Before a full house at the Fine Arts Building’s Studebaker Theater, singer-songwriter Neko Case appeared on stage in conversation with Lior Phillips, a Chicago-based South African music journalist. Case received a rousing welcome from the clearly enthralled crowd.
Case may have been in town to promote her unsettling memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, but she is no stranger to Chicago. In the late 1990s she moved here from Seattle. She lived on Maplewood Avenue in Humboldt Park while working at Calabash animation studio. Her roommate at the time worked at the Hideout. It was in Chicago where she wrote her first solo song, “Favorite.” It took her all of an afternoon to write, she said.
One of the first things the audience learned about Case that evening is her love of animals. “I think about animals all the time,” she told Phillips.
On the book’s cover, a young Neko Case wears a swimsuit while holding a cat. Lurking behind her is the silhouette of what looks like an alligator, or at least some kind of scary monster. The cover is fitting because animals feature prominently in her story. All kinds of animals. Cats and dogs but also snakes, coyotes, deer, and horses. Especially horses. It was as a lover of horses, when she first realized that music could “become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy inside my body…”
Animals, real and stuffed, were her protectors. When in emotional pain as a child, which was often, she would snuggle with her dog, Buffy (named after singer Buffy Sainte-Marie), and “I’d make a barrier of stuffed animals around us.”
“I trusted animals so much more than people,” she writes. Humans, after all, were messy and unpredictable. Humans hurt her. Animals were her friends at a time when she didn’t have many.
Case grew up grew up dirt poor wearing “Kmart clothes” and a “puffy perm” in the “gray city” of Bellingham, Washington. “Even the gum on the sidewalk was gray,” she writes. Her first memory was of neglect, a near drowning in a swimming pool. She was an accidental birth, unwanted by a pair of teenagers who were not ready to be parents. Her mother forged a lifetime resentment toward her, she says. When Case was a child, her mother faked her own death, claiming she had cancer. Case was told that her body had been cremated. Yet, a year and a half later she returned, as if rising from the ashes. Case didn’t ask any questions. She wasn’t even angry, just grateful: she didn’t want to make a fuss in case she disappeared again. Years later, she recalled something her mother once said to her, “If I didn't exist she would be free.” She wondered if she ever had the disease.
She describes her father as a quiet and “strange” man, who barely spoke. He would often play Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks over and over again. Although only in second grade at the time, she felt its “staggering sadness.” He was a cypher to her and probably, she surmises, to himself.
When her parents divorced, Case bounced around the country with her father, mother, and stepfather. Most of the time she would spend hours and hours by herself without any human contact. She refers to her situation as a form of “emotional starvation.”
Her memoir is straightforward and candid but also at times morbidly funny. Given her emotional abuse it is no surprise to learn she has a soft spot for Grimm’s fairy tales, an appreciation for their gallows humor and their brutality, especially their brutality. The specter of violence haunted her childhood and teenage years. The Green River Killer, a serial murderer who terrorized the Pacific Northwest for decades, was not far from her mind when she was growing up, accentuating feelings of vulnerability she had for being female in a misogynist, male-dominated society. She was raped when she was 14 by an older man, a 19-year-old brother of a friend. She didn’t even consider it rape at the time but rather just something to get over, something that girls had to endure.
By the time she turned 16, she was a skinny, feral, lonely kid full of rage just like her mother. Music saved her life. She listened to bands like the Pogues and the Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star and the Cramps. Music was the “only thing that never let me down.”
Music meant freedom. Cars did too.
The first car she drove was a 1964 Ford Falcon, which she bought for $350. Driving it around her neighborhood gave her a natural high. Soon, music and driving were intertwined. She played the drums in her first band, the Del Logs, in Vancouver, British Columbia. She felt safe behind the drum kit, she says, “partially hidden.” Later she would learn to use her strong and powerful voice to tell stories about feeling invisible. A voice well suited for everything from dark murder ballads to shiny pop. She was a member of the New Pornographers and as a solo artist had a minor hit in 2006, with the autobiographical “Hold On, Hold On,” probably her best-known song.
She told Phillips that she has always had a strong dislike of biographies in general “unless they are written by the artist.” Among her favorites are Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Rickie Lee Jones’ Last Chance Texaco. In her angry, brave, and compassionate book, she tries to make sense of and come to terms with the bullying and the cruel behavior that engulfed her—it made her who she is today. In its dark secrets and painful revelations but also in its honesty and blunt lyricism, it belongs on the same shelf as the work of the fellow musicians she so admires.
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You is a survivor’s tale written by an artist who has finally learned to accept herself as she is—the good and the bad—in all her contradictory and complicated glory.
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