NEKO CASE

11/18/2009

Knight Theatre (16+ must have id - under 16 with parent only)

Doors Open: 7:00 - Headliner Begins: 8:15

Knight Theater

$29.50     Orchestra

$27.50     Grand Tier

$25.50     Mezzanine

Tickets can be purchased in advance at the Box Office (Belk Theater Lobby), online at CarolinaTix or by phone at 704.372.1000

There's a special challenge to being an artist in this increasingly fractured cultural age; a delicate balancing act, between being of your time, and striving for timelessness. Few contemporary artists even try. Neko Case is an exception.

Case's last album, 2006's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, brought her to that nexus where critical acclaim meets commercial success. But Case's impact can't be measured merely in chart placements or press plaudits. It's her ability to connect - on an uncommonly deep and meaningful level - with her audience. She's one those artists, you see: the kind whose songs linger in your head, your heart and soul long after the record has stopped spinning.

While Case's creative evolution has made for an impressive story so far, she's about to write the most remarkable chapter in that continuing saga with the release of her sixth studio album, Middle Cyclone.

The tornado that blows through the title and several songs on Middle Cyclone is an apt metaphor. Neko has famously taken her own twisted route, lighting for a time in the South, in the West, in the Northwest, in Canada, flirting with as many musical styles as homes. She is settled-or unsettled-in Tucson for the moment, with dreams of moving full-time to the former dairy farm she owns in Vermont. She recorded the new album in both locations, as well as studios in Toronto and Brooklyn.

For Case, the beauty of making music, of creating, is that it remains a mysterious, confounding and, occasionally, contradictory process. 'When I toured for Fox Confessor one of the things I said in interviews about that record was that I don't like writing love songs, that I can't write them,' she recalls. 'Of course, as soon as I said that, I ended up writing a bunch of love songs.'

 It should be noted here that Case's 'love songs' are not the typical boy- meets-girl variety, as the opening track, 'This Tornado Loves You,' dramatically attests. 'What would it be like to be pursued by a force of nature' asks Case. 'That's a frightening and exciting prospect.'

Case resists the temptation to see the tornado as metaphor for something more personal, like a destructive relationship from her past. 'Of course, I'm fine if people want to interpret it that way, but for me, the song is very literal,' she says.

 Neko is equally earnest when she sings exultantly about the revenge of caged animals on their keepers, in the polemic 'People Got A Lotta Nerve.' The lyrics we're tempted to read as ambiguous and layered ('But you seemed surprised when it pinned you down/ to the bottom of the tank... I'm a man-eater, and still you're surprised when I eat you') are in reality the plainest. Neko's killer whales and elephants really are killer whales and elephants. But with a magician's gift for misdirection, she keeps us off balance, questing and questioning.

 Presented in conjunction with NCBPAC & MAXX MUSIC

www.nekocase.com