003. "Middle Cyclone", Neko Case (2009)
In Middle Cyclone, Neko Case is feral. She is a “tornado”, a “maneater”, an “animal”, “made of mistakes”. She is coarse and savage, wild, unforgiving to her prey. She will do anything to survive, and she does it all for love.
Case graces the album’s cover, perched atop the hood of a polished red-brown car, ready to strike. She wields a sword, barefoot, her weapon longer than her own wingspan, gazing into the distance with precision, like she’s just seen something in the distance and is ready to strike.
Neko Case once looked to her surroundings for lyrical inspiration, writing melodies to accompany her observations, sometimes removing herself from her own thoughts. In her acclaimed solo album Fox Confessor Brings the Blood, released in 2006, she tells stories, writes characters and conflicts and fashions indie-folk worlds for them to live in. But Middle Cyclone is different; although Case wields the sword, she often turns it on herself, carving out parts of herself and fitting the assorted haphazard fragments into something new. The record is just that: beautiful chaos, made of parts. There are contradictions: the same woman who sings of tearing through counties and devouring her prey doesn’t seem to want what she seeks. Case knows that her means to an end is antithetical, but presents no intention of remedy. She’s not vowing to be a better woman, to let down her walls and be gentler with her impulses; she’s just admitting who she is.
The record itself is made of those same fragments. Sick of “social vampires” in Tucson, Arizona, where Case made a home for five years, she purchased an old farm in Vermont. The property’s barn was fitted with a cardboard recording booth and eight pianos, all found free of charge by the artist on Craigslist, two of which turned out to be less-than-functional but were still deemed repurposable. The album’s lush feel is due to these derelict pianos: Case brought in five other players to fill the barn with sound, recording tracks with as many as six pianos as to create an orchestra of keys. In the record, every note and chord performed is punctuated by another, a predecessor or an echo. Keys hang in the air until they are swept away by the tide, a crashing symphony of reverb, a pleasant kind of drowning.
The barn proved unpredictable in a way Case favored; the record is full of gusts of wind, the croaking of frogs, birdsong in the distance. They patter in and out, weaving through melodies and riffs, as if they were manufactured, intentional. In a record where Case professes herself to be a ruthless animal, a force of nature, nature came to her; it makes its presence known in Middle Cyclone. She sings of the memory of elephants, the triumph of mollusks in a tide, the “tin roof” songs of a magpie bird. The Earth’s forces are interwoven into the fabric of every recording, inseparable from every moment in time.
Throughout the record, there exists a sense of haste, a scurrying through every song, like she is vomiting every word, every chord. She announces her presence like a stampede in the distance, a flurry of brushed snares, rushed guitar chords, and interspersed wind chimes; each instrument clangs with a sonic recklessness, brash and cursory and raving, but with cunning precision, a controlled chaos of an orchestra. The record’s opening track, aptly designated as “This Tornado Loves You”, Case inhabits the storm, announcing her bloodshed with a kind of perverse pride: “My love, I am the speed of sound / I left them motherless, fatherless / their souls dangling inside-out from their mouths / but it’s never enough / I want you”.
And in accordance with Case’s declared purpose in the record — her impudent, nearly masturbatory confessions — the veil peels back every so often to reveal layers of insecurity, the parts of herself she can’t quite reach out and touch. In the titular track, her voice careens through plush guitar strokes: “I can’t give up acting tough / it’s all that I’m made of / can’t scrape together quite enough / to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love”. Case is not asking to be loved here; there is no begging, splaying, pleading for attention, but rather a statement. She acknowledges the “fact”, but keeps it at a distance. She is inhuman, after all.
Many of Case’s professed insecurities seem to be rooted in quick allusions to her upbringing. In “Vengeance is Sleeping”, she reminisces on her past self with a fresh awareness: “Vengeance built me hastily / and I dragged the clanging notion I was nobody, nobody / nobody”. She sings of her own deception: she felt like “nobody”, and in return, she made herself something - but not somebody.
Neko Case was raised in Tacoma, Washington, where she left her family’s home at age fifteen. She had nowhere to go, but knew she could not be there. Born to Ukrainian immigrants in Virginia, Case grew up impoverished, often left to her own devices as a child; she played with her dogs, sang, made art. “I should have been an abortion,” she said to Daniel Menaker for The New York Times Magazine, “the only reason I wasn’t was that my father was a Christian…he hated his life. And he reminded us of that every day”.
