Neko Case turns mourning into wonder on “Destination”

Neko Case has always written like someone who distrusts the obvious word, and “Destination” is a master class in that instinct. Built as a tribute to friends and collaborators she lost while making Neon Grey Midnight Green, it could have been a straightforward elegy. Instead Case reaches for metaphor — the lost loved one as a destination, a place the living are forever travelling toward — and the indirection is what makes the grief land.

The central image is exactly the kind of thing worth looking for: a small, strange picture that earns its emotional weight. “Someday this one horse town will pull itself out of the station to follow you around — you’re the real destination” is a line that shouldn’t work, mixing the mundane (a one-horse town, a train station) with the cosmic (a place getting up to chase a person), and yet it does, because Case commits to the wordplay completely and trusts the listener to ride it.

She’s most devastating when she’s plainest. “Most of all I love you because you don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt / Waiting for the world to catch up and see you for your worth” is the song’s beating heart — a tribute to a person’s refusal to perform okayness that doubles, quietly, as Case’s own creed. After all the imaginative misdirection, she lands on something direct enough to ache.

Musically this is a new colour for her. The song opens on light twinkles of piano and builds into a blockbuster ballad, scaled up by the PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra into something grander than her usual alt-country frame. The orchestration risks swallowing the intimacy, but Case keeps her voice — that big, unmistakable instrument — at the centre, so the strings lift the song rather than drown it.

If there’s a critique, it’s that the album’s ambition occasionally pulls “Destination” toward the stately, and a fraction of the rawness that makes Case’s quieter records hit can get smoothed under the grandeur. It’s a small price for the scope, and the writing is strong enough to survive the polish, but the most piercing moments here are the plain ones, not the symphonic ones.

Final take: “Destination” is alt-country grief writing of a very high order — mythic where it could be maudlin, specific where it could be vague, and anchored by a voice that has never needed help selling a feeling. Case turns loss into wonder without ever losing the hurt.