Even if you have played from Seattle to Savannah, even if you've been touring with a road warrior like Merle Haggard, even if you have the chops and are the real deal, which Neko Case certainly is, you might feel the way she feels tonight, which is on the extremely nervous side, given that she's playing Lincoln Center. "I'm kind of realizing what a big deal this is," she says. There is little danger of an open beer can being hurled, but this is not a place where a kid from Tacoma—playing in punk bands, buying thrift-shop gospel records, driving a beat-up van around the country as her pedal steel player navigates—expects to end up. She's performing tonight in the American Songbook series. A stretch, you might think, if you've never heard her songs, but not if you have.
"She is one of the most innovative and lyrically driven songwriters out there," says Jon Nakagawa, the producer of contemporary programming for Lincoln Center. "The fact that she crosses all those genres and sings in so many styles—I just think she's one of the quintessential American voices in music today." Neko Case's songs roam around in dark places and deliver nuggets of beauty, songs she sings as if pleading, songs that often rise up into the sonic version of a clear starry night—the kind of night, coincidentally, that backdrops her as she takes the huge glass-windowed stage in Lincoln Center's Allen Room, spotlighted by a big bright moon. Her dress is black and her hair red, putting the torch in her torch singing. The audience, a slew of repeat Case attenders, are on the edge of their seats.
A couple of days later, walking around the city in jeans and a windbreaker, she confesses her relief that the show went well. "I had to pretend everything was O.K.," she says. She then raves about her influences, her fellow Pacific Northwesterners Lynda Barry and Sherman Alexie, and, sure, W.H. Auden. "The sky is darkening like a stain, ⁄ Something is going to fall like rain ⁄ And it won't be flowers," he writes in "The Witnesses."
"It's the scariest poem I've ever read in my life," Case goes on. "But beautiful. It's terrifying, but beautiful. That's the thing."
Punk was another influence, one she came across while at art school in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the mid-nineties. Case played first in girl-fronted punk bands like the Propanes and Maow. In 1997 she recorded The Virginian, an album filled with covers of songs by the likes of Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb, and even Queen, as well as originals. Thus began the comparisons to Patsy Cline, and her solo career took off—a surprise, even to her. "I never thought music was possible," Case says. She'd first heard country gospel on second-hand LPs and was impressed with its passion, though she does not subscribe to organized religion in any way. "It was more powerful than people singing about sex or drugs or money—or rock 'n' roll," she says. "That's when I made the realization that hopefully everybody makes before adulthood, which is that the world is not black and white. It is gray."
