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Neko Case


with Shannon Shaw
All Ages

$45 advance

Band Details

Neko Casenekocase.com
Shannon Shawtheshannonshaw.com

From the Promoter

PRESALE STARTS - THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 AT 10AM
GENERAL ADMISSION SHOWFLOOR- GA STANDING ORCHESTRA - GA SEATEDBALCONY - GA SEATED
 
Neko Case has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket will go to support Urban Native Youth Association and their culturally responsive, holistic programs and services helping Indigenous youth explore their personal goals for education, work, culture, and life, in a fun, safe, and healthy environment (unya.bc.ca).
 

NEKO CASE

Five years have passed since Case's last solo project, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. In the interim, she sang on Whiteout Conditions, the 2017 release from longtime bandmates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs on the case/lang/veirs project.

Recording that record was a revelation, from Veirs' innovative guitar tunings to Lang's skills in studio. "I learned so much experiencing the work ethic of those two," Case says. She considers Lang "probably the most natural producer I've ever seen. Watching her work was awe-inspiring."

After their national tour together, Case found similar transcendence in October 2016 sitting on a panel at the first-of-its-kind "Woman Producer" summit in Brooklyn, NY. Between discussions and performances from a diverse group of women who produce music from around the world, she wondered how it had taken such a long time to get to that moment, and why so many female pioneers had been forgotten.

She felt lucky to have worked with the people she had encountered across her career-Darryl Neudorf, Tucker Martine, Craig Schumacher, and Chris Schultz among them-who encouraged her to expand her own skills in studio. But she had also gotten fed up with a world in which women's accomplishments seemed to vanish from public memory. "The George Martins and Quincy Joneses of the recording pantheon deserve every drop of praise and every project they have received," Case says. "But we can't keep telling the same stories over and over. We need more stories, more inspiration, more flavors."

She set to work on her next record looking for not just new stories but also new sounds. This time, she wanted to put herself in a setting far away from everything she knew. She recalled Björn Yttling's skill with Lykke Li, Camera Obscura, and his own band, Peter Bjorn and John. "I've worked with the same people so long, I never had to step outside my comfort zone," Case says. "In this instance, I chose to."

The two met over breakfast in Washington, DC, and decided to team up. By the time she went to Sweden in the fall of 2017, Case had already written songs with longtime collaborator Paul Rigby, laid down vocal and guitar tracks at WaveLab Studio in Tucson, and built Carnacial Singing, her recording space in Vermont.

But in the middle of her stint in Stockholm, with the finish line in sight, she received a surreal 3am call telling her that her house was burning and would likely be completely destroyed. She felt panicked and helpless.

The fire had started in the barn, where she kept an assortment of belongings, from artwork to old pianos. A friend had managed to get the dogs to safety. After the flames jumped to the house, her home was engulfed, too.

A few hours later, she went into a studio in Stockholm and laid down the vocals for "Bad Luck," singing the lines she had written long before she realized they would land on her.

Case is now stoic about the fire. "If somebody burned your house down on purpose, you'd feel so violated. But when nature burns your house down, you can't take it personally." The month before the blaze, Hurricane Harvey had slammed into Texas and flooded Houston. Her home burned just as Puerto Rico was plunged into a nightmare by Hurricane Maria and wildfires incinerated California. "In the big picture, my house burning was so unimportant," she says. "So many people lost so much more: lives and lives and lives."

She was hell-bent on not losing sight of the goal, reminding herself there was still beauty in the world and in the process of making music. She had been reading a lot of ancient history, including Adrienne Mayor's The Amazons, and thinking about how for millennia, women have been more central to events than the average history class admits. "We were always there, we were just erased. And I knew it. As a little girl I knew it. As a young person I knew it," Case says. "Now I know it anew with a ferocious, righteous, razor-sharp tribe of witnesses, and it makes me feel like a super-powerful human being. It makes me feel joy. There's an inheritance there that's really important, and I want to share it."

