KALX DJ Madame X speaks with Neko Case in an interview that was originally broadcast on October 30, 2025.
MADAME X: Hello. Hi. How you doing?
NEKO CASE: Good, how are you?
MADAME X: Thank you. Nice to see you. It’s so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
NEKO CASE: No problem.
MADAME X: Yeah, so I think we have a short time, so I’ll just dive right in. I’m curious about many things about you. And the first thing I think is, you know, you’re a person who has managed to carve your own path through the world instead of looking at what’s there and taking steps that are already there. You seem to have made your own way through things, and I’m just interested to know, did you have role models for that?
NEKO CASE: Yeah, I think I tried to do things in ways that looked like certain ways and then I started meeting gay women in music and people who were non-binary and trans and stuff and who played music. I realized I was very worried about what men thought of me and very worried about what the industry thought of me. And there was a way that a lot of the women I met were—they didn’t grow up worrying about the male gaze. They had a much more intense sense of purpose and a lot more swagger, and a lot more like, just a very, very capable presence. And I realized that is the person I wanna be. I wanna have that sort of swagger—swagger is the only word I can think of for it, even though it’s not necessarily the right one—but I just remember every person like that I ever met who just had that confidence and that swagger and that singular sense of purpose that did not involve what men thought or what the industry thought. I was so grateful to see an example of a path that looked like the right one. So I think that had a lot to do with it.
MADAME X: Yeah. So that leads me to my next question, which is, one of the things I admire about you, just the way that you present yourself in public, is that you seem to have a really healthy relationship with anger. I don’t think that’s very common actually, because I think as women we’re supposed to sort of squash that. Do you feel like you have a healthy relationship with anger?
NEKO CASE: I do. I feel like women’s rage will save the world. It’s something that is supposed to be this horrible, horrible thing, but, you know, we’re saturated. We have had enough. Our rage is so justified, it’s not even funny, but we’re told that our rage is something broken inside of us and there’s something wrong with us for feeling it and expressing it is worse than feeling it. So that’s a lot of what it’s fuel—and you wanna learn to control it. You don’t just want it spraying around like some crazy cut artery just getting blood on everything; you wanna be able to control what happens. And that’s not easy. So it’s kind of a lifelong practice, but to respect your own rage is to respect yourself ultimately. And it is a powerful tool. Rage is a big umbrella and it has a lot of things in it, and it has a lot of lessons in it. It’s just a really important facet of who we are as humans.
MADAME X: I’m so happy you exist in the world. Thank you for that. I mean, that’s amazing. Do you think it comes from religion, this sort of women not supposed to be angry, or is it bigger than that?
NEKO CASE: Well, I think it’s really, really, really old. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve just often tried to figure out when did men start hating women? When did we start separating each other as men and women? When did we start hating queer people? Like, that doesn’t make any sense that we would do any of those things. So, I’ve read a lot of books and there’s different theories. Western culture has a lot to do with it. The ancient Greeks have a lot to do with it. Women basically lived as house slaves, and I think that there was a time in ancient Greece that it wasn’t that way. But previous to that, there were egalitarian societies where women and men did things based on their abilities. There were especially horse societies, horse warrior societies, because a woman was as strong or as fast as a man because everybody’s made equal by these horses. And the invention of the recurve bow made women very powerful as well on the battlefield. Based on radiocarbon dating now in the last 20 years, they figured out that a lot of warriors were actually women. Especially on the steps of Eurasia and even Genghis Khan’s Army, many were women. We’ve always been there, we’ve always been doing these things and I don’t know why this shift started in this direction to make half the population lesser, but it did. Somebody saw some good somewhere. But when you think about how mentally ill people like Donald Trump are, of course there were people that mentally ill back then who wanted power and people stupid enough or greedy enough to follow them. And so how it happened isn’t so shocking. But the fact that it’s lasted this long is.
MADAME X: I think you’re speaking from a place where you’ve amassed a vast life behind you and incredible knowledge. If you were to meet your 21-year-old self today, what would that conversation look like?
