Back in 2000, Donna came home from the book and music megalomart waggling a CD jewel box at me, saying, "You've got to put this on right now." She had been desultorily sampling new music at one of the headphone stations at the store when she was gobsmacked by the opening measures of an old-school, whiskey-soaked, closing-time ballad--two big a capella beats, "Want to..." before the band crashed in on the downbeat, "...get it all behind me, you know everything reminds me...."The song was "Set Out Running" and the singer was Neko Case. In 2000 she was little known outside the already fading alt-country scene, but now she's the Lady Empress of the indie world and a darling of the critics. We saw the "Furnace Room Lullaby" tour at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill that year; when she came back in 2006 to support "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood," they had to book her on back to back nights. Her dark, brooding, minor key tunes tend more toward the lyrical than the narrative, and without access to her personal and enigmatic world of symbols the listener gets more mood than meaning out of some of her denser songs. But that voice.
You can read more than you'd ever want to know about her at Wikipedia and MySpace, but you'd do better just to listen to this.
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