Billy Bragg was a veteran of both protest music and actual protests when he released “Workers Playtime” in 1988… an album of love songs fueled by a passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Letters From Prison, in which the Marxist philosopher wondered “if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures.”
Thirty-five years later, it's a notion that still resonates in “Sending Up Flares,” the new album from Portland’s Casey Neill and the Norway Rats. A fan of Bragg and a longtime ally to environmental causes, Neill’s earlier work has included both the 1995 rallying cry “Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations” and a 2005 story song that took its name from Portland’s Sisters of the Road nonprofit. Neill has also played traditional Irish music, been on Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls’ record label Daemon, and is a stalwart member of Scott McCaughey’s sprawling band The Minus Five. With “Sending Up Flares” — an album for what you might say is the not-quite post-Trump or post-COVID era — collectivity, community and love are intertwined in every song, whether Neill is paying homage to Ursula K. LeGuin, Wim Wenders and David Bowie in “Meteor Shower” or gratefully celebrating the power of “found family” in “The Ones You Ride With.”
In Norway Rats, Neill rides with producer and guitarist Chet Lyster (also of Eels), bassist Jesse Emerson, accordionist/keyboardist Jenny Conlee-Drizos and drummers Ji Tanzer and Joe Mengis, with such friends and collaborators as McCaughey, Anita Lee Elliott, Peter Buck and Corin Tucker also appearing on “Sending Up Flares.” For Neill’s March 10 show at Polaris Hall, the band will include Emerson, Conlee-Drizos, violinist Kathryn Claire and drummer Paulie Pulvirenti (Eyelids). In addition to featuring songs from both “Sending Up Flares” and an upcoming solo record, the Polaris show is also the long-overdue continuation of Neill’s traditional St. Patrick’s Day-adjacent gig, which hasn’t happened since the March 12, 2020 show at Mississippi Studios became one of the first Portland shows to be canceled prior to full lockdown.
Jason Cohen: In terms of live music, the pandemic made it feel a bit like time had stopped. But obviously, you were writing and recording all that time.
Casey Neill: Yeah. Creating things requires time. You have to let your brain stretch out. And doing music, especially the way I work — I’m in the Minus Five, I'm producing records for people, I'm occasionally doing other things like music for theater and soundtracks, and then just gigging like crazy, it's really hard to have time. I hadn't written a song where I felt like, “Wow, cool,” in a year and a half or two years, leading up to that. And then in 2020 and 2021 I wrote, I don’t know, like 35 songs that I would deem “keepers.” It was probably the most creative time in my whole life. At least since I was in my 20s.
Cohen: Were some of the songs reactive or responsive to the moment?
Neill: Some of them were. Like the song “How Beautiful Am I?” is about Marianne Faithfull. She had COVID and (her longtime friend and producer) Hal Willner had COVID and both of them were like first wave: older folks on respirators. And she survived, and Hal Willner did not. They were texting each other from their COVID beds, and I was just so moved by it. And then I read Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography and wrote the song.
And then some of the songs are about connection to people, and finding wonder in the world. When it was just so hard to do that. It just felt like everything was going to shit, and we couldn't see our friends. One of the other important songs on the record is “The Ones You Ride With,” which is like a song for found family, and what that means and how important it is to just be connected to other humans.
Cohen: So how did you first fall in love with Irish music?
Neill: I think it was hearing the Pogues, really. A friend of mine bought the “Poguetry in Motion” EP. I was a teenager and it was like, fricking amazing. I've been around folk music a lot of my life so I just sort of instantly gravitated towards the punk energy of it.
I sort of have this problem of being a musical omnivore. (Former Norway Rats and Minus Five drummer) Ezra Holbrook (used to) tell me, “You like too much stuff!” Because I've hopped around various musical genres on my own records. I started out very much in the folk-punk vein, like, doing stuff with Jello Biafra, and then I got signed to a folk label and it's like, okay, I'm doing gigs with Pete Seeger, and then went into the world of traditional Irish music. And the groundwork for that had been laid by that incredible Irish music scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: the Pogues and Sinead and Hothouse Flowers and the Waterboys’ “Fishermen’s Blues” really became kind of the most formative music for me. It’s always at the core of what I do.