So she left. She stayed in friends’ basements for short bursts of time, flitting around the Pacific Northwest’s burgeoning punk scene, and supplementing her life with a lot of alcohol and PCP. She earned her GED and borrowed enough money to flee to Vancouver, where she attended the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, then just a small institution, where she learned the drums and played in local bands. When she abandoned her degree program and thus her student VISA, she left to work in Seattle, then to Tucson, and then Vermont. There, she renovated a once-defunct barn and historic home, filling both to the brim with old pianos and refurbished appliances.
In 2017, eight years after the release of Middle Cyclone, the property burned down. While she resided in Sweden, recording the album Hell-On with producer Björn Yttling of Peter Björn and John, the land set fire — caused either by poor electrical wiring in the barn or a spontaneous combustion of horse hay — and she had nowhere to return home to. She rented a cabin, a shelter for her and her many rescue dogs, until she returned to the ether of what her home once was.
In an unflinching essay, the first official publication of her newsletter The Lung entitled “I Want to go Home from Square One”, Case mourns her home, as honest as ever:
“Since I can remember, all I wanted was a home I didn’t have to leave. I wanted heat! In at least TWO of the rooms! I was tired at ten! Just let me be a kid, man! Maybe no mold? No fucking fleas in the carpet!? I didn’t want to have to ask permission to paint the rooms or get the leaks fixed. I thought I was finally there! I wanted to share my home and I wanted the people who came to visit to stay”.
There is a kind of tragedy there seemingly impossible to numerate. After a lifetime of instability, an innate vulnerability that seems to come with merely daring to live in the world, Case found a home in Vermont. She was free of the “social vampires” in Tucson, the food stamps of her childhood, into a home with custom-made kitchen tiling (“Neko Red”) and collectibles from her life. Her home was the product of scratch, filled with recycled materials and knickknacks, and then torn away from her in an instant. Like a force of nature.
“Art and nature are my real parents,” says Case in the same newsletter, “they have gotten me out of all the bad places and taken me around the world to meet good people and feel the connection that is ‘humanity’ and see and partake of the unique art and nature that feeds and cares for them, and by extension, in some familiar way, me!”
Neko Case is the cyclone herself, and a victim of the cyclone. Nature gave her everything — a career, stability, a place to call home — and then burned it all down.
Therein lies a familiarity I am all too eager to reckon with. In January of this year, one week after my birthday, the ushering in of a new decade for myself, my apartment flooded. It hadn’t felt like a home in the half-year I’d lived there; I didn’t love the neighborhood, didn’t know my neighbors, and felt cramped. It was a dirty studio with a mezzanine, my futon overlooking the white tile of the ground floor, and it had been in disarray from the moment I moved in: dust coating every surface, windows cracked, a defunct garbage disposal.
The ceiling began leaking in October of the preceding year, or maybe September, or maybe August — those months of my life are a blur for no good reason. I spent most of my time indoors, leaving only to attend class or for a shift at my underpaid catering job. It was a very roundabout way of self-care; I cooked every meal for myself, spent hours doing my hair just to kill time. I listened to music and binge-watched Vanderpump Rules and Gilmore Girls. I spent all of my time alone and pretended to be okay with it, pretended it was preservation. At the time, it probably was. I was playing it safe.
But my ceiling was leaking, and I hated going outside, hated seeing other people, hated asking for help. I sent emails, filed official complaints, called and texted and begged for my apartment to feel safe. The leaks didn’t spring up often, maybe once or twice a month, but they were annoying as hell.
At some point, they stopped being annoying and became something else entirely. I came home from my parents’ house one day; I’d been attacked outside of my door by five men a few days earlier, and I was still shaken up, still afraid to turn corners or board subways, evading anything that might happen. And then I was home, or at least, in my own space, where I’d diligently paid rent for months, where my belongings resided.
I opened the door, and there it was, a thick layer of water coating the tile floor. It was impossible to determine how long the ceiling had been gushing for; the roof was coated with quickly-melting snow, and it was making a home in my apartment. It kept filling up and filling up, water spilling into the bathroom, caressing the heels of every chair. The water was unstoppable.
I’ve never been anything close to a hoarder, but I like having things. I like souvenirs, reminders of where I’ve been and the people I’ve loved. It’s important for me to keep certain things, to preserve parts of my life.
Right under the leak spot, there was a box of books, organized for no particular reason. There were titles I’d bought myself, some given to me by my parents or sisters or an old friend or lover. I didn’t even like some of them, the people and the books themselves, but there they were, being engulfed by the stream. Twenty years of memories and joys and sicknesses, my life in a box, all drowning.
