100 favourite songs: #26: "Hold On, Hold On" - Neko Case

Desert guitar chimes it in, Case starts breathlessly and undeniably with a killer couplet — “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers,/I know it’s unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous” — and then the song’s off, recalling Calexico’s “Ballad Of Cable Hogue” in its channeling of spag-Western drama and widescreen dynamics, driving irresistibly forward on the back of a restless, tumbling melody and Case’s glorious singing (the magic moment is her soaring delivery of the line “I leave the party at 3am, alone thank god”, in which everything gathers itself together, briefly pauses, and then launches forwards again), cresting and subsiding and cresting again, shimmering like something in the hazy, sun-distorted distance… - 5/2/06