Wash Your Hands Of It

Neko Case “Night Still Comes”

I can’t listen to this song without feeling convinced that Neko Case is singing about clinical depression. The hopelessness, the self-recrimination, the inertia, the alienation. The lyrics are the things you think and say to justify it all, because it feels like the only thing that is possible. Case’s voice keeps the song from tipping into grey, blank misery. There’s just something in her voice that always sounds strong and stubborn and authoritative, and there’s a suggestion in the way she delivers her lyrics – and the ambiguous, possibly optimistic chorus – that she has some distance on these feelings. “You never held it at the right angle”: Is that what you say to yourself to push yourself away from the negative thoughts, or what you tell someone else to convince them that your negative thoughts are the truth?

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