“It’s the devil I love”: Neko Case, Bob Dylan and David Bowie

I’ve just come across this little item on NPR about Neko Case’s new album, which includes a scrap of a song and a bit of her sounding pretty vulnerable about the process of putting a record together. It’s worth a listen, as is this great little featurette I posted a while back about the recording of her last album, Middle Cyclone (and indeed this amazing live version of ‘I wish I was the Moon’).

I’m always slightly bemused by the fact it’s Middle Cyclone that’s ended up being Case’s breakout album, because if the truth be told the album I find myself going back to the most is the one before it, the brilliant and luminous Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, a disc that might be less polished than Middle Cyclone, but is starker and stranger and filled with that very special sense of magic and discovery you get when a writer or musician or artist is suddenly liberated into the possibilities of something new.

Here’s an interview and a live performance of ‘Hold On, Hold On’. Jump to 7:24 for the song.

And while I’ve got you can I recommend you check out the rather hilarious Nash Edgerton video clip for ‘Duquesne Whistle’, the first track from Bob Dylan’s new album, Tempest (and while you’re there Alexis Petridis’ review of the album, which pretty much nails my feelings about it (not least because I’ve spent a lot of the past week listening to the extraordinarily brilliant Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde)) …

And finally you might want to take a look at Dorian Lynskey’s profile of David Bowie, published to celebrate the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Bowie retrospective exhibition (an exhibition that also inspired the now-reclusive Bowie to release one of the funnier public statements I’ve read in a while). You might also want to check out Hugo Wilcken’s excellent 33 1/3 study of Bowie’s Low (available as a book and for Kindle) a book I can’t recommend enough. And if that’s not enough Bowie for one Monday perhaps you should take a look at this post of mine about him from a while back.

And because I can’t resist it, here’s Bowie’s ‘Song for Bob Dylan’, off Hunky Dory (another album I’ve been working hard lately) and a lovely HD video for ‘Life on Mars’.