Ghosts of Country Music Future
I've been listening - a lot - to Neko Case, a singer I came to know via New Pornographers, for whom she's done some vocals. But as a solo artist, she's got a considerable output, and my own starting point was Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, an album I spent considerable time listening to, over and over, much to the exclusion of many other recordings I otherwise regularly or even occasionally enjoy. Fox Confessor is a remarkable record, so I went out specifically to get some of her "& Her Boyfriens" output, to be amazed at just how country she was. Recently I bought the album immediately preceding Fox Confessor, The Tigers Have Spoken, and it was straight out of the "boyfriends" country-Case style manual - which isn't itself a negative, as she's doing things with the lyrics that would nearly make Lucinda Williams blush to claim equal standing. What's really remarkable, and so very much more so on Middle Cyclone, the latest release, than even on Fox Confessor, is that Neko Case has forged a sound that so far and so well transcends categorization. This is what I've heard in so many artists at the top of their genre, where the cross-over isn't even a cross-over, it's purely itself, the way the "American songbook" - that stuff Sinatra sang, and Tony Bennett, etc. - was beyond merely pop, even "merely" swing, jazz, big-band, whatever. And - ZOMG - you can get the lyrics.

P.S. A. C. Newman's got a solo career? Too many records to buy, now.