The first time I interviewed Neko Case, back in January of 2001, the scene was very much what I expected from a Neko Case interview: we sat in the front lounge of the Cameron House, enjoying a steady stream of bourbon shots delivered by servers with whom Case was on a first-name basis.

Interviewing her eight years later, not much has changed about Case: her long red hair is as formidable as ever, and — in her loose-fitting sweater, worn-out jeans and Blundstone boots — she still looks like she’s dressing for a lazy Sunday at the cottage.

Our surroundings however, couldn’t be more different: the scene has shifted dramatically from Queen West to Yorkville, into a suite at the Park Hyatt, where our conversation is interrupted by polite inquiries from bow-tied bellhops who want to know if Case needs her mini-bar restocked.

But as the weeks following our interview would prove, the Park Hyatt is only the third strangest place I would see Neko Case this year. The second was on the northbound platform at Bloor subway station, where a large, life-size poster advertises her new album, Middle Cyclone, for rush-hour commuters. But hands- down the strangest place Neko Case has been this year was sandwiched between Taylor Swift and Lady GaGa on the Billboard 200 albums chart, where Middle Cyclone debuted last month at No. 3. (By comparison, her previous album, 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood topped out at No. 54.)

Neko Case’s career to date has been filled with moments of devastating heartbreak (2000’s “Twist the Knife”) and beautiful, starry-eyed balladry (2002’s “I Wish I Was the Moon”), but never before has she written a pop song as pure as Middle Cyclone’s “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” an immediately bracing hit of Byrdsian jingle-jangle whose infectious “I’m a man-man-maneater” hook should earn it a place alongside Hall and Oates and Nelly Furtado in the pantheon of catchy songs about maneaters. But unlike her carnivorous forebears, Case isn’t singing about some hot ’n’ bothered nymphet who likes to fuck and run. Case titled her 2004 live-album collaboration with Toronto roots-rock renegades The Sadies The Tigers Have Spoken; in the case of “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” the tigers have eaten.

“It seems like every time I go on tour and I’m in a hotel room and turn the channel, there’s some sort of animal-disaster show on, or somebody’s just been mauled by a tiger in a zoo, and everyone’s always so shocked,” Case explains. “And I’m like, ‘It’s a fucking tiger! You got it in a cage and you were poking it with something, and it killed you! What the fuck do you want it to do?’

“Zoos are a bad deal: elephants are meant to walk 70 miles a day, otherwise their feet go bad and they go insane and die. Killer whales need to swim 200 miles a day — why would it be happy in that little ice box?”

And surely it’s no good for a musician who’s moved cities five times and spends a good two years touring her records to be cooped up in a hotel room explaining zoology to music journalists. But, as she explains, Middle Cyclone is not about science — it’s about common sense.

“There’s only one life that we know of,” Case reasons. “Everyone can say they know of another one, but they can’t prove it — so it seems like it’s a good thing to hedge your bets and make sure you do a good job on this one.”

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In Neko’s case, doing a good job requires working at her own patient pace. By her own admission, Case is not the most prolific writer: Middle Cyclone arrives three years after Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and, much like its four predecessors, the new album was recorded in concentrated spurts several months apart. But when she’s not writing and singing her own songs, she’s recording and performing those of Carl Newman, as part of her ongoing membership in venerable Vancouver power-pop outfit The New Pornographers — a side gig that doubles as a form of occupational therapy.

“Thank god for The New Pornographers,” Case says. “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t just pick up and leave and sing different songs for a while. It’s a good palate cleanser, and then I come back [to my own work] with a renewed sense of vigour.

“Recording [Middle Cyclone] was such hard work,” she continues. “There were a couple of days where [guitarist] Paul [Rigby] and I would just fall off the wagon and listen to Aerosmith and get drunk instead of working songs, or we’d just lay on the floor and watch Talladega Nights three times in a row. You have to give the brain a vacation, otherwise it just rebels. But I’m really not much of a drinker and when I get focused, I’m pretty focused.”

For Case, that focus is a function of her constantly changing locations: a native Virginian, Case has worked and/or lived in Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago, Tuscon, Brooklyn and Toronto. Middle Cyclone not only marks another bold step in Case’s progression from traditional country balladeer to artful pop composer, it was greatly inspired by a new addition to her travel log: Vermont. 

“I lived there when I was a kid and I always wanted to go back,” Case says. “I’m not an ocean guy, so I don’t have to be coastal — I like mountains and trees. The forests on the West coast have such massive trees; on the East coast, they’re more small-scale and fairy-tale style. I bought a farm there, but I haven’t fully moved in yet because I’m still renovating the house. It’s pretty remote, which I enjoy. I’m about a half an hour away from some French toast — that’s my lifeline.”

Fittingly, Middle Cyclone is very much about nature, both of the ecological and instinctual varieties. It’s an attempt by Case to humanize the inhumane, and empathize with those uncontrollable forces of nature we’re taught to fear, be they killer mammals (“People Got a Lotta Nerve”), convicts (“Prison Girls”) or, most improbably, violent weather systems (“This Tornado Loves You,” which, just as its title indicates, was inspired by a dream where Case got chummy with a killer cyclone “who wanted me to read it a book”). Case’s retreat to rural Vermont for the writing of the album, as well as some of its recording, thus seems like an appropriately intuitive gesture: a protective strategy to stabilize her private life just as her professional life was about to hit new levels of activity and ubiquity.

