Neko Case recently put out a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. Emily Fox reviews the book.
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Neko Case recently put out a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. It’s a story largely about neglect and abandonment. KEXP's Emily Fox reviews the book and shares her personal connection to Neko Case.
Neko Case recently put out a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. Emily Fox read the memoir and has this review:
I first fell in love with Neko Case in 2006. I stumbled upon her album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood at one of those listening kiosks in a record store, the ones where they have a few albums on display and headphones available for you to listen. It was her album art that included foxes that first drew me in, then I put on those communal headphones and Neko’s belted alto tone got me hooked.
I listened to the album all summer while I drove in my family’s hand me down minivan between my rural Midwest cornfield-lined hometown and the nearby rustbelt capitol city of Michigan.
“Driving home I see those flooded fields/
How can people not know what beauty this is.”
— from “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” by Neko Case
I cried to the title track while driving said minivan after visiting an ex and realizing my first serious relationship had ended its course. It felt like Neko was speaking right to me.
“I flooded my sleeves as I drove home again.”
— from “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” by Neko Case
I fell in love with her even more when I heard an interview she did with NPR when she released her 2009 album Middle Cyclone. She talked about how she wrote a song about falling in love with a tornado.
And how the bonus track of that record was recording either crickets or spring peepers in a field. These were sounds that I too heard every night growing up in springtime.
Neko’s love of nature connected with my own. We were also both altos, something I loved to hear at a time when I was studying classical voice in college where the main goal from my instructors was to learn to sing louder and higher. Why couldn’t I just be like Neko Case instead? When my voice felt out of place, I gobbled up Neko Case’s albums as comfort.
When I heard Neko Case was about to publish a memoir, I couldn’t resist. As the title suggests, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, it’s a heartbreaking story — a story largely about neglect and abandonment.
In the first chapter, Neko Case describes being the child of children. Her parents got pregnant in late high school and as Case describes it, “These two people had no business being together, and even less business forcing a human soul into this world.” She goes on to share stories of falling into a pool as a toddler when her parents weren’t watching and spending 12 hours alone every weekday the summer she was seven while her mother and stepdad were off at work. Case also wrote about filing for emancipation before she was 18. But the most intense moment she wrote about, was her family telling her that her mother died when Case was eight years old, only for her mother to come back in her life a little while later. There was talk of her mother having a cancer diagnosis, but she had gone off to live in Hawaii for a while. Later in the book, Case comes to the realization that her mother might have never had cancer in the first place.
So much of this memoir is rooted in Washington state, with Case growing up in Bellingham, then moving to Vancouver, Washington in late elementary after her parents split, then on to Seattle and Tacoma.
Amid her family turmoil, she found solace and comfort in nature and animals, writing that she “trusted animals more than people.”
Then when she was 14, she started to listen to stations like KEXP, formerly KCMU in Seattle, and she developed a relationship with music. She wrote that music was “the only thing on earth that never let [her] down.” But she didn’t get to get seriously involved in music and find her voice until she attended an art college in Vancouver British Columbia. It was there that she started performing with the female band Maow.
At that point Case still didn’t feel worthy enough or comfortable enough to sing a solo. It was in Maow that she started singing solo, and shortly after that moment, Case made her first solo album, The Virginian.
The book closes with some chapters on the reality of being a musician. How when she was coming up in the music scene in the early 2000’s sound engineers, who she notes were always men, were “keenly aware that you are an earless vagina and are therefore ignorant of sound engineering and its many guarded mysteries.” And how “most of the people making a living as touring musicians work really hard and barely keep it together. . . nothing is guaranteed and there is no retirement plan or safety net or insurance unless you have a trust fund, and you never come off the road.”
Despite her family’s struggles and upbringing and despite how hard it is to make a name for yourself in music, Neko Case, who’s now in her mid-50s, is still killing it. She’s released seven studio albums in her career, she just released this memoir, and is also working on scoring the music for a new Broadway musical for Thelma and Louise.
Case still uses nature and animals to ground herself. She wraps up the memoir sharing that she finally has something she always dreamed of, owning horses. They bring her joy and calm her anxieties, writing that they are “the friends and family I craved my whole life.” I’m so glad she’s been able to continue to connect with animals and nature despite not having the family she deserved. That nature connection and her voice drew me in almost 20 years ago and reading Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You only deepens my appreciation for all she’s gone through to get to where she is.
