“MY DAD MADE UP ‘NEKO’ AFTER SMOKING POT.

I COULD NEVER FIND ONE OF THOSE LICENSE PLATES WITH MY NAME ON IT.”

For Case, letting go is the second-hardest part of finishing an album. “It’s even harder to transition back to being a regular person,” she says. “You know, sitting on your couch and doing nothing. You always have this feeling that there’s something you’re not doing.”

Today at least, she’s making a decent go at regular-personhood: sipping iced tea in her lavender-walled dining room while her dogs nap on their beds a few feet away. A black velvet scrunchie gathers her trademark electric-red hair in a sloppy ponytail atop her head, revealing an undyed natural palette of brown and gray underneath. Her skin is makeup-free, dappled by the sun, and her green-gray eyes are soft and friendly. She had surgery two days ago to remove a vein in her leg that wasn’t returning blood to her heart (“They were like, ‘It’s preventative, but we should really take it out ’cause you don’t want to have a stroke on a plane’ ”) and her “giant Barbie leg bandage” is making her move more slowly than usual. But no bother.

Her unassuming one-story home is dotted with telltale signs of a craftswoman. Pieces of cardboard—the beginnings of a miniature building she’s constructing for a Chicago art exhibition called “Exquisite City”—are scattered across the dining room table. Lemon and tangerine trees and pots of Ukrainian bell toma-toes, okra, and tomatillos fill the space in her backyard that isn’t monopolized by an empty in-ground swimming pool. And while her front yard is lined with the same cacti as every other on her residential street, it’s the only one with a fence made from old mattress springs (which she welded together herself).

Despite the baroque perfection of her current home, Case hopes to leave it soon for an even

more bucolic one on her farm—which would, in a sense, be a return to happy times. She spent fifth and sixth grade living with her mom and stepdad in Vermont’s rural Lamoille County and considers it the high point in a childhood that didn’t have many.

CASE’S FAMILY COMES from Washington state, but she was born in Virginia, where her father was stationed with the Air Force. Her dad took credit for her unusual name. “He claimed he made it up while he was on guard duty at the Air Force base, and he claimed to have smoked a bunch of pot, which, for some reason, he thought was a great selling point as to why that name is so great,” Case says. “I could never find one of those fucking bike license plates with my name on it.” When she was a year old, her family moved back to Washington, driving cross-country with her grandmother and grandfather, who was a school superintendent, in a big yellow school bus.

Her parents got divorced soon after, and she split her time between them, bouncing from town to town and school to school, getting picked on relentlessly because her family didn’t have much money. “Kids were so fucking mean and petty,” she says, audibly angry 30 years later. “They had this adultness to their pettiness that I just didn’t get; I didn’t understand why they were so cruel.” Things were different in Vermont. “It was the only place I lived as a kid where I felt like I really fit in,” she says. Everyone she knew there lived on a farm, so class wasn’t an issue. “They were really okay with themselves, so they were friendly and supportive.”

When her mom and stepdad relocated back to Washington two years later, Case found things worse at home than they were at school. “My family were pretty big alcoholics, and I wasn’t into it,” she says, letting out a nervous laugh. “It was time to go.” She left home at 15 and got on a “schedule of hand-to-mouth”—no one would give her a job since she was underage. She tried to finish high school, but was so malnourished that she couldn’t stay awake in class and ended up dropping out. She fell in with a group of young punk musicians and starting playing drums, despite the fact that her musical training amounted to a year of violin in elementary school. One thing she didn’t do was sing. “It was terrifying,” she says of the prospect.

Case eventually got her GED and completed a two-year program at community college (paid for by working the graveyard shift unloading trucks at UPS) before heading to art school in Vancouver. She played drums in a few Vancouver punk groups—including Cub and Maow— and at some point, started to share vocal duties. “I don’t really know when it happened,” she says about singing. “It wasn’t me thinking, ‘I am gooooood and I better share this!’ It was more like I had such a huge desire to do it.”

Carl Newman, the leader of the New Pornographers, remembers seeing her for the first time in 1995 when she was playing with the all-girl Maow. “They were wearing kitten ears and fur bikinis, and Neko was drumming,” Newman says, “and at the end of the show, she just go-go danced randomly for a minute. I remember going, ‘Who the hell is that girl?’” They soon became friends, bonding over their love of the Vapors and Shocking Blue, and in 1996 he asked her to join a band he was starting. A year later,

FROM LEF T: ROBER T LOERZEL; TIM MOSENFELDER/GE T T Y IMAGES; ERIC OGDEN; PAUL CLARKE

60 MARCH 2009 / GET SMARTER. GO TO SPIN.COM