But my producer back in that time period was this guy Johnny Cunningham, who was one of the world's greatest Scottish fiddlers. We had this friendship and musical partnership for years, and then he died of a heart attack in New York at the age of 47. He was the one who was like, the Celtic music stuff you're doing is great, but you don't want to go too far down it. Because there's people like himself who had been, y’know, raised with a fiddle in his crib, and were just masters, but had a hard time finding an audience. He was like, take the melodies of it, take the passion of it, and just incorporate it in your own songs.
I wish he could hear the records we’re making now because I think he'd fucking love it.
Cohen: Obviously Shane's been sort of a talisman for you. Would you say Joe Strummer is another?
Neill: For sure. I was thinking about this because I did these shows with the Indigo Girls in the fall. Throughout all the different music I played, there's been a thread of politics to it. I'm trying not to slam people over the head with it, although I certainly have done that before. And people will be like, oh, you’re playing protest music. That's like a ‘60s thing. And the things that inspired me were not that at all. It was The Clash. It was even new wave bands: “Shout” by Tears for Fears is an anti-nuclear song. R.E.M. Fugazi. Now Tracy Chapman is in the news. And Strummer was kind of the overarching inspiration for all of that.
Cohen: I know some punk rock people who were too cool to like The Clash, but I think there are also Clash fans who don’t know how good his solo stuff was.
Neill: Yeah, he was evolving — no less committed to the things he was committed to, but really open-hearted. He was like an antidote to cynicism in a really beautiful way — being in the world and wanting truth and justice but also celebrating the fact that without people you're nothing.
And I've tried to do that. Someone said to me after a show in California, that my songs are about what it's like to be in the world and think this way when so much of the world is going this other direction. And it makes me feel like I'm not alone. And I was like, "that's like exactly what I'm trying to do." Kind of approaching (the music) with radical empathy towards how to go about your life. And how to see other people.
With Irish music, a certain amount of both grief and celebration is kind of built into it. Are you wondering what the emotion of that's gonna be like this time?
Grief is always different. Losing Johnny Cunningham at the time I did, it’s had a ripple effect for 20 years. But there's this thing that happens where you sort of carry a bit of their power with you and they push you forward. I didn't know Shane or Sinead personally. But, y’know, Shane sang about death so much, and nobody expected him to make it this long, given all of the things. So we're certainly going to do a whole brace of Pogues songs at the end of the night.
We’ve also got Kaia Wilson on the bill, from Team Dresch, and she makes beautiful solo records, and she's a massive Sinead fan. We were actually at the show that Sinead played at the Crystal Ballroom, maybe six weeks before COVID, and one of her last four or five shows. And I just remember she came out on stage, and the minute she opened her mouth, there was a collective gasp in the room. Like, we couldn't believe that a voice like that existed. She made music that was so beautiful and modern, and then seemed to reach back into 1,000 years of the struggles of Irish women, and it's all coming through her voice.
So that's intimidating. Kaia’s going to help out with that, and I think she’ll do some Sinead in her set too.
Cohen: So tell me about the original inspiration for your song “Sisters of the Road,” and how you ended up being connected to the actual organization as well.
Neill: The song was based on some traveler kids I knew: people that were like, modern freight-hoppers, and kind of semi-historical fiction about Portland in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. That era of Portland that was captured by Gus Van Zandt so well. People would see kids spare-changing on the street or something and just dismiss them, and I think we see it now with the homeless situation. People are being driven off the cliff by the economic realities of the world at the moment, and I don't understand how you can not approach that with empathy for each individual and for the situation they're in. And Sisters of the Road is such an example of that, and (founder) Genny Nelson was so amazing in terms of that mission.
So then there’s that Winterfolk show that happens in Portland every year that was done as a benefit for Sisters of the Road (Editor’s Note: it now benefits Transition Projects), and I think we debuted it there. And then Genny Nelson came to my shows every now and then over the years, and I would play it at their annual auction. So I did that for many, many years.
And then Genny was one of those people who passed away during the pandemic when we couldn’t have funerals. It just made me so sad that she was gone, and then last year, when they eventually had a memorial for her, there was an article in the Portland Tribune that said they played my song and I was just so moved by it. So moved by it that I have yet to…. I’m like, "I cannot play this on stage, because I’m just gonna friggin’ lose it." Especially in Portland. But, talking about it now, I feel like I’ve got to start playing the song again.
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