case/lang/veirs at 10: Three Solo Artists Shared the Last Word

The 10th-anniversary edition of “case/lang/veirs” arrives on 4 September with the original 14 songs, the previously unreleased “Accidental Tattoo” and 12 performances recorded on the trio’s 2016 tour. The larger track list turns a one-off album into a fuller document. Yet k.d. lang’s clearest memory of making it is not the harmony. It is the difficulty of bringing together three artists accustomed to running their own work.

lang proposed the album, and Neko Case and Laura Veirs answered within half an hour. Enthusiasm was not a working method, however. The three barely knew one another, and each came from a solo career in which she could veto a lyric, arrangement or tempo. Case has described striking out clichés, changing words and building bridges between sections. Her bluntness could land badly before the trio learned how to argue productively.

“One word would get axed and someone would be hurt,” Veirs told NPR in 2016. lang also remembered a two-hour debate over the word “love.” Looking back this year, she told the Guardian that the trio had to rebuild the structure of its writing process. At times she stepped out of the way because Case and Veirs were writing more. The record came together without pretending that equal authorship meant equal habits.

“Atomic Number” makes the arrangement audible from its opening seconds. lang, Veirs and Case take one line each before their voices meet in harmony, with none of the three surrendering her identity to the blend. That small exchange holds the album’s working agreement: not to sand three voices into one, but to make enough room for all of them inside the same song.