Neko Case with Des Demonas
The Orange Peel
101 Biltmore Ave.
Asheville, NC
Oct. 8, 2025
Following his utopic DIY tour of the North East corridor documented in Midbrow here, Philadelphia-based musician Tyler Maxwell is headed South on a less idealistic mission: To survive as a working artist amid housing hardships and financial uncertainties at home. Follow along here as he writes about life as a performer and audience member traveling through Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas over the next few weeks in search of new sounds and scenes — and in lieu of, at times, a sense of security or stability.
Whenever I think of Neko Case, I think of Garth Hudson. The late, great musician – the last surviving member of The Band until he passed in January of this year, at 87 – played the haunting, impossibly pretty piano coda to Case’s “Star Witness," a highlight from 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, long one of my favorite albums. Hudson’s improvisation could just as easily have concluded a ragtime take on Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”; it’s a composition within a composition, as sweet and inevitable as springtime, a mysterious, fairy-tale-ish way to conclude the song’s bleak, violent narrative. “Star Witness” perfectly encapsulates Case’s filmic, country-noir style, one that is all her own, utterly personal, utterly inimitable. That sound, in all its twangy, dissonant, offbeat glory, was brought to full technicolor life at The Orange Peel, with Case and her five-piece touring band performing a set culled from across her wide discography, in support of her self-produced new album, Neon Grey Midnight Green.
Strumming her four-string tenor guitar, the wood finish on the top worn raw from decades of motion – a slash not unlike the shock of grey hair cutting through her red mane, not unlike the falsetto howl she shot across the room at the finale of “Deep Red Bells” – Case unsurprisingly commanded the room with her presence, her powerful voice, and her trademark, disarming humor. (She’s never been shy calling attention to goofy pants problems, whether “lamenting her skirt’s ‘zipper boner’” or, in my case, requesting gaffe tape from a stagehand for a hole she’d ripped in the butt of her pants mid-set. “And now we’re cooking with gas!” she pronounced, all gaffed up. “There’s no more wind in there…”) Her band was on fire, too, from guitarist Paul Rigby’s expert flatpicking and chiming, Byrdsian twelve-string twanging to Nora O’Connor’s perfect harmonies, always right there with Case, both halo and shadow. Keyboardist and saxophonist Adam Schatz took a few expressive sax solos throughout the show, bringing out a texture I wasn’t expecting from a Case-led band, and it really worked, a total scene-stealer. Songs from the new album were full of life, just as satisfying as the classic cuts – “I remember nothin’ but horizon,” she repeatedly sang in “Baby, I’m Not (A Werewolf)," and the band rose up behind her, quickening and quickening, in cinematic, widescreen-filling glory. The old songs have never sounded better: take the sultry nightshade beauty of the romantic “That Teenage Feeling," with its long, gorgeous melody eliciting cheers when Case makes “hard” a ten-syllable word, or the power pop of man-eating anthem “People Got A Lotta Nerve," still the sugary-sweetest bloodlust around. (My only complaint, naturally: they didn’t play “Star Witness.")
The six-piece ensemble was by no means a one-trick pony, playing in a range of styles that has always made Case too varied an artist to easily classify, and besides the pleasures of grooving and swaying with the sold-out crowd, I marveled most of all at the casual way Case’s songs unfold like folk tales, twisting and turning into enigmatic, unexpected, yet utterly natural shapes, crooked in all the right ways. Her melodies and incredibly-rich, novelistic lyrics follow their own logic, resistant to definition, the way that winding paths and roads nevertheless know exactly where they’re leading. Fox Confessor highlight “Hold On, Hold On” hit different in light of reading Case’s recent memoir, The Harder I Fight The More I Love You: “I know it’s unkind, but my own blood is much too dangerous,” she sang, imbued with new meaning and context from learning about Case’s utterly unique upbringing. She is, whether on the page or in song, a vivid, gifted storyteller, and she seems to be hitting a new stride, never more in tune with that gift.
