Neko Case's Middle Cyclone

I encountered Neko Case in the worst moment in my life. (Well, one of the worst moments, or, in true "Simpsons" fashion, "Worst moment so far".) I had taken my first job in a different state and I was living by myself. I was finally entering adulthood.

As an old co-worker of mine put it, Once you enter the workforce, it's all just a grind until the end. I didn't know who I was. I thought I knew who I was. I didn't know what I liked. I thought I knew what I liked. I didn't know what I wanted to be. I thought I knew what I wanted to be. And life had an interesting way of challenging all three.

I blew up. I lashed out at a lot of people. I was disappointed with who I was, I was jealous of other people for being who they were, I was angry I couldn't change my situation, and I was ashamed I felt all of these emotions. And I didn't even know I felt the way I felt. Vice is not passionate; it is calculated, it is a crucial component in us.

I was in a miserable situation, one I had created, and I didn't have the grace of mind to realize it was all on me, and so I thought everyone around me was simply evil. I didn't have the strength to change directions, I simply waded through my misery one day at a time, passively absorbing everything around me. I was lost.

I don't know when I came across "Middle Cyclone". I knew of "When Things Get Worse ..." (2013), particularly the poetic "Night Still Comes" where Case muses "what drug will keep night from coming", a metaphor that came to express my depression in its totality. It's possible I circled back to her with 2018's "Hell-On", where, in "Bad Luck", Case bemoans, "Woke a dog from a running dream, and that's bad luck, / ate a black fly in the cream, and that's bad luck, / chipped my tooth on an engagement ring ..." and you can see what the rest is. For reasons I really can't discern - I wasn't all that enamored with Case then - I listened to "Middle Cyclone" (2009).

I remembered I bought the CD, played it on my CD player in the apartment, and listened as the music of "This Tornado Loves You" filled the faded room, as the guitar opening the track conveyed something arid, lonesome, deserted and despairing in my solitude. Case's voice arises from the strings like rushing winds:

My love, I am the speed of sound, I leave them motherless, fatherless, their souls hanging inside-out from their mouths, but it's never enough -

and then Case, being careless in the destruction she is causing, indifferent to the suffering she is creating as compared to her own torment, declares

I want you

It's the honesty that disarms me. It's her admitting she's selfish, tremendously so. It's a pettiness and weakness I wasn't able to acknowledge were also in me.

The titular tornado becomes stormier as Case sings,

I have waited with a glacier's patience, smashed every transformer, with every trailer, 'til nothing was standing -
Sixty five miles wide -
still you are nowhere, still you are nowhere, nowhere in sight,
come out to meet me, run out to meet me, come into the light -

Besides the laughable drama of my life, I was in a crisis with my writing. For a while I had been very serious about writing, and yet, on reflecting on my output for the last six years or so, I realized I was, simply, a bad writer. I didn't know what voice I had or what voice I had been polishing towards. I felt like a failure.

Reflecting on the lyrics of "This Tornado Loves You", I realize that Case anthropomorphizing the tornado - really, empathizing with the tornado - has similarities with a lot of my writing in my early years. It's not so much indulging in metaphor as displacing or finding one's emotions in another person or thing's environment. I used to write about coffee beans and talking shoes and old cats.

But, of course, Case is many notches ahead of me. You can detect a hint of anger and frustration in her voice as she smashes every trailer; you sense her despair as she wails "sixty five miles wide", and her desperation as she remarks "still you are nowhere"; and then there's her begging for you to "come into the light", which is enhanced by the repetitive "come out" / "run out". These petty emotions, this very personal conflict she's going through, somehow becomes extremely important, of universal significance; she makes the universe a story about humanity, her humanity specifically, a selfish story, sure, but a powerful one about life itself.

Here is one of the greatest couplets I've ever heard in music:

I miss how you'd sigh yourself to sleep when I rake the springtime across your cheek

which sensuality, imagery and emotion I'm still trying to emulate in my own writing. It's a metaphor Rilke might find admirable.

And then Neko ends the song with:

My love I'm an owl on the sill in the evening,
when morning finds you still warm and breathing

In my apartment, I realized this is exactly how I wanted to write. I wanted Case's presence, her ability to put you in that situation, however absurd it was. I wanted Case's voice, specifically her ability to weave her own personality into fiction, and somehow make both more vivid than they would be separated. I wanted Case's imagery, the tension between her personal thoughts and the scene before her and how reality blurs in the intensity of her thoughts.

I remember taking the train to the office every morning, an office I didn't want to go to, a morning I didn't want to wake up to, and a situation I didn't want to admit was mine. I remember flattening my face on my backpack, trying to sleep, trying to ignore all the other passengers; I didn't want anyone to see me. As I dreamt and dreamt, I would hear the opening lines of "Vengeance Is Sleeping", one of my favorite songs of all time:

I didn't know what a brute I was,
I dipped my cigarette and rode the bus.

I didn't realize at the time this was about me. Of course, Case didn't write the song for me, but as it lingered like smoke in my mind I discovered I was really condemning myself. The riff on the guitar made me think of the petals of sunlight that woke me up to my apathetic reality, and its repetition is near-labyrinthine, a "Groundhog Day" without a happy ending:

Vengeance built me hastily and I had the dragging notion I was nobody, nobody, nobody...

That's what I was: I was nobody, and nobody was what I longed to be. I wanted to be Case's vision of "nobody". I wanted all of time to be before me and in front of me; I wanted to be the character in her song, rendered naked by time. And that's one of the powers of fiction: I put little stock in an audience's concerns for a "character", but an attribute of storytelling that's very important is that the story, as it were, is "laid bare to all of time". A story is a bounded thing, that is not moral nor immoral but has an ending, and a story ending makes it very different from life which has no ending. In short, in comparison to life, you can know what a story is about, and that's what I wanted: to know what I was "about".

