Public Servant Lifestyle

A first-class winter (heart) warmer from Neko Case as she releases her first ever live CD - prior to her much anticipated Anti debut album.

The Tigers Have Spoken by Neko Case

Acclaimed in both indie-rock and country circles - as a solo artist and as a former member of the band, The New Pornographers, the superb Neko Case is releasing her first live CD.

Neko Case is responsible for a string of acclaimed solo studio recordings, starting with 1997's The Virginian and ending (most recently) with the storming alt. country classic Blacklisted. Now comes The Tigers Have Spoken - an 11 -song, 35-minute live release, recorded mostly at a handful of shows - over seven nights and at three different venues - earlier this year in Chicago and Toronto.

This album is Ms. Case's first for Epitaph's Anti - also the label home for such diverse artists as Tom Waits and Tricky.

For this disc Neko is backed by a full band featuring the Sadies and steel guitar whiz Jon Rauhouse, together with special guests Kelly Hogan (of Kelly Hogan & The Pine Country Cosmonauts fame – a regular support on Neko’s British dates of a few years ago) Carolyn Mark, Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops, Paul Morstad and Brian Connelly.

Greatest Hits?

While ’Tigers’ is a live album, it is by no means meant as a career retrospective — in fact, only two of the eleven songs features are from Neko's previous full releases. In addition to the two new original compositions, Neko wraps her powerful pipes around a surprising collection of covers written by such diverse artists as Buffy Saint Marie, Loretta Lynn, the Shangri-La's and Freakwater's Catherine Irwin.

This is a real treasury – a collection of new original material, selective covers and one previously hard-to-find cut (and live favourite), the handily named Favorite. The first song Neko ever wrote herself from start to end, Favorite is a heart-rending romantic number more in the tradition of her earliest recordings, than the more recent Blacklisted era numbers. Something of a contrast to that album, this number has previously only ever appeared on the tour only disc Canadian Amp suits this collection to a tee – summing up as it does Neko’s more playful, joyful side.

When we play," says Neko, "people always come up and say, ‘Are you going to do some upbeat stuff? Are you ever going to bring a drummer?' This record's sort of for them.

For the fans it may be, but the sources of the album run deeper than that. The music on Tigers offers a brief history of the sounds that first made Neko want to play. As a kid in Washington, Neko ‘ family introduced her to country music by way of Marty Robbins, while she took in punk shows by bands like the Fastbacks and Nomeansno. Later, as a college student in Vancouver Neko first began playing in the punk trios Maow and Cub. Later she joined the New Pornographers, a Canadian indie-rock collective that won a Juno (the Canadian music industry's Grammy) for their 2000 debut album: Mass Romantic.

As a solo artist Neko's records have always been well received. The Virginian won her early notice but 2000’S Furnace Room Lullaby - all of the songs for which were written either solo or collaboratively by Neko herself - both widened and galvanized her fan base. Two numbers from Furnace Room Lullaby: Set Out Running and Guided By Wire even found themselves championed in the UK by Radio 1’s famous John Peel, hosted by the late DJ – who played them alongside Man, Or Astroman? and The Fall, with characteristic good taste, into the homes of millions.

Aside from the continuing championship of Britain’s former foremost DJ the exquisite follow-up Blacklisted also garnered accolades from sources as diverse as Entertainment Week, USA Today, Rolling Stoneand GO magazines.

Freedom

When it came time to assemble a live record - Neko Case has the freedom to both test and reinvent her working repertoire on the road – and she had a clear idea of what she
didn't want to create. "It's a rip-off to buy a sprawling double-live-album full of songs you already have," laughs Case, who co-produced Tigers herself and was the one responsible for selecting the song list from the available tapes. "And really, a lot of ‘live’ albums are largely enhanced in the studio-they're heavily overdubbed, or people re-record weak vocals, or things are fixed in the mix. I didn't want that.

"I wanted it to be something that actually happened in front of the audience; I wanted it to be as live a recording as possible, with he bleeding and the weird notes and everything preserved. Of course when we go into the process matching the best performances with the best recordings turned out to be a lot watch The Last Waltz and think this was going to be easy?” So in the end we did have to overdub one part - an acoustic guitar with a bad direct input - that just didn't come through at all in the original tapes."

