Casey Neill’s album time zero land, arrived at the end of July, following the Fall 2023 release of Casey Neill and The Norway Rats’ album Sending Up Flares. The juxtaposition was interesting, with one very outward and forward-looking collection released first, and a more private, at times backward-looking and reflective album released afterwards. However, the relationship between the two albums turns out not to be entirely straightforward since they both hail from a time of fervent creativity for Neill.
A couple of the songs on time zero land also hail from the same recording sessions as Sending Up Flares, but overall, they have a certain timeless quality culled from memory that creates a seamless world in which they operate. Specific memories are the latticework for songs like “The Mallow Road” and “The Distance Ahead,” while tracks like “Dance on Air” recall an earlier time in America and music culture that’s not too distant to evoke a magical feeling of connection. I spoke with Casey Neill about these inter-album connections and the personal stories behind some of these intricately crafted songs.
How does writing and recording for Sending Up Flares relate to the timing and recording of time zero land? Were those difficult to juggle?
Both of them were mostly made during the lockdown years, and then it took time to finish them up before they came out in the world. For time zero land, I had made slim wallet CD copies of it, and the first tour that I did, when things started to open up again, I brought it along. But it hasn’t been out in the world other than on the merch table. We really wanted to focus on Sending Up Flares, since that’s the album that the whole band poured their hearts and souls into. Our label, Fluff & Gravy, has been so awesome. We really wanted to push that throughout this year. But the other music hasn’t been out in the broader sense, so now we’re launching it and talking about both albums.
Thank you, that really helps me contextualize time zero land. It really seems like certain qualities would come out even more sharply playing in the first shows after lockdown. The emotional impact must have been pretty high.
As humans, we’re moving on from that time, and we’re probably not processing it enough, but it’s a completely understandable notion that we just want life to come back. But there’s a funny thing with the music, because so many musicians who I know, on the days that they were getting out of bed during that time, were so creative. Because creativity needs time. Time’s a privilege. For myself, I found all these songs ideas came out. I had been going so hard for so many years, touring and doing Production work, and so many other things. I hadn’t really had a chance to write in three or four years. So I had the most creative time of my life, basically. Because the songs are from that time, you are still living in it a little every time you play it. When you’re singing it, you’re taken back to those places.
There was definitely explosive creativity during that period, based on many conversations I’ve had. After a period of silence where artists didn’t know if they were going to do anything at all, a sudden overwhelming thing would happen, like a turning on of the tap. One of the related things was that memory behaved differently during that time for a lot of people. Memories would just well up and replay in great detail, which led to reflection. I thought of that when I listened to some of these songs since they seem based on memories.
Yes, it was very much that feeling that things that happened 10 or 20 years ago were suddenly front and center. Like you said, they just suddenly arrived. If you’d asked me what was going on in 2017, I’d have a hard time remembering that, though! [Laughs] There’s a song on there called “When Came The Change” which is, if anything, a political song about relationships, and paying attention to them, and noticing what’s happening around you. In the last verse, it moves to political systems and takes it for granted that humans will evolve to an incredible, enlightened place. Obviously, that has not happened! But there are memories in there that are really specific.
Then there’s also another song, “The Mallow Road”, which is about hitch-hiking in Ireland. That one is based on something I did in the 90s. I’ve been really involved in Irish music my whole life, and I’ve been a guitar player there, and I’ve sung the songs. There’s actually an Irish song on this record, too. The Mallow Road sounds like a very romantic place, but it’s just a truck stop, really, where a few highways converge. That one has a lot of metaphor built into it, too, where the chorus is “I could use a lift”, and it’s talking about the isolation of standing on a highway for hours in the rain waiting for cars to pick you up.
That song interested me a lot. I liked how you used “You” as the vantage point, putting the audience into the role. There’s a lot of physical detail, but there’s also a feeling of multiple meanings to things. Hitchhiking also feels like this distant, romantic thing now.
Yes, I’m a six-foot-tall white guy, and I would not hitchhike anymore. There’s an inherent trust of humanity in it that we just don’t have anymore. Maybe I was just an innocent abroad, but Ireland is a more trusting place. It was much more common there in the 90s than it was in the US at the time.
There’s a funny thing with this song, looking backward, that there’s a relationship between this album and Sending Up Flares. For Sending Up Flares, with the Producer on the album, Chet Lyster, who’s been a guitar player in The Norway Rats for a long time, we co-wrote all those songs. I came in with them 70% or 80% done, then the band recorded the basics all at once, then Chet and I crafted them over time afterwards. We really picked the stuff that was most forward-looking, thematically and musically.
I’ve wanted the albums to feel like they are pushing forward, not falling back on things I’ve done, so Chet is a wonderful second ear for that. Thematically, a lot of the songs on that album are very much about the modern world and things that we are having active conversations about, like reassessments of mental health or trying to find wonder in the world when the news is so grim. Or people talking about “found family”. These are current conversations baked into those songs.
I’m suddenly realizing that the stuff that we didn’t use, the stuff that instead was on time zero land, is the flip side of that. It’s funny because there’s this notion that every album is supposed to have a story, but sometimes, as an artist, you feel like, “Can’t I just have ten good songs and a great band playing them?” [Laughs] But actually, between these two albums, there is kind of a story that I didn’t plan at all.
