▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Neko Case: “Hold On, Hold On”
When Case released her 2006 album “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” she described this track as the only “autobiographical song” she’d yet written. When asked to elaborate, she said in an A.V. Club interview, “I mean that the song is actually about me. It’s not metaphorical about other people. It’s not little pieces of my life made into a story about someone else or someone fictitious.” In that sense, it represents another evolutionary step in Case’s songwriting.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Neko Case: “This Tornado Loves You”
This opening track from Case’s great 2009 album, “Middle Cyclone” — sung from the perspective of an anthropomorphic, heartbroken tornado — is one of many songs that Case has written when trying to recollect one of her dreams. Her friend and collaborator Paul Rigby talked to me about its composition and cited it as one of many songs in which Case is able to extend her perspective beyond just the human realm. “Getting to know a weather system as a person is pretty cool,” he told me.
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7. Neko Case: “The Tigers Have Spoken”
Are there any songs that, regardless of your mood, are guaranteed to make you cry as soon as you press play? This is one of mine, and if the melody so much as pops into my head, I’m a goner. This ode to a tiger killed in captivity — the title track from Case’s 2004 live album — is perhaps her sharpest and most gut-wrenching extension of compassion to the animal world. Someone hand me a tissue!
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Neko Case: “Hell-On”
This smoldering title track from Case’s most recent album once again showcases her idiosyncratic lyricism and her knack for melding her own singular consciousness with the plurality of the natural world. “I am not a mess,” she sings. “I am a wilderness.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Neko Case: “Night Still Comes”
Case wrote one of my favorite albums of hers — “The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,” from 2013 — while struggling with depression. (“I couldn’t run from being sad anymore,” she told me. “I had to do my time.”) She chronicles that battle with a courageous heart and a dash of dark humor on this rousing tune, banishing her demons with a cathartic chorus.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. Neko Case: “I Wish I Was the Moon”
Finally, this yearning ballad from “Blacklisted” is one of the most beloved Case songs, and for good reason. In her memoir, she says that she wrote the song shortly before her father died, when “the sadness of my dad’s situation was on my mind a lot.” “I’m so tired,” she sings, before unfurling a lyric that beautifully encapsulates her own particular flavor of imaginative, otherworldly melancholy: “I wish I was the moon tonight.”
