fur coat — but diligent about her craft and hungry for community. Those tentative years give way to her cheekily countrified first solo album, The Virginian, and her initial outing with Carl Newman and the New Pornographers. 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. (In a recent response, the venue’s new management said she is now “welcome at the Grand Ole Opry.”) Case is far from encyclopedic; this isn’t one of those books that charts a neat narrative path from album to album. And you won’t find any juicy industry gossip about Dan Bejar — or any other of her collaborators, besides Charlie Louvin. The story gets a little more familiar, though, as it eases into her career and away from the grayness of small-town Washington.

For a while, Case’s unease thrums beneath it all: “I ignored that I was operating on sheer adrenaline and that deep down, I was still very afraid.” Rage, so important for some early sense of self, proves to be hard to contain. “I was willing to fight anyone,” she writes. It’s all part of the long aftermath of her childhood. Her relationship with her father softens as they age. Her mother, on the other hand, continues to be a volatile presence lurking on the outskirts of her life. But the final plot twist is less a blowout than a private revelation that brings agonizing clarity — the kind of thing people write songs about.

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