The Strange, Lonely Childhood of Neko Case

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Nico Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.
Nico Case is a lead vocalist of the indie pop collective The New Pornographers, and she's

also had a long solo career. But what's most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are

often oblique. Like a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it's about incomplete grief.

You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

And then there are lots of times when Case seems to run? This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen.
Last month, Nico Case peeled back some of the mystery. She's written a memoir called The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.
She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child.
By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes, quote, she couldn't sign it quickly enough.
She didn't even have to think it over. And so Case hid a lot behind her music.
One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remember that the beanbags were corduroy, you know? Oh, yeah.
The image was so perfect. Like, it was such a perfect image from that era.
And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to Atomic by Blondie.
Over and over and over and over. Like, only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.
Right, right, like just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, okay, that's the moment that she discovers the power of music.
And like in a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover like what music is for and what it does to you. Music was always just there, and I took it for granted, but I also

leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do because I was kind of, you know, I was just a girl.
And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie or myself and the Go-Go's.

I just knew I really loved them. So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? Like you played in bands, but you didn't really sing for a while.
Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America, so I wasn't raised with a lot of self-confidence.

So what was the point where you were like, oh, I can do this?

It wasn't so much deciding I could do it.

It was just that I couldn't help but to do it because the desire was so intense.

Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing. Like, what was the desire? Even just to sit near it.
Anything. Anything I could have.
In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful.
And that's now. Oh, that's not a complaint.
It's not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

No, no, no. It's not powerful and it's not pretty.
Like, those are things that, you know, I wish it were powerful. I don't care that it's not pretty.
I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty.

And, you know, singing is an incredible physical feeling. It's like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

It gets so physical.

It is so athletic.

And there's nothing else like it. Well, even in this just few minutes that we've been talking, you like describe a little journey from a point where, you know, the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you you can and can't do things.
And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, you know, either through your voice or how you experience music or even the way you write about institutions. Like you write, you know, the country music institution was limiting in some ways.
Oh, it's straight up misogynist and racist and hateful.

We don't even have to sugarcoat that one.

The current country music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous.

And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they're trying, and I'm like, don't even bother. Let that thing die.
That thing is poison. Come over here.
Let's make the other thing. And is the other thing, like you inventing your own genres? You know, like you've given them names over the years that are not country noir or odd rock and things like that.
Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women? I think that what it is is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don't have a problem with evolution. But there's something very white supremacist about how country music works, and they're really, really dialing down on it now.
So you don't mean just then. You're talking about then and now there's a resurgence.
I think it's worse now. I think it's far worse now than it has been in a long time.
I mean, there was a moment, there was a good moment for women. It was a brief good moment for women in country music.
There have been a couple. Yeah.
You know, sometimes people are so talented that they're undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out. Uh-huh.
Well, it's good Beyoncé made that country album then. We're lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things.
That's true. That's true.
I think that reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music. And I wasn't sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing.
Like, is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? Like, at times I almost read it like, oh, this is a key to some lyrics. And I wasn't sure if that was correct or not correct.
I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don't like to ruin songs for people.
You know, how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it's not the lyric that you thought it was and then you're like, oh, not as good anymore.

If you think you know what a song's about

and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it

and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life,

you don't want to ruin that for people.

Yeah, but I don't know if it's ruin it.

I think it's just complicated.

