Sleep is a luxury for some people, and Neko Case is really craving some right now. Turns out the singer's hotel on the Sunset Strip is party central, with a bar right outside her window and drunken chatter deep into the night. "My sleeping cards," she says wearily, "just aren't lining up right now."
She's been on the road talking up her new album, "Middle Cyclone," hitting one city after another, visiting radio stations, performing her songs of indie torch and twang at the occasional showcase. The day before was San Francisco, and a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago awaits her in the morning. The usual "tour dementia" is already setting in, a condition she describes as the general stupefaction that occurs after too many nights in too many time zones.
"You wake up in a hotel room and it's dark and you don't know where you are," Case says with bleary good cheer. She sips iced tea in a hotel coffee shop, her tangle of red hair tossed over a shoulder. "It's hard to stay grounded."
This is also when the strangest dreams come. Some of those turn into songs, like the one that inspired the new album's dark and surreal opening track, "This Tornado Loves You," as anxious beats and banjo race beneath the singer's lush, adoring vocal. The dream went like this: "I was driving across the country and stopped at a gas station. I was approached by a tornado, and the tornado wanted me to read it a book. It was a sweet image. I woke up and it made me really happy. I still think about it."
There are many scenes of stormy weather on "Middle Cyclone," set for release today, and the turbulence is often internal. The new album was recorded over 10 months last year, and for the first time, most of the songs were written and rehearsed with her band before going into the studio.
Case's last release, 2006's "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood," was widely acclaimed for its emotional echoes of traditional country feeling within subtle waves of rich, postmodern pop. "Middle Cyclone" is her sixth studio album and continues the transition from the straight-ahead alt-country of her 1997 solo debut, "The Virginian."
On the album cover, Case is shown on the move, crouched on the hood of a 1960s muscle car, sword in her hand. It's a strange, dynamic image for a collection that conjures up images not just of tornadoes, but of prisoners and bad love.
