fox confessor
Neko Case is a beautiful, beautiful woman, and she just opens her mouth and this voice rings out, yes it's like Patsy Cline but better, and the songs are darker, and Neko makes it look so easy. When you take a beautiful redheaded woman with a voice like that, which sings of foxes and tigers and sparrows, and you back her with a steel guitar and upright bass and drums, and she has the white electric guitar of her own and she keeps grabbing her long hair and flipping it over her shoulder and laughing with her band, and then that mouth opens and the sound is so pure....
it is all okay when she tells you she has never smelled this bad, "like salmon!" and that she botched her own chorus because she got a whiff of her armpits.
And it is okay when, after she comes back on stage for the encore, she says, "I just got my period in these pants!" and laughs again, like we're all in on some joke, and we all laugh with her.
Yes, we were blocked by an invasion of Enormously Tall Men on the floor and ran for the balcony. Yes, we were too far away then and the air was freezing and the girls at the bar below us would not shut up. But that voice, that voice, what a spell it casts. She did a gorgeous cover of "Wayfaring Stranger," and one of Dylan's "Buckets of Rain," and a lot of songs from the new album as well as some old favorites (mine is "Deep Red Bells.")
Also, I got an album (Canadian Amp) she made in her kitchen between Furnace Room Lullaby and Blacklisted, and she only sells it on tour, and, yea verily, it is good.
I would love to see her in a smaller venue than the Roxy, with its six bars and two levels and squawking , bar-clinging girls. But the plushness felt right, the carpets and gold lions and velvet curtains. Oh, to see her in a little club though, in her spit-and-sawdust days when some of the patrons probably smelled as bad as she did!
it is all okay when she tells you she has never smelled this bad, "like salmon!" and that she botched her own chorus because she got a whiff of her armpits.
And it is okay when, after she comes back on stage for the encore, she says, "I just got my period in these pants!" and laughs again, like we're all in on some joke, and we all laugh with her.
Yes, we were blocked by an invasion of Enormously Tall Men on the floor and ran for the balcony. Yes, we were too far away then and the air was freezing and the girls at the bar below us would not shut up. But that voice, that voice, what a spell it casts. She did a gorgeous cover of "Wayfaring Stranger," and one of Dylan's "Buckets of Rain," and a lot of songs from the new album as well as some old favorites (mine is "Deep Red Bells.")
Also, I got an album (Canadian Amp) she made in her kitchen between Furnace Room Lullaby and Blacklisted, and she only sells it on tour, and, yea verily, it is good.
I would love to see her in a smaller venue than the Roxy, with its six bars and two levels and squawking , bar-clinging girls. But the plushness felt right, the carpets and gold lions and velvet curtains. Oh, to see her in a little club though, in her spit-and-sawdust days when some of the patrons probably smelled as bad as she did!