I'll give you an example and maybe just indulge me and you can through the process. Like, I'm the listener, you're the singer.
When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album, The Worst Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song Nearly Midnight Honolulu, which has run in my head for 10 years.
Hey, little kid that I saw at the bus stop one day. You know, which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it's hard to keep up with who's the you and who's the me.
When your mother said, your mother said, like I couldn't hear her, she said, get the fuck away from me. And then that kind of devastating line about, you know, my mother, she did not love me.
My mother, she did not love me. No, no, no, no, no, no.
In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way? Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii, and I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.
You felt helpless to protect the kid. Yeah, but the kid also was being very resilient, and she was, you know, entertaining herself.
She was very spunky and cute, and her mom was just an asshole. I mean, reading your book, I did think, oh, Nico, that line resonated with Nico for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother.
Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way? Well, I mean, I told the story. I've never written a book before, and, you know, I didn't set out to write a memoir.
I wanted to write fiction. But, you know, it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, we'll pay you to write a memoir, though.
And I was like, okay, a memoir it is. And that's not a complaint, or, you know, they didn't hold my heels to the fire or anything.
I just thought, okay, well, it'll just be a little challenging. Because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn't the most exciting thing ever.
You know, you spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don't think of myself as like, oh, people are really going to want to know this.
So, I mean, that's one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes maybe of good things too. Because I didn't want it to just be, you know, oh, poor me.
Especially because it's not unusual. It's most people's experience.
I mean, you know, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that, those are most people's experiences.
Or growing up really poor, like that is most people. Mm-hmm.
I think your experience is actually pretty unusual. Yeah, it's pretty damn weird.
Pretty damn weird it is. When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn't even realize her mother was sick.
And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day, I don't want you to think your mom's a ghost, but she came home. As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover, but didn't want Case to see her so ill.
And Case, who, remember, was a little kid, believed her. She had her mom back.
She was happy. It only occurred to her later, after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother, that she might never have been sick in the first place.
It's one of the weirdest stories I've ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget.
And I'm not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way. I didn't know that until I was in my early 20s and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death.
And then they were like, that's the weirdest fucking thing I've ever heard. And I was like, oh, yeah, that is actually pretty weird, isn't it? But, you know, kids, like kids just think what's happening to them is what happens.
So, you know, I just didn't, it didn't occur to me. So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn't actually how you move through the process.
Like I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, She did not love me. No, because that lyric is, I mean, it is haunting.

Like, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it, I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn't. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.
It's in me all the time. And, you know, it's just not my fault.

She didn't love me.

And it's just the fact. Even if I don't see you again.

When you work out kind of memories and pains in song, I don't know, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Like, is that, like, does it do something for you to work it out in lyrics? Only in a super nerdy kind of neurodivergent slash Virgo way where

I'm like, oh, I'm taking all the things and I'm organizing them in this box. And so now I can put

this box over here like a hard drive. So my brain has more room in it.
And it's all color-coded and

I know where it is. That's like Virgo organization.

Interesting. Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, oh, from family trauma and a mother who didn't love you comes immense creativity.
Like, how wonderful. What's wrong or write about that interpretation?

Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things in general is not true. You mean they don't need to suffer? No.
Because it feels like reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things. No, if I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along.
You don't need that. So to you, it just feels like pure baggage.
It's like a thing you've had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way. It's an absolute trunk of shit.
The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. I still am a trusting person.
I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn't. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, no, you still want to believe people are good.
And I think that's a more important quality than whether or not you're wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away. You know what I mean? Yeah.
I was more thinking like you had this life and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere and you had a huge strong motivation to do that. And so you found music.
Yes. But that's just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.
No, music is the only thing that never let me down. but trauma did not make me a great musician.
Like, I am a journeyman at best. And, you know, I'm broke.
I don't know. I think great musicians do other things.
Well, did you just say you were broke? Yeah. Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Financially broke. Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.
The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming. Those three things together.
Wow. And I cannot catch up.

When we come back, more with Nico Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with her friend's death that she said felt like getting on a spaceship to go to the moon.

I felt absolutely unafraid.

And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life.

And I couldn't believe it.

That's after the break.

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV insurance. RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.
So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance. They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel see progressives other benefits and more when you quote rv insurance at progressive.com today progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates pet injuries and additional coverage and subject to policy terms i wanted to ask you about gender because it's the way you you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now.

And I'm curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender.

Like, in your lyrics to Man.

I'm a man.

That's what you raised me to be.

You don't mean that literally.

What do you mean by I'm a man? I do mean it literally. I mean, I am of the species.
I am a man. Like, whatever's going on downstairs doesn't matter.
Like, I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and there's still a lion.
I'm a man in that same way. And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are.
That has been one of the most exciting things I've ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself. You know, because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy.
I'm more of a gender-fluid person. And when you say it's taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just like, you know, at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians.
And then there's a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that. So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? Like, how do you think about yourself? As neither.
I am neither. I still call myself she, her.
I'm used to it. It doesn't bother me.
And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won't.
but I also understand that the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it.

