AVC: You've been living all over the place the past few years. How has that affected your writing?
NC: Well, it's pretty normal for me. I've kinda done that since I was really little. I think maybe it's good for thinking up new ideas. Scenery is definitely very inspirational. I like driving. I'm a real sucker for driving across North America—I never get sick of it, ever.
AVC: What are you touring in now?
NC: This time, we're taking a bus. I never thought I would ever take a bus, but it's actually cheaper to take one now than it is to drive a van, due to the price of gas and the fact that there's nine of us on tour.
AVC: Do you feel like you're "making it" now that you're on a bus?
NC: No. Anybody can have a bus—you just have to pay for it. It doesn't mean anything. It's just something that is either a necessity or it isn't. Some people think maybe it makes you look like there's some kind of status, but if I had my way, I'd be driving, which I prefer. I'm a control freak, and I like to be in control of when we stop and when we don't. [Laughs.] You don't feel that as much on a bus, because you can pee whenever you want. What if you want to pull over and take a picture of something cool? You don't have that luxury as much on a bus. It's a little more day-care-style, which freaks me out a little bit, but I'll be all right.
AVC: Have you thought about what level of fame you'd be most comfortable with?
NC: I'm probably most comfortable with this. I'm not really working for Kurt Cobain-style fame, and I might be a little old for that anyway. I'm not going to the fat farm or getting lipo anytime soon. I don't know if that's possible in America, even. You could compare yourself with such a thing, but I think it's apples and oranges. I have a good audience, but I've just been maturing for so long, and hopefully they'll just keep coming back. I'll keep begging them on my knees. "Please, please!"
AVC: It's not like you can't escape strangers saying, "Oh my God, it's Neko Case!"
NC: Nobody ever recognizes me, ever. It's great. Every picture of me looks different from every other one. I have this stupid Eastern European face, so I'm easily disguisable. The only picture that's ever looked like me, I think, is the one where I had the braids. That looks like me to me—grubby hair.
AVC: That's good, considering how much you hate your photos.
NC: I have a pathological fear of getting my picture taken.
AVC: Is that why you're hardly in the video for "Maybe Sparrow"?
NC: Yep, exactly. [Laughs.] I'm not very interesting. Birds are interesting. I could stand there lip-synching all day long, but it would feel funny, and people would be able to tell. I'm not a good actress.
AVC: You spent so long recording this album. Are you sick of the songs by this point?
NC: I don't listen to it anymore. When I play them, they're completely different, so it's not the same thing. They sound different. It's kind of like a relief to be playing them live. Because listening, while not completely a passive activity, is not the same thing. You're not upwardly moving through something; you're sitting by it while it moves. It's kind of exciting to figure out how those songs should be performed live, because obviously we can't do them exactly the way they're performed on the record. To make something sound that thick live, you need way less people. Things become smaller on a recording. You can have 15 people doing a song, and maybe you only need four to recreate that live. The records are about the vocals, so as long you have those, and you have the general mood, and people doing little parts here and there, it works, I think. It makes it a little more intimate.
AVC: You've said that you're a control freak, but this album is more collaborative than its predecessors.
NC: Well, they've all been—lots of people are involved. I mean, I have the executive decision-making powers, but I'm a soft control freak. I try to ambush myself by making it as easy as possible. I hire people who are really good, and who I don't have to give a lot of direction to. The most direction I'll give is like, "Oh, I like that, will you do that some more?" or "Do that again. It may not end up in the final edit." We just make sure we put down as many ideas as possible and then edit them down. You've got 24 to 36 tracks; why not use them all? 'Cause there could be some really great idea that you could miss out on if you didn't try it.
AVC: Has your musical knowledge grown a lot in the process?
NC: I wasn't overstudying too hard. It was more like doing things that felt natural and not trained in any way. It's kind of like the happy accidents. I really don't know how to use the tools that well in a traditional sense, but sometimes it makes for interesting outcomes. I'd love to paint myself as some kind of genius, but really I'm just kind of lazy—that's what it comes down to. My laziness, luckily for me, has produced some different kind of style in some of the songs, which is a happy accident.
AVC: A lot has been made of the lack of traditional song structure on this album. Was that another "happy accident"?
NC: It wasn't so much saying, "Traditional song structure sucks. I'm gonna bend that." It was that the ideas I was having weren't coming together in a way that suited repeating them. I thought they had a lot more emotional impact when things were said once. It's more of a linear thing than your cyclical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-out. That works well, but it can make you a little bored after a while. I think I would feel like I was just trying to stretch it out and fake it. I'm pretty self-conscious about my songwriting. Between this record and Blacklisted, I kind of figured out my own style, and I think it just means my own style is less traditional. Ever since I started playing guitar on the recordings, I've found it's a lot easier to get my ideas across. If you're singing a song to somebody who's writing a song with you, that's really great, but say you have some melody idea that's in a completely different key. They're gonna put it into the key that you've already been working in, and so you have to change yourself to that. You don't have to, but I may not know what key it is unless I have the guitar in my hand, so it's nice to make sure that those things don't get lost. Even if the keys don't fit together, you can find a way to make them fit together, and that makes an interesting-sounding part. That's what really ended up happening. It wasn't forced. I realized that that was the style, and I don't fight it anymore. [Laughs.] There's less fighting with myself now.
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