NEW YORK – While growing up, Neko Case always took comfort from voices in the dark. She’d retreat to her room and listen to the radio and records, to people she felt knew her private thoughts and imagined she knew as well.
Now that she’s a singer, Case is motivated by the desire to mean the same thing to others.
Case performs Saturday in Seattle.
She’s got a remarkable voice, one that can inspire shivers in the ghostly ballad “A Widow’s Toast,” heartbreak in her energetic cover of the obscure 1960s story-song “The Train From Kansas City” and surprise with its power when blended onstage with her friend Kelly Hogan.
Case “projects like she’s singing in a cathedral with light pouring through stained-glass windows, even when she’s singing about darkness, dementia and death,” wrote critic Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune, in the city where Case keeps her home when not on the road.
“I don’t know if I ever realized I was a good singer,” Case said. “I just realized that I wanted to sing.”
Kot’s cathedral reference is apt, since that would probably be Case’s performance venue of choice. She loves big rooms where the sound bounces off the wall and lingers. That’s not easy to find in nightclubs.
To approximate that effect and recall the sound of her favorite old Ike and Tina Turner records, Case’s sound technicians add reverb to her vocals. The same sound from Turner “just makes you break out in tears,” she said.
“She could change the way the room sounded with her little human lungs,” Case said. ‘To me, it’s totally mind-blowing and very moving.”
Case, a young veteran at 35, grew up in Tacoma, and left an unhappy home as a teenager. She attended art school in Vancouver, B.C., and played in punk bands. She was the emergency replacement for the drummer in the band Cub when she made her public singing debut in 1993 at a club in Toledo, Ohio.
“I am a very loud singer,” she said. “My great strength is my loudness. I basically started making records before I had any idea what dynamic was. You can hear the terror in my first two records because basically I’m singing on ‘10’ all the time. I had people point that out to me, and I was really glad that they did.”
Her love for country music is evident in her work, but she’s not so easily classified. One term she’s heard and liked is country noir, because it hints at a movie-like quality and attention to detail.
Case’s most recent album, “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” can be lyrically dense and inconsistent, inspired in part by eastern European folk tales.
“The voice is what drives you in originally, but there’s a whole lot there behind the voice,” said Andy Caulkin, president of her record label, Anti-. “Her music is very cinematic. It’s hard to verbalize it, but I feel like I’m hearing a movie.”
Neko Case performs Saturday in Seattle.
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