Grand Central
Review by George Yatchisin

Given she’s enchanted by fairy tales, it’s only fitting that Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You leaves its readers following breadcrumbs tossed in a dark forest. Sure, many of the typical milestones of the rock ’n’ roll book get visited—childhood record purchases (Best of Blondie, “We’ve Got the Beat” 45), the agony and ecstasy of the road (on bad sound systems: “Your voice sounds like it’s being piped through a thrift store whale’s carcass into a pirate’s wet diaper. Ahoy, bitch!”), the tease and sleaze of a failed major label signing. But don’t come to the book expecting an album blow-by-blow or much dirt or gossip. This is really a book about art—how and why we make it and need it. That involves digging, a care to ever reconsider the past, a drive to outrun whatever hunts and haunts us, from the Green River Killer to familial trauma. And a hope to be fiercely feminist—at one point she rightfully laments, “How do women have any space left inside us with all the shit we swallow?”
Seven studio albums into her solo career that began in alt-country but is now all her own, Case is beloved by a loyal if far from large—say even Maren Morris big, the kind of artist in some ways Case helped pave a way for—fan base and critical hosannas. She’s also a stalwart in The New Pornographers, bringing her yet more acclaim. The Harder I Fight (the memoir title is a shortened version of one of her album’s) spends lots of time on her hardscrabble early years, bouncing between divorced parents who had her far too young. There’s a stomach-churning passage involving fleas I refuse to dive into. But the misery is always buoyed by bright spots, from country fairs with cousins to a delightful gymkhana day to a life-long connection with animals wild and domestic. By the book’s end she will have parsed the usually simplified notions about girls and horses into something cleverer and more understanding, as is her won’t with pretty much everything. Case often refers to herself as feral, even writing a song called “I’m an Animal.” Part of that lyric has it: “And yes, there are things that I’m still so afraid of…/ But my courage is roaring like the sound of the sun/ cause it’s vain about its mane and will reveal them to no one/ I’m an animal, you’re an animal too.”
In her songwriting and this book (and her vivid and unvarnished Substack “Entering the Lung”) Case is always an ace at metaphors, which, of course, not only make the unalike alike—unifying the world—but also suggest some underlying mystery. For instance, when describing her grandmother joining along, quietly, to a car’s country radio station, Case writes, “Her voice was sweet, though. It sounded like the last three Certs candies from the bottom of a purse tasted, like the last candy on earth.” She crafts a world of ghosts and gods, the latter ever changing, hopefully aspirational. Pre-teen she, moving from a fixation with horses to Adam Ant and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, tenuously resonates: “My desire, still mysterious to me, was to live in a world where my old gods, like horses and moths, and my new gods of music could coexist, in a pantheon. But such a world didn’t exist, and the pull to be a ‘girl’ was too strong. I couldn’t not do it. And in becoming one, I abandoned the gods of my childhood and so, for a long time, broke my own heart.”
Luckily her life was saved by rock and roll. The punk scene in the Pacific Northwest lit her up. Finding a clip of Flat Duo Jets in the film Athens, GA: Inside/Out knocked her sideways: “Something unlocked for me that day—still inchoate, still not yet formed, but a way that making music could become a physical manifestation of the blazing wild horse energy in my body, of how I might have all my old gods and new gods together.”
And later when she discusses her own singing, she admits she wouldn’t trade it for the world while also calling it “nasally: oversized and mulish.” Fortunately one day she discovers (oh, she’s a voracious listener of all musics, btw—this book deserves a playlist) Trio Bulgarka, with a tone close to her own. “I felt as if I had actually come from somewhere now, like I had ancestors to hold me up, not just a dead sea with bones at the bottom,” the Ukrainian Case explains. “It was like they had handed me a tiny strand of ‘origin’—a scant red thread that could lead me safely out of the labyrinth.”
After all, what is a memoir but an exercise in voice, a crafting of how one might live solely (and soulfully) as just words on the page. Of course Case’s signature is her beguiling and remarkable singing voice. It’s one thing to list all the different folks it can suggest, from Patsy Cline here to Dusty Springfield there, but its sum is much more than any reference. Somehow she can intimately belt, draw you near and blow you away all at once. Of course there’s beauty to it, but there’s ever an edge, a bend or a smear of that perfect note, another woman’s voice (and not just any woman, usually Kelly Hogan, a fine chanteuse herself) joining in to up the volume, ante up the angst.
Take her moving song “Maybe Sparrow,” a live performance mainstay (and alas unmentioned in the book). Sure, the song itself is sad—there’s no maybe for the poor little birdie; it’s a goner long before the song’s end. But it’s Case’s voice itself that gets me, the set-up of those “la-di-da-di-da-di-das” that are anything but “la-di-da” light, such casualness and such force confused, and then the three repeats of the words “maybe sparrow” at the close, and on the very last her intonation rising and missing, something that might sound like a crack if her voice wasn’t so richly round-toned. A little rush runs up my spine and my eyes dampen every damn time that damn note signals the sparrow’s damnation.
The best thing is she can pull off such lyrical passages on the page, too—this memoir can sing. Mere pages in she drops this line about her mom (much of the book’s emotional weight is about that freighted relationship): “This is how a ghost might disappear, I guess, but what did that make my mom? A ghost or a charged space left by a theft?” Rhymes are a way metaphors can sing, of course. So somehow by the book’s end Case gets well past just the me in memoir, instead underlining the our in it. It’s a kind of prayer, kin to communion. Like everyone in a bar together huddled inside the sound of one song.