Neko Case: "Ragtime"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Here's one of my favorite songs of 2013, "Ragtime" from Neko Case's critically celebrated The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. (An intricate examination of individuality, it's another strong effort, though is as always the case with Case's albums I'm generally pulled in more by individual songs than by the whole thing, which lacks coherence and ends up in an odd dichotomy of introversion and disconnectedness.)

It's hard to match her powerfully gorgeous voice singing lyrics like:

Last night, late, I was watching it snow,
It always goes sideways in the city,
It comes right out from the streetlights, you know,
Pumped out by an engine deep inside the earth's core
It goes sideways in the city...

Enjoy!