She decided to climb inside her role as producer and wield it more directly. It just meant owning what she was already doing.

***

The record that came out of this reckoning with lost stories delivers both familiar Neko Case and something different. Death, extinction, exploitation, tides, animals, and adoration all blend recognizably. Case's trademark narrative gaps, just large enough for listeners to enter each song, likewise remain. As with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone, Hell-On spins away from conventions of story, slipping into real life, with its fierce mess and blind catastrophes.

"I'm writing fairy tales, and I hear my life story in them, but they're not about me," Case says. "I still can't figure out how to describe it. But I think that's why we make music or write things. You've got to invent a new language."

There are differences, too. The opening kalimba notes of the first track, "Hell On," lead into a waltz of deep forces, irresistible as gravity, that refuse to be leashed or controlled ("You'll not be my master / you're barely my guest"). This tornado might not love you.

Case planned this record with a commitment to big choruses and a goal of making them even bigger. The results appear in the anthemic "Last Lion of Albion," a requiem for every landscape and iconic creature ("last tiger of Tasmania / the last she-wolf to suckle Rome") erased through massacre and marketing. Rounding out the opening trilogy of false possession is "Halls of Sarah," a song for unwilling muses tormented by poets who love women "as lions love Christians."

"Bad Luck," recorded from the ground up in Stockholm, opens at a gallop and never breaks stride. A song always poses the challenge of when to move away from the groove and how to get back to it. But Yttling pointed out to Case that sometimes the whole song should be the hook-that there's no shame in exploiting the catchiest part. That became the strategy for bringing "Bad Luck" to life. Longtime collaborators Kelly Hogan and Nora O'Connor came up with backing vocals that build a giddy, knowing call and response into the song.

For "The Curse of the I-5 Corridor," former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan duets with Case on a ballad of memory and departure. Melancholy grooves "Gumball Blue" and "My Uncle's Navy" mark Case's first songwriting efforts with New Pornographers cofounder Carl Newman. And after performing it live for years, Case has finally done a studio recording with Eric Bachmann of his song "Sleep All Summer," which moved her to pull over to the side of the road and cry the first time she heard it on the radio.

The labyrinthine "Dirty Diamond" opens onto room after room of shifting vocals that soar above a march-like rhythm. "Oracle of the Maritimes," perhaps the most fairy tale song on the record, floats over a tuning invented by co-writer Laura Veirs, carrying a love that longs to prove itself ("come on sweet girl let's find you an ocean / that goes with your eyes").

Clouds of mosquitoes rising out of hot tires, a chest of drawers that rides out into the waves, a box filled with unnamed newborn creatures: these songs are bursting with images that can only be understood through peripheral vision, shards of imaginary lives wired into a mosaic.

Later comes "Winnie," a pirate love song for a woman with a mouth "as sharp as the rib of a star." The song came from the afterglow of reading Amazons. "There aren't enough songs that are obviously about a woman loving another woman, just loving her, Sapphic or Platonic," Case says. "I thought there should be one, because I know I sit around loving them all day."

The record ends with "Pitch or Honey," winding its way through intimate verses sung over a drum machine before blooming into layered vocals, a bigger beat, and a wall of sound. "Am I making pitch or honey?" fades into repetition of "I love you better when you're wild."

The record was born at the hands of some three dozen performers in all, from k.d. Lang, Laura Veirs, Beth Ditto, and Robert Forster on backing vocals, to Joey Burns of Calexico and Doug Gillard of Guided by Voices on guitars, and Barbara Gruska and Matt Chamberlain on drums. The sidelong perspective is part of the known Neko galaxy, but the production is more expansive and edgier, moving into new universes. These are songs that can swallow you.

***

When Case returned to the US and walked through the ruins of her home, the fire that had blazed after these songs were written became part of the record. For the cover, she made a warrior's helmet out of cigarettes. Interior and exterior shots of her incinerated house appear on the gatefold and booklet. And a tiny pop-open charred Brothers-Grimm cottage serves as the set for the video of "Bad Luck."

