About the Event

Neko Case steps out, cutting the sky and singing the stars, spinning fury and mercy as she goes. She loves the world and wears her heart on her sleeve, but she might eat it before you get to thinking it belongs to you. 

What if some wild creature drags you out to the woods, but the woods begin to become the whole world, and your earlier home, still visible in the distance, suddenly seems less interesting than where you are now? You might be in the middle of a Neko Case song. 

Wild Creatures pulls together some high points of feral joy from 21 years of Case’s solo work. The Virginian marked Neko’s debut as a solo artist in 1997. She delved into darkness in 2000 with Furnace Room Lullaby, scrawled Blacklisted in 2004 and recorded The Tigers Have Spoken live the same year. In 2006, she dreamed Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and in 2009 unleashed Middle Cyclone. She plumbed her own life in 2013 for The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, and raised hell in 2018 with Hell-On. Now in her third decade of recording under her own name, she’s just getting started. 

Is there another songwriter so fearless and inventive? Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, she wields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat. She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm in New England. 

Gathering power year after year, Case sings with the fierce abandon of a newborn infant crying in a basket in the woods. Since escaping the labels of country and Americana, the gorgeous train-whistle vocals of her early career sit submerged in her later style, where their ghost can appear any minute. When her voice jumps an octave, it’s almost visible, like sparks at night. 

From longing to malice, and collaborations with the New Pornographers and Calexico, Case’s music spans a broad spectrum. Her lyrics evoke worlds, imagining a woman pilot ready to die, a serial killer, a murdered child, and a tornado, just for starters. Is there any perspective she can’t write a song from or about? 

Case seems to live to bend the shape of the melodies she writes. Listeners might feel the music going in unexpected directions as she looks for the note that will negotiate a truce to fuse it to her lyrics. It’s not that you can’t find a verse-chorus-verse structure in a Case song. But you’re just as likely to find any chorus you hitch a ride with going off a cliff or to hear a hook you think might be the chorus, only to watch it disappear. 

Her songs often exist with distinct sections that recall symphonies. Changing from ballads or waltz time to a rock beat and back, the elements sometimes seem wired together to make an improvised explosive device. 

Imaad Wasif 

Los Angeles-based Imaad Wasif is part primitive goth-folk musician, part psychedelic fuzz face-melter. He operates as a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and dark poet, mixing the influence of surrealism in his lyrics with the modalities of East Indian music and Americana—arriving at a love song steeped in a personal occult liturgy. He describes his creative work as “Music for Unification.” Wasif has released seven solo albums and also plays bass/keys in Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He was also in alaska!, Lou Barlow’s Folk Implosion, Electric Flower Group, Grim Tower, and the sci-fi concept band ACID.