All I had was my invention and my love invented all of you, oh look what thoughts can do, what thoughts can do...
if you're not by now dead and buried, you're most certifiably married, oh, married...
I'm sure you're sleeping sound, with a mistress of the hour, the hours that grind your life to dust

Then Neko, a damning spirit, says to me,

your easy loves you keep like pets, denied them, you are powerless, whatever keeps you sleeping through the night

while taunting me,

I'm not the man you thought I was, my love has never lived indoors,
I had to drag it home by force, hired hounds at both my wrists, damp and bruised by strangers' kisses on my lips,

And then, brightly and hotly in this night of the soul, Neko wails,

But you're the one that I still miss, you're the one that I still miss, and it's ruthless that it comes as no surprise.

It's a haunting song, and it's not clear what it's about. In my view it's about guilt and shame, about losing someone and not having the courage to reach for them again. It's about the ghosts in one's life, it's about being condemned for the things you did and didn't do - and, more shockingly, it's sung from the man's perspective, not from Neko's perspective, and yet you could look at little details like "my love has never lived indoors" and "you're the one that I still miss" as being from her perspective, as if there's empathy extended to her tormenter, or she realizes she has played the part of both. It's a mysterious song, and for that reason I love it so much for being as slippery as art should be.

I'm not going to cover all of "Middle Cyclone"; it strikes me as a loose collection of songs, though one can see themes of selfishness, vengeance, helplessness, shame, regret, and, ultimately, independence. It's no coincidence the murder mystery of "Polar Nettles" precedes "Vengeance Is Sleeping".

I'll instead cover next the other great-great song on the album, the folk-tale-like "Magpie to the Morning", a song so good Case covers it again in "The Worse Things Get ..." yet with an arrangement that re-illuminates the music:

Magpie comes a-calling, drops a marble from the sky, tin roof sounds alarming: Wake up, child,
"Let this be a warning," says the magpie to the morning, "don't let this faded summer pass you by, don't let this faded summer pass you by."

I realize now Case likes to play with meter - she likes short lines to achieve a short, blunt, factual effect, and then she unwinds and increases the meter as the action and the drama of the verse increases. On one hand, you can call it a cinematic effect, of Neko painting the scene in short, rapid brushstrokes, and then painting movement in long arcs. On the other hand, you can call it artistic, where she compresses the action in her verses into tight coils, and then unbounds them as the action becomes messier and impactful. It lends "Magpie to the Morning" the effect of a fable, distorting reality as the fable arrives at its comment on humanity and its failings.

The other quality of Case's writing is that her verses don't seem to have a discernible length; she will cap an idea off in one, two, three lines. There's a flexibility, a stream-of-consciousnessness to her writing style that doesn't fit in a typical four-row structure.

Black hands held so high, the vulture wheels and dives, something on the thermals yanked his chain,
He smelled your boring apex rotting on the train tracks, he laughed under his breath because you thought that you could
Outrun sorrow,
Take your own advice, this thundering and lightning gets you rain, you run an airtight mission, a Cousteau expedition, to find a diamond at the bottom of the drain, a diamond at the bottom of the drain.

Then, as if feeling pressure from her own exhortation to "take her own advice", Neko, after a solo, audibly says, "Here I go".

Mockingbird sings in the middle of the night, all his songs are stolen, so he hides,
stole them out from whippoorwills and screaming car alarms.
he sings them for you special, he knows you're afraid of the dark.

Do we take comfort from this statement? Is this Neko recounting what her characters said, is she describing how great the fear is, as compared to the story of the mockingbird? Is she singing this for you? I don't know. I prefer to take it personally. There's something about knowing that "he sings them for you special" that lightens my heart. This is the power of fiction: the mockingbird is not real, but the sense of his words, his sentiment, is. There's no other way the power of art reaches out to us.

And so, on the most intimate song on the album, the titular "Middle Cyclone", Neko, to an acoustic guitar, sings quietly to herself,

Baby, why am I worried now? Did someone make a fool of me? Before I could show them how it's done?

She whispers,

I can't give up acting tough. It's all that I'm made of. Can't scrape together quite enough

and then the part I always sing with her,

to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love.

I know "Middle Cyclone" isn't a perfect album. Some of it feels artificial, a little too polished, where I crave rawness. Some of the metaphors are forced, as one can hear in "This Tornado Loves You". Case also is unable to carry an idea to its end; there are too many "interlude"-like songs, songs too short to have an idea, like "The Next Time You Say Forever", "Polar Nettles", etc. Case too is so much of a diva, you feel she is trying to carry the songs through the strength of her voice too much, and not actually matching the emotions of the lyrics. Then there's "Marais La Nuit", a 30-minute long recording of a pond. It's not a mistake to end the album this way, but it's certainly pretentious. I definitely don't listen to "Middle Cyclone" from top to bottom often.

But it's one of those albums where I see so much of myself in it, and an album whose flaws I understand and accept entirely. I understand what Case means when she says "The next time you say 'forever', I will punch you in your face"; I understand the tension in her voice as she covers Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth"; and I understand the regret in her voice as she covers Harry Nielson's "Don't Forget Me". Then there's her nonsense lyric in "People Got a Lotta Nerve": "So the saying says / an elephant never forgets, / standing in a concrete cage / swaying sad and insane." This verse makes no sense on paper but it makes perfect sense to me.

It reminds me that my best-of list isn't a list of "quality" in any absolute sense, but a reflection of my taste and how art speaks to me specifically and how it weaves with my life - and, in turn, reflecting on what is "quality" and why we put so much energy into thinking about and preserving art.

I might as well end on Neko's words, on "I'm an Animal":

You could say it's my instinct - yes, I still have one - there's no time to second-guess it, 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.