NEKO CASE: I don’t know, because the lessons I learned were really important. I would probably try to give myself a lot more confidence to be able to do more. Like I would’ve tried to give myself more confidence to pick up an instrument earlier. Granted I didn’t know that tenor guitars existed until I was 30, so maybe I’d be like, there’s these, and give myself a tenor guitar earlier.
MADAME X: Is there anything that your 21-year-old self might say to you now?
NEKO CASE: It would say, “I’m so glad you’re not married.”
MADAME X: Why?
NEKO CASE: I think that’s ’cause I just have never wanted to do that. I have an incredible partner, but it’s weird, we don’t feel like we have to do something like that. And I’m also like, historically it’s kind of a slave contract, which I’m like, “Nope, not doing it.”
MADAME X: I was just gonna say, is it like taking part in the institution that feels icky?
NEKO CASE: Yeah, like I could see us having a party where we invite all of our friends or something, but we basically just really love each other and we have a really great daughter. So that’s kind of the celebration, you know what I mean? We live every day with each other and it’s awesome. I mean, what’s better than that? Nothing.
MADAME X: So I feel like this culture we live in is so focused on image and you seem like a person—and obviously there’s gonna be a private part of you that you keep for yourself and your family that is not shown to the world—but you seem like a very real person in public. Is that hard to be in this day and age? ‘Cause it seems to me like it would be.
NEKO CASE: No, ’cause I’m an oversharer, it doesn’t feel natural to not be myself with people. I noticed a long time ago that the audience really responded to that when I would just make a mistake and go, “I just totally picked this song up. Look what I just did.” They were so much more invested in it when they see you just being a person making a mistake, right? Because we all make mistakes all the time. And finding it funny with the audience is—I don’t know—I just got so much from that and realized how much they were invested in coming to the show, to not just look at art or witness it, but to support it, like literally emotionally supporting you. And that’s a gift that you can’t just ignore. You gotta really be reciprocal with that. I think I first saw that once doing a show with Kelly Hogan in Chicago. She knew the Indigo Girls and they were like, “Come up and sing with us.” So we were like, “Yeah, great.” So we went to Chicago Theater and we were watching Michelle Malone who was opening and the audience were maybe the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. She’d finish a song and they’d be like, “You’re doing a great job up there!” They cared about who the Indigo Girls brought along as an opener. I was like, that’s the kind of audience I wanna cultivate. I want people to feel that good at a show. And so I think Indigo Girls definitely are a huge influence because the way they just treat their audience so nicely and their audience feels so invited and entitled to feel things and to give their support. I think it’s super beautiful and it’s the completing of the circuit. As a band, we don’t play for ourselves—we have fun at soundcheck or in practice—but we don’t play the same at all. It’s wildly different. When there are people watching us, we are so much better and we don’t do that alone. We do that because there is an electricity and a current that is happening between us as a large group of people, which is one of the really cool things about human animals. We have an incredible system of communication and it’s so varied. There’s so many different things we can do and we forget those things. We’re not really in touch with our instincts and we forget what magnificent animals we are. We really are magnificent and not in the gross, we’re the top of the food chain, macho, stupid way. We are majestic in the way we fit into our ecosystem and we forget about that, but watching us as a species have this beautiful wavelike communication with each other in that setting is so remarkable to me.
MADAME X: Amazing. In my day job, I work in theater, so I sort of understand that language of the porousness between what’s happening on the stage and what’s going on in the audience. I mean, the live event, it’s everything. Speaking of theater, you’re writing the music for Thelma and Louise: The Musical.
NEKO CASE: Yes. It’s been a while in the making, but we’re getting there.
MADAME X: Theater takes a long time. I’m curious to know, is there anything that has surprised you about working in the theater? Have you learned anything different about the way you work?