It was as if nature invented a landscape for Hell-On after the fact: a melted ladder, seared insulation dangling in ribbons, the internal organs of pianos. She thought it should all be included in solidarity with those who had lost so much in the past year.

All the living creatures present at the time of the fire were found alive, and so Case was able see beauty in the bleak scene. "It felt like this out-of-time Jacques Cousteau undersea expedition through a sunken World War II ship. Of course there's some shit I miss," she says, citing family photographs and a favorite sweater. "But none of it matters."

And as for those fairy tales she's writing and the history she's remembering: "We need them now more than ever. We need stories from all sectors. Stories without endings. Stories with multiple endings. Stories that don't end happily, cautionary tales, everything. We don't need Disneyfied stories anymore."

A force of nature, an act of a mercurial, forgotten god, Hell-On is a record sealed by fire, filled with love and rage and dangers that might lay waste to everything at any moment. So if you wake up dazed in a smoking landscape, walking through the detritus of your own lost civilization with the smell of ash in your hair, your favorite sweater gone and a new song in your head, don't say you weren't warned.

SHANNON SHAW

Shannon Shaw, the captivating vocalist, bassist, and founder of Shannon & the Clams, valiantly strikes out on her own, gracing us with her first solo album, Shannon In Nashville. In a nod to Dusty Springfield’s 1969 classic Dusty in Memphis, Shaw made her own pilgrimage down South to collaborate with The Black Key’s Dan Auerbach and a congregation of revered old-school session musicians which have played on notable records by Elvis, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Herbie Mann, Aretha Franklin, Sturgill Simpson, and Nikki Lane, to name just a few.

It started when Auerbach, who discovered Shannon and the Clams after hearing them at a local record shop, recommended the band to an Australian tour promoter. Shaw wrote to thank him and they met in person at the historic Fillmore in San Francisco and formed an immediate artistic rapport. The two hit it off, and within days Auerbach invited her down to Nashville to record a solo record.

Understandably, the process of making Shannon In Nashville pushed Shaw into unknown territory, which could be intimidating at times. She struggled to overcome the withering confidence and feelings of not deserving to be there—imposter syndrome, essentially. Shaw had never done session writing or worked exclusively in a group of older, male, professional musicians who produce music for a living. Writing music is so vulnerable and emotional for me. They wanted me to just jump in on the spot like double Dutch. It felt like I was taking my clothes off. She came in expecting to be treated subconsciously like the girl, an interloper in a predominately male music industry. However, the studio musicians’ down-to-earth warmth, humility and encouragement made Shaw feel like a peer and reminded her that they were all there working together in service of her vision for the album. The album’s title is meant to acknowledge her collaboration with these Music City greats. Shaw initially brought six songs to the table, and the rest were written from scratch on group songwriting days. It was an exercise in self-esteem and speaking up for what she wanted. “Can you imagine telling Bobby Wood, Elvis’s piano player, that you don’t like what he’s doing?”

Shaw admits that she initially had a hard time wrapping her head around that notion of recording a solo album and didn’t have the means to do such a thing. Her fiercely independent mother insisted she go though, and threatened she’d sell her car to purchase a plane ticket. Not wanting to disappoint her mother, or make her sell the car, Shaw wrote Auerbach that she wasn’t so sure about the prospect and that she could, at best, only afford the plane ticket there (which she was able to do without her mother selling the car). Auerbach responded, Just show up and we͛ll make it happen. It’ll be awesome. And it was. Evoking the tear-jerking intonations of Brenda Lee and Patsy Cline, Shaw’s mastery of the instrument she was born to use leaves no doubt that she belongs squarely on the throne of whatever she cares to belt out.