I left dozens of furious calls; my leasing company was unresponsive. I called a roofer, who couldn’t help in the case of a rental. I emptied my wallet on anything that could help, any manufactured material that would stop the flow. Nothing worked. I watched as holes punctured my ceiling in real-time, water spilling out of every new crevice. Every application of Flex Tape was accompanied by a new crater, more fervent than the one before.
I was sick and sobbing and alone and pleading to no one in particular. I can’t count how many times I curled in and out of myself, weeping like a child one moment and slamming the walls with my fists the next. My life, my false sense of security, was in exodus, the remnants pooling around me, dancing in the water around my ankles as if to taunt me.
I had nowhere to go, nowhere tangible to welcome me home. I wanted to be in my childhood home in Illinois, but it wasn’t mine anymore: my parents had sold it six months ago to relocate closer to me. They have their own house, a beautiful-suburban three-story, but living there would have felt like adding insult to a lot of different injuries. They were in the process of carving out their own space, removing the occasional deformity, picking out wallpaper. They’d found a new home after decades of raising children in one place, and they were so excited to have a home of their own. It wasn’t mine.
I fled; I stayed nights at the homes of generous friends and returned to the apartment only to retrieve a rare unscathed belonging or to grab something to eat. I finally had grounds to terminate my lease, so I found a new room after three days of meticulously searching Facebook. The place was across town, a neighborhood I’d only dreamed of living in, clean and spacious and fully-furnished, but too expensive for the long-term. I rented a U-Haul and wrangled what was left of my life into it.
I lived there for four months; we’d arranged for a temporary situation, and I intended on honoring it. I knew I wouldn’t be there for any significant period of time, but I was desperate for something to sink my claws into. My roommates were nice enough to me but fought like feral cats, always spilling their frustrations into our group chat from rooms apart. Within a week of my implementation, one left without a word at five in the morning one day; the other fled a day later, per the subletter’s insistence. There went the stability I had been desperately craving.
I needed so badly for a place to feel like mine. I made my private room a temple of organized chaos, flinging my clothes indiscriminately, leaving bottles of nail polish strewn along the floor. Posters would fall from their taped hinges and I’d do nothing; I let them fall under the bed and wither, collecting dust. It wasn’t pretty, but it was strangely reassuring. All of my things, what was left of my life, was all in plain view. This was my room, one I paid for, and it wouldn’t be forever, but it was for now. It was mine for now and you couldn’t take it away from me.
I don’t like dirt and dust, and I don’t feel compelled to make messes in communal areas in circumstances of cohabitation, but I loved the mess of my own room. I loved the random pile of mismatched socks on my desk chair and the drawer full of empty Juul pods. I smoked cigarettes out of my open window and drank cans of Truly in my bed and reveled in my own company, the mess that I had made. I left the empty cans on my bedside table.
I like when places feel lived-in. When I visit someone else’s house, I make a point of negating their inevitable apologies for the mess; I like to see dishes in the sink and dirty clothes in a pile on the chair. It means someone lives there and is comfortable enough in their own space to do something with it, even if it means kicking their shoes off at the door or leaving a dribble of toothpaste in the sink.
In the final months of my residence there, I had become more open and outgoing. I’d switched jobs twice and landed on one I could tolerate, one where I had friends and opportunities to mess around and have fun. I had a lot of fun, simply put, and spent more nights out in the world than at home in my own bed.
I made a friend. We met after months of playing direct message tag, until we finally split a bottle of white wine and talked about yacht rock until the early hours of the morning. He was charming and warm when I met him; he has a way of turning on a certain appeal, of making you feel like the most special person in the world. We became very close very fast, spending days and nights together, learning everything we could about the other. Or, at least, I wanted to learn; he was so much older, so fascinating, almost malleable. He fell in-and-out of himself depending on the given circumstance, opening all of himself up to whomever wanted to be in his company. He made good money and loved spending it on people, buying drinks and lending cigarettes to friends, paying for Lyfts, asking nothing in return.
Our friendship felt more like an agreement than anything. I’d never known anything like it at the time; we met and just knew, knew we had to be in each other’s lives, knew we had to be a part of something together. It was somewhere above platonic love but never really romantic, just an understanding that we’d been brought together for some all-encompassing reason. I wanted to be a part of his life, to live in the world he had created.
He got me a job, the one I could tolerate, after weeks of hearing me complain about the dive bar-slash-bowling alley I was serving at. He brought me into his life almost immediately, introducing me to friends somewhere between my age and his, people who were equally funny and charismatic, people I still love today. Then he announced there was an extra room in his house, one with a cheap monthly rent, and would I like to take it? It made sense, as the room would be available right as I was scheduled to leave my sublease. I wanted to live with my best friend, this person who would be in my life forever, so caring and wonderful to be in the presence of.