NEKO CASE: I’ve never done anything so large on a collaborative scale. They said it would probably take about seven years and I was like, “Wow, that’s a long time.” But it’s taken about 10, with COVID and everything. Working on a song for 10 years versus working on it for two to five years is very different. And pleasing myself is very different than pleasing the four other people on the creative team. Most importantly Callie Khouri, who wrote Thelma & Louise—I want her vision to be what she wants it to be because Thelma and Louise are very real to me. I would kill for those women. And it’s a masterclass in songwriting and storytelling. At first, I was like, “Oh, maybe I’ll be a little bit sad about losing some things that I write and other people don’t like it,” but I’ve not missed a single thing. The collaborative nature when you’re working with people who are so unbelievably talented is the difference. If I’m making my record, I make most of the decisions. It’s like I have a plow hooked to me and I’m in the field and I’m hoeing the rows and I’m planting the seeds and I’m doing a lot of it by myself—the big decision making that is not the playing, because I can’t stand computer menus. When you have four other people helping you make these decisions, it’s like suddenly you’re just in this floaty hovercraft and the load is lightened so much. That’s one of the great gifts of collaboration that a lot of people don’t think about. I didn’t think about it either; I kind of had to experience it to know that it’s there. But if you really invest in a collaboration with people you really respect, it’s so much easier than it is harder.
MADAME X: You’ve done so many things. You’ve obviously done music and you’ve had a million different musical identities and directions, and you’ve written a memoir. You are doing this theater project. Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’d like to do?
NEKO CASE: Visual art, which is what I went to school for. I miss it. I mean, I do get to do it a little bit sometimes, but I just wanna have like an art show; I wanna actually get to make stuff and do it. I don’t see a time for that really, but I’m hoping to find time for that eventually.
MADAME X: That’s amazing. That somehow feels like a completing of a whole artist’s life.
NEKO CASE: Yeah. I think a lot of musicians come outta art school, a lot of the self-taught ones anyway, because the systems of creation are kind of the same and the art school version just has less rules. Not that people who are classically trained or trained for jazz in schools don’t know how to break the rules, ’cause they can break the rules too. But not knowing what is set in stone supposedly makes it so much easier to do things how you think they should be done. Not knowing how to write a song makes it easier to be outside the normal way of writing songs, I guess.
MADAME X: Which is a lovely full circle back to our first question about finding your own way in the world. So I think that’s a lovely place to end.
NEKO CASE: Yay. Thank you so much.
MADAME X: Thank you so much. You’re very welcome. I can’t wait to see you on tour when you come to San Francisco, and I will be there. And so happy about it. So thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day.
NEKO CASE: Thanks. Talk about the record.
MADAME X: Oh, are you kidding? I love it. I know we didn’t talk about it in the interview, but I just feel like I’m sure you’re talking about that in a lot of places and I will talk about it certainly on air a lot. Is there anything you wanna say about it?
NEKO CASE: Well, I think people are getting the idea that this is the first record that I produced myself, which it’s not. It’s just the first record where I credited myself alone, but I’ve produced a ton of records.
MADAME X: That is not a surprise. I think it’s a little confusing in my bio. Maybe I have to fix it.
NEKO CASE: Yeah, I think it is, ’cause I had that impression too, so I’m glad you said that. What made you decide to credit yourself this time?
MADAME X: Well, I have my own studio. I recorded it in my own studio. I worked in other studios as well, but for the most part, it was mostly recorded in my own. And I forget that in the world of producers, there are women, non-binary and trans producers. And so I wanted to remind myself as well as reminding other people. Because when I think of producers, I just think of a big group of men and I’m like, “Nah, I gotta change my own thinking too, you know?” So that’s pretty much why.
NEKO CASE: Fantastic. Thank you. Anything else on your mind?
MADAME X: I’m on tour, so I’m a little dumb to be honest with you, but…
NEKO CASE: Understandable. Because tour will do that to you.
MADAME X: Yeah, I’m all muscle memory right now. The brain is a little… like, I can look at antique lamps online or something, and that’s about the mental capacity I got going right now.
NEKO CASE: Well, there’s a lot of antique lamps out there for you waiting. Well, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for having me aboard.
MADAME X: Thank you so much. Take care. You are welcome. Bye bye.