In some cases, when music just comes from a certain period of time in an artist’s, each song has its own story, and it’s so big that each story might have spanned years to form. How can that be expressed briefly? It’s hard to put together a brief narrative to tell the world about an album.
Yes, it’s a funny thing. For every songwriter and every band, there are these things that can be so deeply personal, and your hope is that the listener hears it and applies it to their own life, or it hits them emotionally on some level, but you try not explain to too much about it. But giving people some context can be helpful, too.
Am I right that some of the songs on time zero land come from the same recording sessions as Sending Up Flares?
Yes, there were two songs that were part of the initial recording sessions. One is “Dance on Air”, which is actually a song that I wrote in 2012. I was part of a show in New York City called We Would Find Landscapes. We workshopped this piece for the Mabou Mines Theater Company. They hired a set designer, a few actors, and a foley musician to help me. We were all in to make weird art! It was amazing. Mabou Mines was founded by Philip Glass and other artists in the 70s and it’s been a stalwart of avant-garde theater in New York for a long time. It was one of those things in life where you think, “If I could do this forever, this would be great.”
The piece was about pre-industrial corn-based culture. There was a whole bit about the Midwest. There were these traveling circuits of ballrooms that would take on musical acts in the late Big Band era and early Rock ‘n Roll. The song name-checks the ballrooms, but sometimes they’d have shows outside, in the fields. That’s the setting for the song. A young woman is working on the farm, but the freedom for her is at these dances. I played it in 2019 on tour, and would play it now and then, and after a show, a couple came up to me and asked me to promise the song would be on my next record. It wasn’t, and I felt terrible! But it is on time zero land. It’s also a great accordion song, and Jenny Conlee is such a wonderful player.
I really love that song, so I appreciate you sharing this backstory. I did get that it was about an agricultural community and the magical contrast between that world and the world of music for people. I often think about how people encountered music back then, and that era was like the beginning of the in-person modern musical experience. But there’s a really ancient connection between daily agricultural life and music.
It’s a funny thing to think about how we have the entire history of music online at our fingertips, including videos of so many things from across time. There’s a notion of discovery that if you grew up pre-internet, there were secret societies that built up around a band. Imagine music suddenly happening in a field and what that would be like!
You mention the role of the radio, too, in “The Distance Ahead”, and its importance in connecting people and creating communities. That’s the other facet of expanding musical reach.
Actually, what I was just talking about is totally in the first part of “The Distance Ahead.”
That song is clearly important to you, and in it, you were able to write yourself into your own story. We all tell our own stories, but it’s particularly poignant when you can get some distance and almost see yourself as a character in a real story. It’s helpful and eerie!
Yes, you try to think of the person who you were, and it almost seems like a different person at times, though you are probably, shockingly, the same. For that song, I read the Richard Powers book, The Overstory, which is an amazing book. I think Powers does not call it historical fiction, but it’s based on real stuff that happened in The Ancient Forest Protection movement in the 90s, largely on the West Coast, though it was all over the country, Canada, and the UK. A lot of it led up to the WTO, which is obliquely mentioned in the song. It begins as suburban life, then music, discovery, traveling, and the discovery of wilderness that’s under attack. These national forests are being clear-cut. That was very much my experience, and in a weird way, it gave me my music career. I started to write songs about it and music and put out these little cassettes. Environmental groups started having me tour through. I’d play and talk about some of the issues, then I’d play the Punk Rock club the next night.
When I was reading The Overstory, there were some pretty direct references to things that happened during that time. For some of it, I was thinking, “This is completely wrong!” Then for some of it, it would leave me in tears. I really loved the book. I love that the book is bio-centric, driving home this notion that humanity is part of nature and not separate from it, and we need to realize that. It’s rare for something that wins the Pulitzer Prize to have that kind of cultural impact. But I thought, “Well, I was actually there, so maybe I could write a song.” And that’s what happened.
I also wanted to be looking forward, also, and for it not to just be pure nostalgia. There’s a modern climate movement. There are thousands of people who have been arrested for civil disobedience to stop old-growth logging in British Columbia in recent years. It’s still going. I think the last verse of the song is something I’m more proud of than most of the things that I’ve written. It’s about driving in the desert and, in a way, it’s a love song for all the people who I knew, and still know today, who were responsible for saving millions of acres of wilderness. They sacrificed and suffered for it, and I wanted that to all be in there.
The song really does feel like it’s about the people who did this work as much as the idea behind it. The tone reminded me of something like W.B. Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” poem, where he focuses on the people he knew and handles the mythologizing of them. It’s hard to know how to tell stories when people are larger than life, but also very human.
That is a heady reference, for sure. I love Yeats, of course. Actually, it’s funny you bring that up, because the song has a lot of little nods to things in it. There’s a whole line in the beginning where I sing, “so unsatisfied” and I put gravel in my voice, since it’s a reference to The Replacements’ song “So Unsatisfied”, which would very much what I would have been listening to at that moment of my life. But then, there’s a Yeats reference in it. Later in the song, in the verse about the WTO, where it talks about “a Troy of their very own.” The phrase “and a courage to match desire” is cribbed from Yeats’s poem, “Troy.” That’s also the poem that Sinead O’Connor used to base her song “Troy” on, which is, in my mind, one of the most unbelievable songs in the history of humanity.
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Only Casey could use a word like “viaduct” well in a sing lyric. Really loved “Use a Lift”.