She never meant to make music her career. “Music and art were viewed as a real pipe dream,” she says. “I never brought it up to my family, and I never considered that for myself, but suddenly I had to quit all my jobs because I was too busy being on tour.”

A FEW HOURS LATER, Case and I sit at Rosa’s, one of her favorite local Mexican joints, where she has a bowl of chicken and rice soup and her sixth glass of iced tea for the day. It’s early and the place is crammed with young parents and their screaming toddlers. Munching on tortilla chips, Case almost seems to fit into this little slice of American strip-mall life—her music and backstory to the contrary.

Middle Cyclone comes from the term mezzo cyclone, which is the column of air that rises and spins in a tornado. Case became obsessed with tornados after having one particularly vivid dream. “This tornado was a living, breathing thing,” she says. “And he asked me to read him a book because he couldn’t hold it in his hands. It was a diary of someone he was looking for, but he couldn’t read their diary to find out where they were.” That dream inspired the opening track, “This Tornado Loves You,” a layered lyric that grows and whirls like its twister protagonist, on a deadly mission to find his love (“Carve

your name across three counties / Ground it in with bloody hides / Their broken necks will line the ditch till you stop it / Stop this madness / I want you”).

After that dream, Case noticed that tornados had become a theme on the album. Even her cover of “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth,” by quirky electro poppers Sparks, references them. It’s easy to read into her dream and the resulting theme. With her commanding, sirenlike voice (just imagine her trying to whisper), Case is a force of nature herself. As “This Tornado Loves You” implies, consummating the love with the tornado would result in death. Perhaps she’s the tornado, the destructor, someone unsafe to love.

Case disregards that notion. Though the album is full of love songs, she says none of them are hers. “They’re love songs about characters; they’re love songs about places,” she says. “I try not to make them about me. They’re just stories.”

Our conversation is momentarily silenced by a particularly loud wail from a nearby child.

“Do you ever want to have kids?” I ask her.

“No,” she blurts without hesitation. “This bloodline stops here.” She emphatically shakes her head and purses her lips. “I can have dogs— they’re not so high-maintenance that they need me constantly. Plus, you know, growing up as an unwanted child, I don’t know if I’d be a very good parent, because I don’t know what you’re sup-

With Carl Newman and the rest of the Ne w Pornographers,
2006; wailing alongside John Mellencamp and T Bone Burnett
at 2007’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert; melancholy baby
on board, 2009; riding to an electrolysis appointment
with her Maow bandmates, 1996

posed to do, really.” (Case has long since mended her relationship with her mom. “We never really hated each other or anything,” she says, “She’s been recovering for a long time, and she tries really hard. My dad passed away a couple of years ago, so there’s not much to patch up with that.”)

But soon after announcing her no-children policy, she amends the statement. “I’m not not into the idea, especially living on a farm. I walk around there sometimes, and I feel like it’s a real shame that there’s not a kid there to enjoy it, because I remember what it was like to enjoy that as a kid. So, you know, eventually I might adopt. But I don’t ever want to get married or anything like that. I think I would feel kind of trapped, but that’s just because I’ve never seen it work.”

She says that her longest relationship lasted six years (“Wasn’t really worth it”) and that people always want to know if she’s dating someone—that is, someone famous. “Yeah, I’m on the Hot List,” she snorts, rolling her eyes. “There are really hot actors and musicians beating down my door.” For the record, she considers most GQ cover stars to be “teeny weenie” with “giant heads.” “I’m always into dudes like Gene Hackman,” she says, idly crunching an ice cube.

A two-year-old boy at the table behind us starts to cry after his parents get up to pay the bill and leave him in his high chair. Case and I wave at him and smile. “See, it’s okay,” she coos. “We’ll give you attention.”

In so many ways, Case suggests some solitary force as untamable as the tornados running through her songs and dreams. But here, for a moment, she seems different. Almost…motherly. Under her gentle, playful entreaties, the boy’s sniffles subside, and soon he starts to smile.

Case sighs. “Our new boyfriend.”

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