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EKO CASE’S BIGGEST fans bum-rush her at her front door. “Hi, guys!” she singsongs as four large dogs come clattering over floorboards to fill the entrance of her Tucson, Arizona home with sheer body-wiggling desperation. You’d think she’d been on tour for weeks, not at a local café for two hours.

Dropping a canvas tote, Case bends to bestow kisses and back scratches. “Oh, Travis, you’re such a ham,” she says to one of her three greyhounds. “I made the mistake of feeding the dogs bacon yesterday,” she warned earlier, prepping me for potential toxic blowback. “Greyhounds are really talented in that area.”

Happily, though, the only aroma here is a good one: the lingering scent of fudge cookies with white chocolate chips, which Case made last night. Dressed in blue and white Mizuno sneakers, navy blue cords, and a nubby, gray shawl-collar sweater, she ambles into her recently renovated kitchen (vintage porcelain sink and ’50s Tappan Deluxe stove), lifts a glass cake-stand cover, and displays the improbably professional fruits of her labor. “You want one?” she asks, handing over a perfectly rounded specimen, which turns out to have a striking balance of decadent gooeyness and intense chocolate flavor.

“I spent about a year figuring out how to make cookies,” says Case, 38, a proud subscriber to both Saveur and Gourmet. “About five years ago, I really had a craving for chocolate chip cookies, and I used that Nestlé Toll House recipe, and it was shit. So I made my kitchen into a test kitchen for about a year, until I figured it out.”

That would be the Neko Case m.o.: a relentless, near obsessive pursuit of perfection. “I’m a control freak,” she admits, and indeed, she spent the better part of the last two years recording her new, fifth studio album, Middle Cyclone. This collection of atmospheric story-songs and moody country

ballads steers clear of the hooky, buoyant pop rock she sings as a member of indie supergroup the New Pornographers. Here, she lends her arresting voice—molasses-thick with a fiery edge—to loosely structured songs that paint vivid portraits of heartache, death, and failed friendships. Enlisting guitar charmer M. Ward, plus members of the New Pornographers, Los Lobos, and Calexico, the album painstakingly blends twinkling hammer dulcimers, quaking strings, customized music boxes, and other arcane instrumentation in a finely wrought tapestry that sounds unmistakably homespun and rustic.

She recorded much of Middle Cyclone in a drafty 18th- century barn, which sits on a Vermont farm she bought a couple years ago with an eye toward making it her permanent residence. Case had the floors redone and wheeled in six pianos she picked up for free on Craigslist. Some of them were missing pedals and irreparably out of tune, but when she and her collaborators—including the Band’s Garth Hudson—played them all in unison for her cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me,” the sound seemed to fuse decades and eras in one massive, spectral choir. “I figure Harry Nilsson would approve if Garth Hudson was the lead pianist,” she laughs.

Hudson, who also played on Case’s 2006 album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, hears just as deep a resonance in the singer’s voice. “It sounded like the wind from the Rocky Mountains,” Hudson recalls of his first exposure. “Her voice sailed.”

Case built a makeshift cardboard recording booth in the barn to lay down her vocals, and other sounds often snuck onto the tape: A nest of wildly chirping baby robins make an appearance on the ghostly “Polar Nettles”; elsewhere, gusts of wind add spooky ambience. The 32-minute closing track, “Marais la Nuit,” is actually a looped recording of frogs outside the barn. “We were joking that there should be a post-album chill-out section,” she says, “and so I thought, ‘ Why not?’”

Photographed for SPIN in Tucson, Arizona, January 5, 2009

58 MARCH 2009 / GET ALBUM REVIEWS FIRST AT SPIN.COM