Neko Case Pays Tribute to Musicians on Neon Grey Midnight Green

If you didn’t already know that Neko Case has spent the past several years writing for the stage, her new album should give it away. All the time she has spent collaborating on a Broadway-style musical version of the Oscar-winning 1991 film Thelma & Louise has filtered into her own music on Neon Grey Midnight Green, her first new album since 2018. There’s always been an element of drama in Case’s songwriting, but her phrasing and lyrical exposition take on a more theatrical tilt, here on a dozen new tracks, as if she’s building up to the showstoppers.

That is what she’s doing, come to think of it. More than one song here shifts midway through into a new form, with a different tempo or change in melody. “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” for one, finds Case talk-singing free-verse lyrics until there’s a pause in the bright, tack-piano flourishes, and the arrangement expands into a refrain featuring brushed drums and guitars as Case harmonizes with Rachel Flotard of Visqueen. It’s vintage Neko, reflecting her distinctive take on Americana. Later, “Little Gears” follows a similar path, shifting from waltz-time into a four-count beat for a chorus that lasts about forty-five seconds before sliding back to a waltz. Really, though, the technical details matter less than the feelings they evoke, and when Case switches from loosely structured verses into a tightly arranged chorus, the sense of musical resolution is akin to a beam of sun cutting through an overcast sky.

With lyrics that describe watching as a spider builds a web, “Little Gears” is one of several songs on Neon Grey Midnight Green steeped in imagery of the natural world. That’s been a recurring theme in Case’s music over the years. It anchored her 2009 LP Middle Cyclone, for example, and was also a central motif in The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, the spellbinding memoir she published earlier this year. If nature has sustained Case for most of her life, so has music, and Neon Grey Midnight Green is a tribute to musicians—some of those she’s singing about here were friends who died in recent years, including Dallas Green from the Sadies, Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, and Dexter Romweber, an early influence when she first encountered his ’80s power-duo Flat Duo Jets.