Neko Case -- "This Tornado Love You"
Neko Case makes music for people like me: people who tried for a long time to be cool but gave up on it as we settled into maturity. If this is the equivalent of easy listening for my demographic, I accept my fate willingly.
The songs on Middle Cyclone are characterized in part by a sense of the singer's growing maturity, but an even larger feature of the album is the theme displayed prominently in this, the album's opening track: the relationship between human beings and nature. Case explores this theme in a bit of an unconventional way: more Wallace Stevens observing nature on his walk to work than Henry Thoreau isolating himself by going out into the woods alone. Case seems to be questioning the expectations we have of nature. The inspiration for this song, I imagine, is the kind of comment one is likely to hear after a destructive bout of tornadic activity: I guess it was just God's will. The tornado has to happen for a reason. We look for meaning in the natural phenomena around us as though we are unwilling to admit that things like this just happen, for no apparent reason that is sensible to us. To admit that would mean that we are not the center of creation. People are baffled when nature doesn't seem to love us.
The fact is, though, that nature is quite content to go about its business without any special regard for us, which is what Case seems to be saying elsewhere (consider the album's final track -- crickets and frogs for 31:39). I can only suppose then that this song is a farce, a satire of the way the human mind tends to think that everything around us is ordered according to our own conception of things.
Maybe I'm taking the song in the wrong direction. Maybe the tornado really does love you. Then the song is simply about the two most destructive forces in all of creation: love and tornadoes.
Either way, the song works.
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