Represented on The Tigers Have Spoken are the Sadies, an impossibly fine quartet whose own albums are as excellent 60s-country rock/pyschedelia/C&W/surf/punk releases as you'll ever hear: Jon Rauhouse, pedal steel journeyman whose work graces albums by Howe Gelb, Kelly Hogan, Sally Timms, Reubens Accomplice, and The Pine Valley Cosmonauts, in addition to those by Case; Carolyn Mark, Case's collaborator in the duo project the Corn Sisters; Kelly Hogan, a world class singer in her own right; and Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops.

The Shangri-Las

Even the album's five covers indicate something of the range of styles and singers that have influenced Neko's own music, swinging from girl-group homage to Nashville cool to ragged solo vocals. The Shangri-Las' The Train From Kansas City gets a chugging, full-throttle delivery, while Soulful Shade of Blue is as giddy a declaration of infatuation as it was in its original version. "Buffy Sainte-Marie was always a very big deal to me” says Neko. “…Even when I was young; I named my first dog after her - when I was 5. She's the writer of the greatest protest songs ever, she made her first record when she was 23, she's this incredibly beautiful woman, and Soulful Shade was such a nice moment of joyous abandon for her.” Likewise, Loretta Lynn's rip-it-to-shreds indictment of gender double-standards, Rated X receives a note perfect treatment.

But Tigers' high points are easily Case's own compositions-the throaty versions of Blacklisted and the aforementioned Favorite she turns in here, or the brand-new "If You Knew" and The Tigers Have Spoken, both written and performed with the Sadies. In fact it's the simple, audible pleasure of making music-the interplay between Case and her fellow musicians-that serves as the prime element of the album.

And speaking of that, The Tigers Have Spoken contains one moment of creative exchange that's worth specific mention, the only cut not drawn from her tour shows. As an invited guest at last year's ideaCity Conference-an aggressively cross-cultural exchange project that draws presenters from wildly diverse disciplines including art, technology, literature, folklore, and anthropology-Neko turned a conference panel into a field recording session.

"It makes me sad every time I realise that the value of art and music in our culture seems to be slipping away. Especially music, which is easily the most 'used' and enjoyed form of art there is. It's everywhere, but sadly, your average person who enjoys it has no idea how it could enrich their lives to actually try it out. Our culture has long fostered the myth that the making of music and art is a sort of pipedream, something that's beyond their ability-the myth that it's not art if it's not the symphony, or if you don't become a star making millions of dollars. S o what I wanted to do was demonstrate how easy the creative process was, and how easily [the audience] could be a part of it."

Wayfaring Stranger

With friends Darryl Neudorf and Paul Morstad overseeing, Neko walked the assembled crowd of 300-odd conference goers through the chorus to the old standard Wayfaring Stranger, and recorded a stripped-down version of the song, right there in Toronto's Isabel Bader Theatre. And then she played the music they'd helped create back to the audience, playing the raw track through the audio system she'd brought along. That recording-Neko Case and a cast of hundreds-appears as the stand out cut on The Tigers Have Spoken.

The balance of Tigers, then, reflects what Neko's audiences heard on those handfuls of evenings in Toronto and Chicago. And what they heard was music made by people who've shared stages and studios for so long that the music sounds both organic-in-the-moment, as it were-and aggressively rehearsed, as indeed these shows were.

The full track listing for The Tigers Have Spokenshapes up like this:

1. If You Knew
2. Soulful Shade of Blue
3. Hex
4. Train From Kansas City
5. The Tigers Have Spoken
6. Blacklisted
7. Loretta
8. Favorite
9. Rated X
10. This Little Light
11. Wayfaring Stranger

Good news for alt. country fans everywhere is that, in addition to releasing this storming live set, Neko is currently completing a deal with Anti for her next studio album proper - the long-awaited follow-up to the highly acclaimed Loose album Blacklisted. That record is now tentatively pencilled in for release in the Spring of 2005. For those who can’t wait – and for all fans of great live music, country or otherwise - The Tigers Have Spoken will make a first-class winter (heart) warmer.

The Tigers Have Spoken is out now on CD only, from Anti. All of the Neko Case back catalogue is still available –and all are well worth searching out. The as yet untitled 2005 album is expected in the Spring, on the Anti label.

All photographs copyright: Victoria Renard.

More information available in Arts & Culture, Music