I just won't.

But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that either. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. So you don't see the world, you see the world as making some cultural progress in how we think of what's a man and what's a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.
Politically, we are fucked.

Socially, I don't think what, you know, the president and his people represent represents the American people. I don't believe that Americans in general have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants.
I just don't think they do.

To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Well, I mean, a human being's right to be is—I mean, that's just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just, they just aren't separate.
Not that I want to talk about them, politics specifically, because I just refuse to be afraid. Do you feel like that's something you found at this age? Because you've said, oh, there are times in your life where you haven't had

self-confidence, you've been depressed, or, you know, you've kind of lost your mind even

in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And, you know, a lot of people who menstruate who don't anymore have said the same things about what, you know, the hormone shift.

Like, you don't care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die and sitting with her body for four days as, you know, she was an organ donor and she had a massive aneurysm and, you know, her partner just heroically did CPR and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her despite the fact that she had no brain activity. And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital.
Like, it's very, very specific. So, and then you have to wait for all the tests.
Like, there are, you know, barrages of tests that happened to make sure that, you know, you're healthy and that your organs can really save someone else's life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was.
And, you know, we joked a lot about how she was going to work even in death. She was all about service.
and then the day came, right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an honor walk. And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors.
And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone's saluting them, and it seems so important.
And I think I actually saw that in real life. And I just thought, all those things that I worry about and the injustices, we are so right to fight for them.
And I was there watching this incredible thing happen. And these beautiful people from all over the world, many of the doctors are immigrants.
And, you know, it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world, many of the doctors are immigrants, and, you know, it was

a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.
loud ass exuberant joy

I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It's related to this.
I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness. But then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the trust your contempt paragraph.
Do you remember that? You don't have the book in front of you, right? I don't, but I do talk about this occasionally. Yeah.
Dissect it if you can. If something doesn't stir anything but contempt in you, then there's a reason.
Don't canonize your contempt, but don't ignore it. This is the part that I love.
It's so good. Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you.
You do not deserve or ask for these things. They're not always teaching you a lesson.
Where would you say you are kind of after, you know, you have a lifetime of songs, you have this memoir, it sounds like you have friends, on this path? Is it different for different people? Like forgiving, members of your family, people have hurt you in the past. Oh, yeah.
I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not. So you would say you're at different places with different people? Oh, yeah.
What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shatter role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful, maybe, is the right way to read that.
I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely and, you know, he had to be an adult man and, you know, head of the family and all these things.

And he was just a kid inside.

Yeah.

And he didn't know how to handle it. You know, he maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.
And the kind of pain from that, he didn't use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. Like, his forward path was genuine.
He wasn't doing a great job, but he was also, you know, a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn't want me.
But he ended up with me. Yeah.
And ended up raising you. Not really.
Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.
Sometimes. Sometimes.
Yeah. There was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car.
Like you speak car talk with each other, which is very familiar to me.

I come from a family of mechanics and car people.

And so I found that very peaceful.

It was like a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things.

Because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever. And it would have been nice to have been included.
It would have been—I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn't want any kid.
you know i listened to to, like, I've just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you.

And sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums.

And I wonder from you, what's the song you wrote when you were happiest?

Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy.

Like, it just makes you feel good.

Probably Hold On, Hold On.

It's melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself.

And I make good decisions in it.

So it's like a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma,

like you can handle it.

Partially.

It's a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn't mean the moment's going to last.
In the end I was the mean girl Well somebody's in between girl I mean, I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies and, you know, I have such a loving relationship with them, and, you know, it's always made me feel good to play it. And, you know, my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple years ago, way too young.
And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it's like a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow. Let it go, cause black music Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on Thank you again to my guest, Nico Case.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West, edited by Claudine Bade, Rob Smersiak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Abade is the executive producer

of Atlantic Audio,

and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thank you for listening.