Neko Case plus Lost in the Trees to play Calvin Theatre in Northampton on Friday, February 4th

 Neko Case connects with her audience on an uncommonly deep and meaningful level. Her songs linger in your head, your heart and soul long after she’s left the stage or the record has stopped spinning. For Case, the beauty of making music, of creating, is that it remains a mysterious, confounding and, occasionally, contradictory process. “I’ve said in interviews that I don't like writing love songs, that I can't write them," she recalls. "Of course, as soon as I said that, I ended up writing a bunch of love songs." Neko Case's "love songs" are not the typical boy-meets-girl variety. "The songs are about the need for love -- no matter how cool you think you are. What other people might call ‘love songs' I think of as homages. They can be to a person, a region, a feeling.” Case's evolution as a writer is, at times, almost overwhelming. The modest lyrical aims of her debut LP - - released just over a decade ago - - have been continually outstripped with each successive effort, and she continues that trend in spectacular fashion on her most recent album, last year’s Middle Cyclone.

 Lost in the Trees, a musical collective from Chapel Hill, North Carolina plays self-described "Orchestral Folk Music," so named because it features arrangements which harness both the dramatic power of classical music and the more intimate sounds of the singer-songwriter tradition strings and brass meshing effortlessly with accordion, bells, musical saw, banjo, and mandolin. The group's Anti- debut, All Alone In An Empty House was co-produced by Scott Solter (St. Vincent, Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, Erik Friedlander) who creates a space in which both varieties of music co-exist with stirring results. The dramatic and symphonic elements of classical music merge with the accessibility of American folk and pop to create a sound both grandiose and intensely personal.  For a free download of the song “All Alone In An Empty House” from the album of the same name, just go here:

Tickets for Neko Case plus Lost In The Trees at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton on Friday, February 4th go on sale this Friday 12/10 at NBO, 76 Main Street, 413-586-8686 and online at IHEG.com. Presale tickets for mailing list members are on sale Wednesday 12/8. Sign up for the mailing list at IHEG.com as well.