I was elated. I had spent countless hours in this house, listening to Steely Dan in his room or conversing with friends in the living room, and now it could be my house, too. It felt so lived-in; it was imperfect, of course, but there were old DVDs and board games stacked in the living room and vases of fake flowers and a pillow of Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element. He’d lived there for nearly five years, and for most of that time, it had been a venue for house shows. There was a cabinet full of stray water bottles left by past partygoers, left untouched for years, still waiting to be claimed. I loved the history of it, the energy teeming in the walls and the furniture.
Everything was coming together, it seemed. Fate was serving me. I’d wanted a home for so long, and now I had found it, in this house, with this person.
Something changed when I moved in. My friend seemed to become a little more sour with every passing day, turning into himself in a way I hadn’t seen before. He could still turn his charm on; he used it like a tool, wielded whenever he needed something from another, whether it be the attention of a woman or a hefty tip from one of his customers. But he stopped turning it on so often. Most of the time, he was cold and cutting, hard to decipher. I didn’t know this person. I had never seen him raw before, only the versions he chose to project to the world. Cohabitation breaks down those walls, makes it impossible to hide the worst and weariest parts of yourself.
I changed, too. I was at a specific kind of breaking point then, tired of the constant motion of my life, never a moment of repose or solitude. I knew I didn’t want the rest of my life to be loose and tempered by my social calendar. I wanted grit, a life sturdy and earnest, made of something greater than the nightly revelries that my life had become. I started staying in and going to sleep early. He didn’t want to change; his life went on without me.
I understood suddenly, perhaps too suddenly, that this was not my home. I’d tried to get swept along with the tide, to close my eyes and cross my fingers, and it hadn’t served me. I still love the house, love this place where I finally found the impetus to restabilize much of my life, but it has never been mine. For a while, I accepted that like one accepts a kidney stone. I’ve made peace with it now; I have more practice with taking things as they are these days, and there’s little I can do about my instincts. My innate rejection of this house as a home means that I’m growing up and moving on, becoming my own person, no longer blinded by codependency.
In a way, fate did serve me. I brought my life to a new house in a new neighborhood with a new person, and through that, I learned what I don’t want my life to be. I wanted to be a good person, someone who works hard and upholds a moral code, someone who values authenticity and integrity. I knew my friend and his own decisions weren’t healthy for me, weren’t encouraging growth. He was more interested in smooth deception and evasion of responsibility than anything else. I had to let go of him if I wanted to make a home in my life, to build my own ethos and live through it.
He won’t read this. We still live together, but only for another ten days - in ten days, I’ll pack up my life again and try to make space elsewhere. I’m moving into my parents house, actually, now that it’s more fleshed out, more of a place they’ve made for themselves. They invited me in, wanted to take care of me. I couldn’t be more grateful for that gift, for a place to shelter myself while I continue trying to figure out my direction in life.
But it’s temporary, too, which I understand. It has to be. Places — just like people and things — cannot last forever. There’s a natural end to everything. Sometimes it’s bloody and raw, your apartment breaking at the seams and flooding, and sometimes it just ends without a word, like a miscalculated friendship. I’m not a fan of endings, but I’m a fan of planning for them. If something’s being taken from me, it’s nice to anticipate it. So, it’s temporary, and it’s fine.
But I want a home. Like Neko Case, I want walls to call my own, floors I can walk on without feeling a kind of shame for my presence. I want to feel like I belong in a place.
But the feeling of home is greater than any structure, greater than what furniture and light switches can produce. Throughout the record, Case sings of accepting her own need for love, the need for attention and devotion that she keeps like a secret. Love means belonging and acceptance; it’s a place to go, a place to move around and make yourself comfortable. The feelings of home and love are inseparable. Houses and buildings are just structures, places for us to live, but homes are so much more. They are moments and meaning all wrapped up under one roof. The places I’ve lived thus far haven’t been homes because they were not mine. I did not make space for myself, whether subconsciously or with careful intention, or at least, not in the right way. I slept in those beds, but I did not let myself live in them.
I’m getting better at feeling at home in my own life. I have friends of my own accord, places to go and be, lists of things to do every day. I spent the last several months of my life feeling like a “tornado”, a “maneater”, an “animal”, “made of mistakes”. I was making decisions incongruent with the unfulfilled potential I was so blindingly aware of simply because they felt safe. Like Case, I felt like I’d been built by vengeance, a life fashioned from different circumstantial fragments.
I had nowhere to call home, and I tried so hard to sink that further into myself and plaintively accept it. My life became exponentially more beautiful the moment I stopped accepting it.