I’ve been involved with music most of my life. I don’t recall when it began, but I can clearly remember first hearing Giant Steps and the Bartok quartets. Once in a great while, a piece of music will give me an epiphany as strong as the first pangs of love, something majestic and transcendent.
From adolescence on, I set about trying to create something that could generate that sort of reaction. I think I came close a few times. In one medium or another, I think we all get that chance a few times in our lives.
Neko Case certainly has. Several times, she’s nailed it perfectly.
I first became aware of her work several years back when I heard “I Wish I Was the Moon.” It’s a marvelous, haunting song, with some of the most perfect instrumentation I’ve ever heard in popular music. At first, it seems to be channeling Patsy Cline, but it turns into something at once despairing, majestic and quite original.
It’s three minutes that can stop your world and focus everything into a slightly more vivid hue. That’s what we’re all chasing, in one way or another.
Fortunately, the industry has given Ms. Case the opportunity to further her talents, and the public has been rightly receptive. She’s made several successful solo albums, as well as four with the New Pornographers. She has a voice that’s by turns delicate and visceral, and she’s got the songwriting chops to back it up.
Her voice evokes 1950’s rural A.M. radio, but her lyrics and arrangements speak of all the things that happen in those desolate spaces we never hear about. She knows that violence, jealousy and obsession are often just as present in love as are compassion and reverence. Though these ideas have always lurked just under the surface of country music, she’s got a talent for making them quite clear.
So, she’s had a new album out for a few months now, and I’ve not had the opportunity to listen past the first few songs. Driving home tonight, I skipped forward to hear the rest, and “I’m an Animal” cued up as I sat at a stoplight.
This is one of those songs.
The arrangement feels oddly like U2 in their heyday, with an insistent, straight-8ths bass line and widely-voiced chords. Then there’s that voice, at once primal and clear:
I do my best but I’m made of mistakes
yes, there are still things I’m still quite sure of
I love you this hour, this hour today
and heaven will smell like the airport
but I may never get there to prove it
so let’s not waste our time thinking how that ain’t fair
I’m an animal
You’re an animal, too.
Over the course of the record, she anthropomorphizes her persona several times: as a tornado ripping through towns and lives to find a lover, as a magpie watching from a power line, and as a literal maneating animal. In every case, her voice is more than up to the role, but here, it’s distilled into something passionate, defiant and riveting.
It’s quite a simple song, really, and its directness gives it undeniable power. I’m reminded a bit of “Beast of Burden,” but Wood and Richards never had this kind of restraint, nor did Jagger ever soar like this on record.
This song deserves to be considered every bit as much a classic. Anything that makes me inhale coffee and not care fits the bill.