On Shannon In Nashville, Auerbach shines as a producer and possesses a keen eye for talent. He’s lovingly scooped up this diamond in the rough from the punk world for his own recording studio and record label, Easy Eye Sound. The record’s lush orchestration seamlessly melds the Nashville Sound with the Motown Sound—both known for crossing a type of roots music over into pop—and provides the wings for Shaw’s naturally anguished, torchy voice to soar. The all-star lineup comprises drummer Gene Chrisman and Bobby Wood (keys and percussion) of the Memphis Boys, American Sound Studio’s house band that breathed life into hits by Elvis, Neil Diamond, Herbie Mann, and, yes, Dusty Springfield. Rounded out by bassist Dave Roe, guitarists Russ Pahl, Auerbach and others, Shaw’s session crew boasts a mile-long resume.

Shaw truly arrives in Nashville sounding like a woman who has learned to embrace who she is and where she came from. The daughter of a fire-fighting father and a mother who worked nearly half of her life as a nurse at Napa State (the mental institution which famously hosted a 1978 Cramps show), Shaw grew up out in the country, avoiding jocks and cops who had nothing better to do than harass local misfits. In high school, Shaw got a bass guitar, the glittery Danelectro she still plays today, as a gift from a boyfriend. Not able to envision herself as a real musician at the time, Shaw didn’t actually start playing her bass until about ten years later in response to a particularly rough break up that left her alone in the East Bay and desperate for an outlet. She has since become an expert at examining the detritus of love gone wrong with vocal stylings rivaling the ͚60s girl groups and Dion getting his teeth kicked out.

In the laidback, road trippy song, “Leather, Metal, Steel,” Shaw waxes nostalgic for those rural roots in hopes of resuscitating a heart that’s slowly numbing to the mercilessly carved up landscape of gentrification. Leather, metal and steel also represent a vehicle of comfort and liberation. “For me my car has always been my safe place. I grew up with only my brothers to hang out with, stuck way far out where you couldn’t walk to anything but a creek.” It’s inside a car where Shaw writes all of her songs and can be the most vulnerable. “The way I typically write songs is: Something has happened to me and I want to encapsulate it. I want to trap and package it, so I can pull it out of my body, and look at it to get some perspective on this event that has affected me,” says Shaw of the catharsis inherent in her song-writing process.

Raised in the Mormon church, Shaw began challenging authority when the church shunned her mother for divorcing her father and tried to manipulate the kids into reuniting their parents, à la The Parent Trap. Her father never quite recovered from the split, which Shaw addresses lovingly in the plaintive yet hopeful “Cryin’ My Eyes Out.”

Shannon In Nashville exudes a self-possessed melancholy that sets the scene for Shaw to comb through a personal history of love lost to time, circumstance, fear or neglect. “I Might Consider” reigns as the most hauntingly beautiful rendition of this recurring theme as it retraces the fading lines of who-did-what-to-who in hopes of a truce. Lyrically reminiscent of Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner’s heart-breaking duet, “Just Someone I Used To Know,” Shannon In Nashville’s kick off song, “Golden Frames,” illustrates the dilemma of dealing with love’s artifacts that torturously outlive the relationship from whence they came.

After coming out on the other side of heartbreak, Shaw grapples with the guilt of breaking someone else’s heart when the tables are turned in “Cold Pillows” and the Amy Winehouse-esque “Broke My Own.” She empathizes with the pain of the dumped to an extent rarely seen in the person ending the relationship. Love I Can’t Explain͟ speaks more to Shaw’s self-preservationist tendency to hit the eject button as soon as she catches a whiff of rejection. “Freddies n’ Teddies” further reinforces the need for dignity maintenance when putting yourself back out there on the dating scene.

Ultimately, the bittersweet ballads of Shannon In Nashville uphold the elation of love while mourning its loss. Shaw embraces the bravery of daring to love, reminding us that even heartbreak can be a life-affirming, self-teachable moment. On the album Shaw makes a case to stick around and brave the heat. Bring it on, pile it high, and if need be, tear it down, and start over.

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