“A Widow’s Toast”, the fourth song on Neko Case’s fourth studio album, opens:
Spectres move like pilot flames
Their widows toast at St. Angel
Better times collide with now
The tears were warm, I feel them still
Their heat to vapor and disperse
And cloud our eyes with weary glazeYou raise your glass and may exclaim
"I'll put my hands on the truth by God"
In 2006, Neko Case released Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, to not much fanfare—a 7.7 from Pitchfork, and similarly mid-positive reviews from other outlets; they praised Case’s voice, but didn’t seem to know what to do with her strange stories and unconventional structures. “A Widow’s Toast” is sonically sparse, centering on a CSNY-like vocal stack that weaves an opaque and heavy poem—there is little to grasp on the smooth surface of her songwriting, impenetrable and ornate. The album was too off-putting, with its tales of widowed women and wild animals, for either the indie or country communities of that time.
Her writing continued to explore mostly uncharted, dreamlike territory in her later albums; “Prison Girls” off of Middle Cyclone (2009) and “Last Lion of Albion” off of Hell-On (2018) come to mind. She told interviewers in 2006 that there wasn’t anything she wanted to change about Fox Confessor, despite the negative reviews of the album’s narrative features. That the writing told stories was not new to country, but its subject matter, equally fantastic and dark in nature, was. The moments where critics lost the thread, where the narratives stopped following any human logic, alienated them.
Listening to Fox Confessor in 2024, it sounds like what someone might call indie twang, that curious intersection of folk, rock, and country music in which some artists are carving out space, reclaiming these genres. Indie twang has skyrocketed in popularity in the past few years, growing out of mixed traditions: punk rock’s weed-like tendency to grow in unlikely and difficult places, alternative music’s alignment with irony and cynicism, country music’s further bifurcation between political groups within the genre (read: racism). In short, country became cool again, after years of being shunned by the coastal edges of the country as backwards. This reclamation has finally come full circle, back to the mainstream, with Beyoncé’s newest album COWBOY CARTER (2024).
If released today, Fox Confessor might draw comparison to the work of MJ Lenderman, if not sonically then in fixation on poetic and mundane details of odd stories, like the one he tells in “Hangover Game” about Michael Jordan and his shoe deal. Faye Webster, similarly helmed in the genre, features similar instrumentation to Case’s work in her title track of her newest album, Underdressed at the Symphony (2024). Big Thief works more explicitly at the intersection of folk and country, and some of their songs draw if not from Neko Case herself then from her predecessors, whose influence you hear more clearly on her earlier albums, elder country artists like Loretta Lynn and Bob Dylan.
I don’t hear people talk about Neko Case that much these days. She released a career retrospective album two years ago and has been touring since, playing sold out shows to a mid-size base of dedicated fans. I’ve been at a few of these shows, and they’re full of gentle hippies; I’m the youngest in the room by far. In some ways, this atmosphere is a welcome change to the pressing, preening crowds of teenagers at MJ Lenderman, Faye Webster, and Big Thief shows. In others, it’s sad to see so many of my peers missing out on someone’s vital, living art.
I suppose I expected Neko Case to get the Broken Social Scene or Yo La Tengo treatment: greats reinvigorated by a new generation of fans who appreciate them for their similarities to (influence on) their contemporary favorites. There are always a few scraggly twenty-somethings drinking beers at a YLT show, proselytizing to their friends about some deep cut, and while I find these people insufferable, I am just like them—desperately trying to convince my friends that this band or another is the source material.
So here I am, doing just that: I am imploring you to see the light, that Neko Case is at the root of indie twang, still creating relevant and beautiful music. Fox Confessor raised me, but her later work continued to speak loudly into the sonic landscape, sowing the seeds of those pedal steel-wielding indie rockers we all love. She knew so many years before the rest of us that it was all coming back around.
Who do you think started indie twang? I can see arguments for Mac DeMarco, Alex G, Waxahatchee, and Angel Olsen… but Neko is the blueprint for me. Who wants a primer playlist?
Such an amazing voice, I need to go back and revisit some of her earlier albums as it’s been a while since I have them a listen. Coincidentally I was listening to case/lang/veirs while scrolling through my Substack this morning. A phenomenal album
Case had me at her Raindrops cover, "The Train from Kansas City"