Today I Nearly Made Myself Insane Trying to Remember the Name of the Singer Who Had an Album Cover With Her Wielding a Sword on the Hood of Car and Who Wasn’t Jenny Lewis
Posted on November 6, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 21 Comments
Turns out it was Neko Case. Here’s a song from that album.
The reason that my brain insisted it was Jenny Lewis is that both musicians are redhead solo performers who also performed in bands (The New Pornographers for Case; Rilo Kiley for Lewis). It took me hours of extremely imprecise Google searching to finally figure it out. I am… relieved. My brain is full of nonsense sometimes.
How was your day?
— JS
I had a productive day and that was necessary.
My day was entirely too stressful given what is actually on my plate so I gave in to the early sunset of daylight savings, left work early and finished KPS which made my day a whole lot better and which led me here:)
I plugged your headline into ChatGPT:
“The album cover you’re likely referring to is “Warrior” by Scandal featuring Patty Smyth, where she is seen wielding a sword while kneeling on the hood of a car.”
It’s the most off-base response Ive gotten. When I said it was Neko Case I didn’t get an apology ..
“ The singer you’re referring to is Neko Case. The album with the cover you described is “Middle Cyclone” from 2009, where she is indeed pictured with a sword on the hood of a car.”
My day is good and getting better. I’m at the tail end of Covid and needed a pick-me-up. Thought I’d try something that I hadn’t read for a while, so I picked up the Audible version of “Agent to the Stars”.
Just delightful. As always, Will Wheaton is great, and apparently, you’ve always been just as funny and sarcastic as KPS and SV would lead us to believe.
I accidentally found out what an artist’s name was on the bottom of 2 ceramic pots I had bought as part of a lot several years ago. It was written in such a stylized fashion I thought it might have been Cherokee syllabary. Huzzah for serendipity!
Oh Maker. This is the nonsense my brain puts me through but for words like butter. OK, not really but I do sometimes forget what a microwave is called and it is referred to as the food heater contraption.
My day was filled with trying to convince a 91 year old geriatric to shower before she left the hospital so she would smell like the hospital when she got home and, ergo have her cat reject her. Which he did. He came around about an hour later when he food the funny smelling who looked like Meowmy and sounded like Meowmy was indeed Meowmy. So he jumped up on just stomach which is stapled together and sent her into a for of pain.
He is, after all, a cat and had no point of reference for “Stop I had surgery.”.
My day was a night because time zones.
Search engine addiction … you could have just asked, but no. I know how it is.
@ Faughan – I’m still impressed with “African countries starting with K” – “There are none, but Kenya starts with a ‘K,’ which is pronounced like a ‘K’.” The world is much enriched by this point of view.
I’ve been sick for a few days so my day was filled with kleenex and coughing. Gotta say I’m sick and tired (ha!) of people “are you sure it isn’t Covid?” Folks, I’m 65 years old and have had over 65 colds in my life. I know what a cold feels like.
We now return you to your normal scheduled comments.
I wasted time the other day trying to find a large, mustached, actor from Chicago who may have played a bartender or a fireman.
Never did hit a connection.
My mama is On Time for things and not usually notional. However, she once woke up and decided she was not getting out of bed until she remembered that one guy, you know, with the hair, from the next town’s first wife’s name. She rejected names alphabetically. Her name is Wanda and she was very nearly late for work instead of being 45 minutes early.
That’s a good album. I own it. Now I know what I’ll listen to today.
It’d probably be worse for me because I discovered all four of those acts—the New Pornographers, Neko Case, Rilo Kiley, and Jenny Lewis—around the same time, the early-to-mid aughts, on the late, very lamented woxy dot com.
Mitigating that is that we’re bigger fans of the NPs and Case than of the other two. Don’t get me wrong, we like the other two; my wife and I even saw Jenny Lewis in concert on her tour with the Watson Twins, but we’ve seen the NPs four times and Neko Case solo twice.
Still, I guess I don’t study album covers that closely, because while I immediately knew the artist from just a glance at the cover, I would never have remembered that she was holding a sword.
This is somewhat hilarious because this is one of the few albums that I could name based on the cover as described; it’s one of Caitlin’s favorites.
I spent a few hours this week looking at Google Maps/Earth, trying to match the pic my wife took out the window of a trans-Atlantic flight last week. Turns out it was Baffin Island. Spent a looong time thinking it was Greenland.
My day contained two extremes of the kinds of problems retired people deal with. A person willing to go up on a roof finished pointing, sealing, caulking my chimney and now I must wait for an extreme rain (which I’d really rather never have) to see if my leak is fixed. And I decided I needed additional parts to raise a Lego kit to perfection so I ordered those and now must suffer waiting for them.
There is often nonsense in my brain and I try not to worry about it.
One of my favorite songs. We’ve had the good fortune of seeing Neko Case twice in our tiny community in the rural Sierra Foothills.
On the work front, ’twas a frustrating day.
On the upside, though, I learned that Duran Duran released a new album just a couple weeks ago! And it’s spooky-themed, kinda-sorta, as befits a record dropped just before Halloween!
Mind you it’s also about 55% covers by volume (the math is fuzzy around things like “redoing their own songs” which happens 1.5 times, and whatever’s going on with the “Super Freak” mashup). But I think it’s worth the listen.
Years ago I went to a bookstore and asked for the new book that something to do with time or a calendar in the title. Of course, they had no idea. When my brain finally came up with the title a couple of days later it was “Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
This song was the first song she played at the only time I’ve seen her do a ‘solo’ show (except half the band was from the New Pornographers, but she was playing her songs), which was also my first time back to live music since the pandemic started. (Here in Vancouver it seems like she doesn’t usually come along when the NP plays, I think it’s like 1/4 shows that she’s been with them (that I’ve seen)).
Welcome to my world…
I once did a search for “song with the lyrics ‘Hurray Hurray’ and ‘silver lining’ Neko Case” Those were the only words I could remember and I could have sworn it was by Neko Case. The answer: Silver Lining by (you guessed it) Rilo Kiley