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Peter: I’ve listened to this one a lot.

Tyler: I hope that’s a good sign.

Peter: I know you’re a fan, and I wanted to give it a fair shake.

Tyler: Well that’s damned mighty fine of you.  I thank you.  Neko Case thanks you.  Our readers, of course.

For the sake of those readers, I’ll quickly note the full title of the album we’re breaking down today: The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You.

Peter: To my shame, I must admit I am not that familiar with Neko Case. I have some friends who are very smart and have excellent taste who love her, but I never really checked her out. I’ve heard a few of her songs, but for the most part, she’s new to me, and I hadn’t heard anything off this album before this.

Tyler: No shame in things easily remedied.

Is that profound?

Peter: Maybe. I’m thinking about it.

This is the first album we’ve done from this century.

Tyler: I’m a big fan of Neko.  (It feels like a missed opportunity to shorthand her as “Case.”). Long ago, a girlfriend burned me a copy of her 2008 LP Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, which served as introduction.  The following release, ’09’s Middle Cyclone, is where I really began to appreciate her sound, and that voice.

Now, Fox Confessor was not her first album by a long shot.  She even released her first one, all the way back in 1997, as “Neko Case and Her Boyfriends.”  That album is called Virginian, and I’ve yet to thoroughly explore it and her—and the Boyfriends’—second album Furnace Room Lullaby.

I know her third record, Blacklisted, fairly well.  There’s a live one in there called The Tigers Have Spoken, too.  She takes real time between new releases these days, but her catalog ain’t shallow.

Peter: I’ve heard of two of those albums!

Tyler: See, now you’ve got it!

Peter: We should also mention, this is the first female artist we’ve talked about, which is embarrassing. But, we didn’t really have a plan when we started doing these. We just started going and certain albums suggested other albums. Long story short we’ve done lots of Rolling Stones and solo Beatle albums. Plus an Oasis album and a Harry Nilsson album. It’s been a real sausage party. But it wasn’t by design! We listen to all kinds of music!

I have female friends! My wife is a woman!

Tyler: Female friends.  Some dudes still don’t get that.

Hilariously, we should concede, our two “legacy” picks coming up are all white-dude-based.

Peter: And, it was all British except Harry Nilsson? I think?

Tyler: Yeah, Harry was American.  Eesh.  We are part of the problem.

But not tonight!

Peter: Exactly.

Tyler: I’d like to note that, the last time I saw Neko live, Roe v. Wade had been turned over, that day.  Before the show began, Neko and the band stood onstage behind a pro-choice advocate. The advocate told the heartbreaking story of her own decision to have an abortion, made all the more of a crisis by the horrendous ordeal the state made her endure so that she could terminate the pregnancy.  It was a hell of a way to find even a shred of catharsis—not for my dumb male ass, mind you, but the many women in the audience and on the stage.

I guess I’m getting political where maybe I shouldn’t.  Oh God—is this chat my Some Time In New York City?

Peter: Wow. That sounds very powerful. And meaningful.

Tyler: It was.

Peter: And, no, this is not your Some Time In New York City. This is Neko Case’s The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You!

Tyler: You got that right.

Peter: The first track is called, “Wild Creatures,” and it’s great.

Tyler: She must have a fondness for it herself, as a recent career retrospective used “Wild Creatures” as its title.  I too think it is excellent.

Peter: I learned from the internet that she wrote this for the Hunger Games soundtrack, but they didn’t use it. I haven’t seen the Hunger Games movies or read the books (are there books?), so I’m not sure how the song relates to that story.

Tyler: I’ll be damned.  I had no idea.  And yeah, I know nothing about The Hunger Games.  Jennifer Lawrence?  Arrows?  Steely glares?

Peter: I think Woody Harrelson and/or Stanley Tucci are in them?

Tyler: Noted Covid conspiracy theorist Woody Harrelson?  Because God damn it was that a disappointment and an all-time SNL low point.

Peter: Well… there’s a lot of competition for that title.

I mean, Andrew Dice Clay hosted.

Tyler: Dice!  Of late-era Entourage fame.

Just a hair more to the point, much of Neko’s work overall is inspired by nature, right down the the album titles.  The Tigers Have Spoken, Fox Confessor, Middle Cyclone.  There’s a beautifully carnal song on Cyclone called “I’m An Animal.”  The creak and echo of her music feels natural to me, in general.  She’s got a sound.  It’s evolved, but the imagery, themes and, damn, those vocals carry through.

Peter: Yes! She does have a sound. At least on this album. It’s hard to place her genre-wise. Which is fine. Not everything has to be put in a box.

Tyler: The abstractions in her sound have grown with each successive release.  Her most recent song, the closer on Wild Creatures, features a good long midsection of noise.

It’s called “Oh Shadowless.”  It is good.

But that’s Wild Creatures!  Not “Wild Creatures,” the song we’re discussing.

Peter: She introduces some themes here that run through the album. One is mothers and motherhood. Another is our relationship to the past, and the timeless.

Or things that are always true?