To keep herself grounded in the midst of her ever-ascendant career, Case has long surrounded herself with a strong supporting cast of friends and eccentrics: her best friend and co-vocalist Kelly Hogan, long-time backing band mates Paul Rigby, Tom V. Ray and John Rauhouse, plus The Sadies, Arizona desert-stormers Calexico, Giant Sand-man Howe Gelb and keyboard wizard Garth Hudson of The Band. On Middle Cyclone, that guest list is larger than ever, corralling all of the aforementioned names, as well as appearances by M. Ward, Sarah Harmer, The New Pornographers’ Carl Newman, Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin and Kurt Heasley of mod-rockers The Lilys.

But rather than crowd the songs, the additional support greatly expands and enhances Case’s use of space. Be it the climactic chorus of  “This Tornado Loves You,” the gloriously operatic cover of glam-rock pioneers Sparks’ 1974 eco-anthem “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” or the eight-strong “piano orchestra” overhaul of Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me,” Middle Cyclone isn’t country music — it’s music the size of one.

But if Middle Cyclone counts as Case’s most elaborate recording to date, its underlying theme couldn’t be more simple and primal: when you take a creature out of their natural habitat, you shouldn’t be surprised when they resort to their basic survival instincts and fight back. And Neko Case is no different. While she possesses all the qualities to make her America’s new sweetheart — good looks, a swoon-worthy voice and, now, top 5 credentials — her increased proximity to the pop-cultural mainstream seems to only have intensified her straight-talkin’, no-bullshit candour. In other words, what she represents is the very antithesis of the sound-bite vapidity America seemingly demands of its celebrities.

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Neko Case is not your typical, soapbox-stomping outspoken artist; her songs tend to deal in fables and allegories rather than polemics. (Her top 5 standing is all the more remarkable when you consider that she rarely resorts to verse/chorus structures or, for that matter, lyrics that rhyme.) But her work has been greatly informed by her place within America’s landscape, both physical and psychic.

In 2002, at the height of post-9/11 paranoia, Case released her darkest album, Blacklisted; it opened with the song “Things That Scare Me,” whose admission of being “hunted by American dreams” perfectly summed up that era of Patriot Act intimidation. But now, the fact that a president Case actually voted for is in the White House only serves to cast America’s most deep-seated hypocrisies — and Case’s aggravation with them — in a more intense light.

“We live in a time when an African-American man is finally president, and that’s killer,” Case begins, “and yet 70 per cent of Californians — one of the most liberal states in the United States — voted against gay rights, which is so insane. Do people not realize how many gay people they know? I think there’s a really big problem in the United States with the Catholic Church, and nobody is really coming out against this. Homosexuality is not pedophilia — [the media] don’t talk about it as something completely different. Why haven’t we made this distinction?

“The whole country is supposed to be based on freedom of religion, so if Barack Obama is a god-fearing man, that’s totally cool. Some people take inspiration [from religion] and do really great things with it. But America is a more conservative country than it has been in a long time.”

For evidence, Case points not to the rise of evangelical figureheads like James Dobson, but to the likes of Judd Apatow and Diablo Cody — ostensibly liberal filmmakers whose work is marketed to, and greatly admired by, left-leaning, indie rock–loving college kids, but whose films Case feels send out an implicit and very troubling message.

“Popular culture is really letting us down,” Case says. “Movies like Knocked Up and Juno are really popular, but when you watch them, it’s like, ‘Have the fucking abortion already!’ People have abortions! But they won’t touch that in a movie. The last movie I remember where somebody had an abortion and it was treated like a regular thing was Fast Times at Ridgemont High [in 1982]! But there was an episode of Weeds where that happened, and I was so shocked and excited.

"I know that makes me sound like some sort of baby-killing fanatic, but women’s reproductive rights are a really big deal to me, and we can pretend popular culture doesn’t sway the way people think, but it does. So when somebody I think is smart, like Judd Apatow, makes a movie, I don’t expect him to do something like that,” Case continues, referring to Knocked Up’s flippant dismissal of the “shma-shmortion” option. “It’s like, ‘We can make abortion jokes all we want,’ but that woman [Katherine Heigl] would not have had [Seth Rogen’s] baby, I’m sorry! People have abortions, they do it quietly and it’s their decision and maybe their lives are ruined and maybe they’re not. It’s not black or white, and that’s not being represented in popular culture, and it’s really bothering me right now.”

And for Case, a proper, honest discussion of reproductive rights also extends to the non-judgmental treatment of those who choose not to exercise them at all — as evinced when I ask her if she has any desire to have kids.

“Oh, hell no! I like dogs. My genetics do not need to go any further than they do right now — my murderous, drunken family doesn’t need to continue [laughs]. I don’t have any desire to get married, and I don’t need to reproduce. I don’t think I would be a good mother, not right now anyway.

“I do feel out of place a lot. I’m in my mid-30s, and everybody’s married and having kids, and that’s cool. It’s just not something I want to do, and I don’t want to feel like I’m on the outside because I don’t want to have kids. People feel very entitled with their children a lot of times. I get really bummed out when you read these interviews with women who say things like, ‘My life didn’t mean anything until I had Jordan!’ That’s fucking pathetic. I’m sorry, it’s not a miracle, having a baby. People have been doing it for a really long time.”

Like the tornados and tigers she sings about, Neko Case’s tirades on American family values can be fierce and unforgiving. But whether she’s sticking up for animals who attack their meddlesome minders, or unmarried, childless women, she’s ultimately upholding her country’s founding individualist principles: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or, at the very least, quality television programming.

 “I know I always sound very hardline about everything,” Case concedes. “But I just mean for me, I want to see those women represented a little more in pop culture.”

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