Neko Case on finding beauty in the sorrow: 'Death gives us so many gifts if you're willing to loo...

The lauded artist's new album is a tribute to her late idols and to music at its most communal and authentic: &34;I don't think AI can write a song that makes y

The lauded artist's new album is a tribute to her late idols and to music at its most communal and authentic: "I don't think AI can write a song that makes you pull your car over and cry."

Neko Case on finding beauty in the sorrow: 'Death gives us so many gifts if you're willing to look at it'

The lauded artist's new album is a tribute to her late idols and to music at its most communal and authentic: "I don't think AI can write a song that makes you pull your car over and cry."

By Allaire Nuss

Allaire Nuss

Allaire Nuss has been an associate editor at ** since 2022, where she oversees evergreen content and contributes to the music section.

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September 29, 2025 9:00 a.m. ET

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Death doesn't scare Neko Case.

Do not mistake her resolve for indifference. Coming off her last album, 2018's *Hell-On*, the hypnotic 55-year-old indie singer-songwriter experienced repeated loss in rapid succession, as around 10 people she held dear died. Many of them were musicians who were her idols, who then became her collaborators, and soon her friends. She was heartbroken, stunned by the onslaught of bad news, yet inspired by their impact.

"Death gives us so many gifts if you're willing to look at it," she tells * *days before she's set to kick off her North American tour. "I thought the gifts needed to be turned into some sort of love that would be broadcast on this record in a way."

One might consider her eighth solo album, *Neon Grey Midnight Green, *a eulogy. But she calls it a celebration, "a tribute to music, and musicians specifically." It's the first LP for which she was the main producer, and her fingerprints are on every detail. Like its title, her songs evoke imagery akin to Brontë novels, all foggy plains adorned with "mansions of sound" and "tender psychic rivers." Its compositions include dense forests of baritone guitar and an opulent 25-person chamber orchestra.

"I got what probably is the last advance anybody will ever get for a record," Case says on the day she starts rehearsals for the tour, tuning into our Zoom from her very own studio, Carnassial Sound, a converted post office in St. Johnsbury, a town in Vermont where much of *Neon Grey* came to life. "So I thought it would be good to spread it around and pay these people to play." She's often wry like that in her asides, unafraid to stare straight at the s--- facing artists today while still reveling in the magic of collaboration, of tinkering with so many strings.

Here, Case opens up to EW about the existential threats against musicians and other creatives, navigating her industry as a gender-fluid person, and using her songwriting to find beauty in sorrow.**

**: When you recorded the album, it was all of you playing live in one setting, and that totally comes across while listening to it. Why was it so important to you that it really sound like musicians gathered together? **

**NEKO CASE:** The world right now, and technology, are working hard to make people who create things obsolete. It's been really bad for musicians and pretty much every other field of work. But I just wanted to remind people what it sounds like when humans can make something together that way. There's nothing wrong with using instruments and having one person overdub a bunch of things. But I wanted the sound of the air, of all the people breathing together, and people's coats moving across a microphone, or human breaths. There's intention that you can hear, or you can feel.

**The record sounds so lived-in, like humans really made it, which is becoming a novelty of sorts. As an artist, what are your feelings about the rise of AI? **

I'm not worried about AI replacing real musicians. I don't think AI can write a song that makes you pull your car over and cry. But I do worry about our music and our art being mined to train AI. I don't think that's a consensual relationship. That is theft, and nobody wants it. If we were somehow compensated for that, maybe, but nobody gives us a choice in anything. And a lot of us, myself included, have a great deal of debt from [COVID-19] that's gonna be really hard to get out from underneath. And then somebody's just using your music to make money for training AI robots to kill people. [*sarcastically*] It's great.

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**Thematically, the album seems to decenter romantic love while still basking in the glow of that feeling and how all-consuming it can be. What do you think love means in the context of this record? **

It's about sustenance and community, and a tribute. I lost so many friends in the music industry while making this record. If you lose somebody, you often think, 'Oh, I wish I had told them this or that.' I wanted that to come through on a record, and just tell all the musicians how great they are, because I don't know how great they feel*.*

**The record often feels morbid and majestic at the same time. Why do you think it's so important to find beauty in sorrow, especially now?**

[It] makes it less scary. I wanna remind people how powerful and how capable they are to call things out.

**You've been doing this for a while. Right now, we're seeing the reversal of social progress for women and other threatened demographics. How, in your eyes, has this rollback of progress impacted women in the music industry?**

What *has* changed in the music industry is there's way more women. We're not being paid for it, but we're pretty much running the show. And it's funny, when I first started making records and doing press, it was always all men who were doing the interviews. And it'll be like one out of 10 people who do the interviews now are men. Not that I wanna get rid of men. I'm just very excited that so many people are women. Of course, we've wanted to hear and see ourselves in music all this time. It's been a long time coming. But yeah, they still treat us like s---.

**Do you have a prominent example in mind?**

Just being talked to like you* *don't know what you're talking about. That's my favorite. It's only been 35 years — I couldn't possibly know what I'm talking about. And some of the patriarchal bias is even my own. I'm so indoctrinated with it that I'll be thinking about producers and I will think pretty much only of men. And I'm like, "Wow, [I'm] a producer and [I] still think about it that way." I'm always amazed at the bias I still have. That's something I try to tell men all the time. You're not the only person dealing with toxic masculinity. We have it too.

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**In my eyes, the album truly climaxes in the title track. You exclaim, "I'm not your backdoor man / I'm not your oxeye daisy / I'm not your Listerine lady / Your girl!" What did you mean by that, and why did you have so much emphasis concentrated into that moment? **

It felt really good. I'm a gender-fluid person. I always refer to myself as a guy because that's how my grandma talked. And I always thought it was really funny, and it was really inclusive and really sly, but it was also really powerful. She was making everyone one gender: a guy. I can't tell you how many times people just corrected me. It's like, "Have you looked down my pants? Can you see how absurd it is to tell somebody what gender they are to their face, like they don't know?"

**Or, like it even matters what that person thinks in the first place…**

Who are we to tell people? I still go by she/her, but I'm not very hung up about it. I've never have felt like I have a place other than being a soul who does things. I've been obsessed with this since I was younger, but women, for the most part, I think they feel that they have to sing beautifully or pretty. I love women who don't have any qualms with just making their voice sound really ugly and guttural, and just bizarre or strange. It's also part of nature, which I really respect. Nature is just scabs and blood and eating each other, in the nicest way possible.

*Neon Grey Midnight Green* is out now. Case's North American tour kicks off October 1 in Woodstock, N.Y.**

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