Tyler: I’m always captivated by the hook, or whatever closest functions as a hook here.  “Hey little girl/Would you like to be/The king’s pet, or the king/I’d choose odorless/And invisible/But otherwise I would choose the king/Even though it sounds the loneliest…” That is elliptical and cryptic and yet makes all the sense in the world.

Peter: Yeah, that bit’s good.

She’s a really interesting lyricist. I’m struggling to better articulate that. I guess we’ll talk about it more as we go.

“When you catch the light/There’s a flash of wild creatures” reminds me of “When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of my eye.”

Tyler: Ah yes!  Friend of Russia Roger Waters.

Peter: Pink Floyd being another old white English rock band. My preferred genre, apparently.

Roger Waters is the worst.

Tyler: Loom favorites Lucius were his touring backup vocalists for some time.  I hope they never go out on stage with him again.

See?  Lucius are not one, but two women!

Peter: Look at us!

Tyler: We’ve moved to the forefront of the radical feminist movement.

Peter: I don’t want to call us “heroes” but I can’t police other people’s thoughts. What am I, the thought police?

Tyler: If anybody wants to call me a hero, well, by all means, I will take that compliment and return it with a slip reading “wrong address.”

Peter: Okay, let’s do the next track, “Night Still Comes.” I like this one too. It’s got good “second song on the album” energy. The chorus is great and, it ends really strong.

Tyler: Her lyrical style is evident off the bat here.  “My brain makes drugs to keep me slow/A hilarious joke for some dead pharoah.”

Peter: The next bit “But now, not even the masons know/What drug will keep night from coming” is funny.

Tyler: When she’s good, she’s good.  And she’s good a lot.

Peter: She’s not overly “wordy,” but the lyrics she does write tend to carry a lot of weight?

Tyler: She’s a writer who makes choices, alright.

Peter: The first two songs are really, really good.

Tyler: And then in roars “Man.”

I love, love, love that you’d expect this track to be a dark one about man being terrible.

But it’s not!  The narrator’s a good guy!

Peter: I was initially kind of resistant to this song. She made a video for it, which I assume means it’s a single. I’m often more of an “album track” kind of guy. It’s a little “poppier” than the rest of the album, which I guess I reacted against? But, it’s an earworm. I’ve had it stuck in my head for days.

Tyler: It does have a very rock quality that isn’t present anywhere else on the album.  It bangs.

Peter: It’s very driving.

Tyler: It’s at this point that I’ll share how terribly the Neko show I mentioned was ruined by the drunkard couple directly in front of me and my friend.  They got lit and clearly were not fans, they got the tickets free from somebody or something. During “Man” they bopped side-to-side sarcastically.  I know it was sarcastic because one half of the couple heckled Neko (!).

Not during that performance, mind you, but multiple times between songs. He hollered sarcastic praise.  “We love you!”

Peter: Good god! People are the worst!

Tyler: Yes.

Peter: Jean Paul-Sartre really was right. You heard it here first.

Tyler: Roger Waters: “Oh, people aren’t all that bad.”

Did I just compare all of humanity to Vladimir Putin?

Peter: “I’m From Nowhere.” This one’s pretty subdued. Just her and her guitar. I assume it’s her on guitar? She played drums early in her career (I learned from the internet), which is pretty badass. A little more straightforward in the arrangement. It’s nice. There’s a funny lyric about the “puffy sleeves” women wore in the 80s. Fashion flashback! I remember those shirts. Blouses?

Tyler: As go weary songs about life on the road, this one scores.

I was going to quote the Prince sketch from Chappelle’s Show, but fuck that guy too.  Chappelle, not Prince.

Peter: You know I’m from Minnesota.

Represent!

That was a hard day. I texted my brother. Sorry, I pivoted to all Prince.

Tyler: No sorry needed.  I was at work and got a text from Travis.  I said aloud “Prince died.” and a coworker said “You shut your dirty mouth.”

“I’m From Nowhere” has nothing to do with Prince, but it’s lovely all the same.

Peter: Way to get us back on track. Yes. I agree. A fine song.

Tyler: “Bracing For Sunday,” the next track up, might put the lie to my statement about “Man” being the only rock effort on the album.  “Bracing” is propulsive.

Peter: Yes! It is propulsive.

It’s kind of a short story. The narrator murders the brother of her true love, Mary Anne, because the brother impregnated Mary Anne and then she died in childbirth. But it’s got kind of an upbeat arrangement.

Tyler: She weaves in a horn section, because why not?

Peter: The production is very interesting. There’s a lot of texture.

Tyler: Now, where “Bracing For Sunday” borders on traditional rock band form, the next track breaks away completely.  “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu.”

This song breaks the heart.

Peter: This song is a true story, I learned from the internet. Which is very sad. Neko was waiting for an airport shuttle in Honolulu and she witnessed a mother being verbally abusive to her young daughter. I also learned from the internet that this incident resonated with Case because her own parents were abusive.

Or, at least, not very good parents.

Tyler: The detail is haunting.

Peter: The arrangement and production are very interesting. It’s kind of a hard listen. Kind of jarring. Not a criticism, just a warning?

Tyler: It is a hard listen.

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