On her own country road

Neko Case, an honorary Canadian, has left behind her punk rock roots to branch into a style described as 'country-noir'. Photo / Supplied

Neko Case is driving through Amarillo, Texas when I ring through - I imagine her poised on the bonnet, spear in hand, red locks flying as she appears on the cover of her latest album, Middle Cyclone. Really, she's on a mammoth journey from Tucson to Vermont and this is her downtime _ she's in the passenger seat straining to hear me all the way down the line in New Zealand.

Case has been on the road since January 2009. She's performed for almost all her fans, except those in Australia and New Zealand.

"I can't tell you how excited I am about coming to New Zealand, seriously, it's 10 years in the making," she says.

And she promises the show, where she will be accompanied by her full band, will be worth the wait. The only thing missing from the performance will be her projectionist, who usually plays impromptu movies behind the band during a set.

A music career spanning 16 years has seen Case develop from an angry teen girl who played drums in punk bands to a classy, yet still fiercely independent, alt-country singer. She now has an enormous following and divides her time between solo outings and being part of the Canadian powerpop outfit, the New Pornographers.

Her sixth studio album Middle Cyclone, released in February 2009, has been nominated for two Grammy awards, including best contemporary folk album.

It is described as her most accessible yet, something Case insists was more a product of circumstance than a deliberate attempt to top the pop charts.

"I'm in the New Pornographers and I did a lot of touring with them before I made this record. I think I was having so much fun with the multi-choruses ... that I just wanted to add more choruses to my own songs. Usually I am pretty linear, but the New Pornographers made me very excited about choruses again. Which does sound more accessible, for sure. So it was deliberate but I wasn't trying for any sort of commercial gig with it, it was more for fun."

Recently she has criticised chart-topping made-to-sell music for being a bit hard on the ear.

"I don't mind big studio sounds - I like the modern sound, I just don't like the overuse of autotune and I don't like the overuse of mastering, because I miss the sounds of human breathing, it just seems to take a lot of emotion out of it," she says.

Case's naturally big voice means her songs are always laden with passion and emotion. But they are not so much about girls and boys and heartbreak as about extreme weather and ferocious animals.

She admits the curious lyrics do say a lot about what she is like as a person - she's fascinated with nature, and with humanity's obsession with controlling it. "Humans try to emotionalise everything, and put a pen around everything. "A man-eating tiger is a man-eating tiger and you can't expect to put it in a zoo ... and not to eat a drunk college student if they climb over the fence."

These are the sorts of thoughts Case entertains as she is zipping across states towards her farm in Vermont. She admits she is a nicer, calmer person than she was when she first started dying her hair red as a teenager. "My hair is Ukranian brown, which is the colour of a graphite pencil, so light neither enters nor leaves the hair shaft. I don't have any eyelashes or eyebrows really, so my real hair looks like a wig because it is so dark compared to the rest of my hair. I started dying my hair red because my complexion suits it better than my natural colour."

It's no secret that Case had an unusual upbringing. She describes her parents as kids who moved around a lot and had little more aspiration for her than to entertain a drug addiction. But Case had bigger plans.

After moving out of home when she was 15 and securing a drumming position in a punk band by the time she was 18, Case moved to Vancouver to attend art school. She then joined punk group Maow, which released a record on the Mint label. She also played with roots rockers the Weasles and eventually formed her own backing band, the Boyfriends.

Moving into country-folk, Case released her solo debut, The Virginian, in 1997, and went on to perform with Carolyn Mark in the Corn Sisters. At the same time she joined Vancouver indie supergroup the New Pornographers. In fact, she's off on another tour with them right after her New Zealand show.

Finishing art school in 1998, Case returned to Seattle to work on her second solo album, Furnace Room Lullaby, which was released on Bloodshot Records in 2000.

She then moved to the thriving alt-country scene of Chicago, where she released her home-recorded Canadian Amp EP in 2001, followed by 2002's Blacklisted, which received her strongest reviews. In 2004, Case signed with United States label Anti Records and released a live album, The Tigers Have Spoken, and her studio album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, was released in 2006. Tracks on this album introduced her audience to a style described as "country-noir".

She's lightened up a bit in Middle Cyclone, an album that was tracked in the barn on her 40ha farm. And if her music could leave one mark on the world, what would that be? "That I could comfort people."

Lowdown

Who: Neko Case, alt-country artist who also plays in Vancouver band the New Pornographers.
Born: September 1970 in Virginia
Albums: The Virginian (1997), Furnace Room Lullaby (2000), Blacklisted (2002), The Tigers Have Spoken (live, 2004), Confessor Brings the Flood (2006), Middle Cyclone (2009).
Playing: Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna, Tuesday January 19; San Francisco Bath House, Wellington, Wednesday, January 20.