Neko Case is as well-known for her solo work here in Canada as she is as one of the founding members of The New Pornographers.Emily Shur/Supplied
Throughout her nearly three-decade-long career as a musician, Neko Case has always leaned toward nature as a device for her storytelling. In her music, from her early, folk-tinged songs on her debut solo album The Virginian to her more recent work, Case – and her powerhouse singing voice – weaves metaphors about life, love and loss using evocative images of the natural world.
Now, in her newly released memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, nature is as present as ever, but Case’s storytelling is – of course – more straightforward. Her formative encounters with flora and fauna are a through line in the book, as in her life, but here, they’re anecdotes that break up a striking look back at trauma, grief, and music. The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You tells the story of a woman moving through time and space, from the American Northwest to Canada’s West Coast, finding herself through music and holding herself up along the way.
Case, who is as well-known for her solo work here in Canada as she is as one of the founding members of The New Pornographers, may not satisfy fans looking for a classic, cookie-cutter musician’s biography. Instead, Case’s book veers closer to a tell-all, with the musician revealing – with a frankness that is at once refreshing and jarring, considering the subject matter – a difficult childhood marked by the early abandonment, then return, of her mother, followed by patterns of neglect by both of her parents. In between this, she reveals the blueprint of a singer that will be recognizable to fans: a woman whose strength, perseverance and grit is fully worn on her sleeve.
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Case spoke with The Globe about the book, archiving her life’s story, and finding strength in uncertain times.
As someone who’s listened to your music for a long time, I’ve always felt that the way you write about yourself is often allegorical and maybe a bit shrouded. And after reading this book, you feel much more known to me. How does that land?
If you know me in real life, and I’m sure my friends would say this, I’m an oversharer. I’m not super guarded in my regular life, so it didn’t feel like I was doing anything that was untrue to myself. It just felt like, okay, I’m gonna talk to a lot of people like they’re my close friends, and that can backfire. But luckily I’m 54 and I don’t care.
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You get more than a hundred pages into the book before you start writing in about yourself as a musician. Did you have a thought that you didn’t want to make this a typical rock star memoir?
Well, to be totally honest, I have really bad ADHD. I’ve known that most of my life and I start things in the middle or the end and then I work backward and then forward. So it was arranged chronologically but not written chronologically, if that makes sense. Things that seemed to turn my head or make me feel engaged at the time were things I would latch on to immediately, just because that’s the way to get the most out of my brain.
A lot of what you write about your family seems like it may have been a difficult subject matter to retread. Was there a process that you had to maybe safeguard yourself while documenting those memories for the book?
Not really. I mean, I’ve done a lot of therapy, so I feel like I understand where things are on the map of my life. And I’m definitely a person who can talk about really gnarly things and still be clear-eyed about them because I have a lot of practice, I suppose. So nothing seems horrible to me because they’re not things that I just bury away; they’re things I think about on a fairly regular basis.
Did you come out of the other side of documenting any of that subject matter and find yourself feeling differently about it?
Yes, and it is the nerdiest, most ADHD Virgo satisfaction of putting something in a square box. I guess it feels like, okay, all those things are in the book and I have the book on a shelf now. It’s like having a hard drive: I can store them on that. I don’t have to carry them around with me all the time. It’s labelled with tape and it’s safe and if I need it, I know where it is.
There are points in this book where you you talk about your own gender, and about the genderlessness of some of your childhood experiences. Is there a way you would categorize your own self-identity when it comes to gender?
I call myself a woman just because people hate women so much, so I will not abandon it, but I’m a gender-fluid human being. The idea that you like one thing more than another thing because of your genitals is so dumb. It’s literally the dumbest assignment anybody’s ever had given to them. If somebody feels like one of the two things that you’re supposedly allowed to be, that’s okay and great and we should respect that and be happy with it. But all of the trillion other combinations should also be allowed because if we just suddenly decide we’re gonna, you know, vaporize everybody who isn’t those two things, we’re gonna have hardly any people left.
You write about your grandmother as a powerful influence, and one through line in this book was that you would continue to make these discoveries about her life that have bolstered you. Is there anyone in your life like that now, especially in this political climate?
I’m turning to myself a lot. And I’m going ahead with the good work I’m doing. I’m keeping my people close and just trying to be a beacon of something that is opposite of fear.
What is the opposite of fear to you?
The opposite of fear is joy. And rage has a lot of joy in it, if you’re doing it for the right reasons. You can’t always control rage, but it is a great thing to practice, that’s for sure. It’s a fuel.