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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.
Her voice 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.
Perhaps it was her voice that altered the weather at the Sasquatch! Music Festival at The Gorge on Saturday. A few songs into her mainstage set, a torrent of hail shut down her show.
Ordinarily, 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 of the Chicago Tribune, in the city Case calls home when she's not on the road.
"I don't know if I ever realized I was a good singer," Case told The Associated Press. "I just realized that I wanted to sing."
Case loves big rooms where the sound bounces off the walls 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.
As most local fans know, Case, 35, grew up in Tacoma and left an unhappy home as a teenager. She attended art school and played in punk bands. She was the emergency replacement for the drummer in the band Cub when she made her 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 movielike quality and attention to detail in her writing.
Case's 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."
Her contract with the relatively small independent label illustrates how the music business has changed.
"I've had offers from major (labels), but I didn't really think it was the place for me," she said. "You see it happening every day. A person gets signed to a major label, the label gets bought out and the person who cared about them and signed them is gone a week later. That's not really job security."
Besides, she said, she's a control freak and being with a smaller label gives her a feeling of control.
It also doesn't hurt that Anti- is the home of Tom Waits, one of her favorite artists.
She'd like to emulate the career of someone like Waits or another hero, Nick Lowe. Both are mature artists making music they love for a dedicated group of fans, and worry little about videos and other aspects of the star-making machinery.
Anti- also accepts and encourages Case's dual-track career. Case records and performs regularly with the indie rock band New Pornographers, many of whom are old friends from the Vancouver, B.C., area.
Knowing that New Pornographers leader Carl Newman is writing a song for her to sing is, Case said, "probably one of the most heartbreakingly lovely things that there is."
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