Neko Case’s new album, Middle Cyclone, is like the first ride on the carousel with the person who you often passed in the hallway in Junior High and was dying to bump into at the Fair.

All 15 tracks rotate like the wheel of chairs and each vocal rise and fall is like the hesitation when two teenage passengers look at one another and can’t think of anything else to say. The album transports you to your first kiss or the first time you heard Janis Joplin or the Mamas and the Papas on your parents’ Magnavox. In this album, Case is brave enough to include the track “Marais La Nuit”-a thirty-one minute reel of crickets-and is progressive enough to call tracks like, “Fever” and “The Next Time You Say Forever” country music.

In her 1997 debut alum, The Virginian, Case took less chances, her twang was rooted in ordinary country music flair with little influence other than maybe Reba Macintyre or Dolly Parton. However, over the years, Neko Case has regained her confidence and has grown up. So too has her vision for melody, storytelling and everything country music is not known for. Neko Case’s new album digresses from the mainstream soapbox country music has come to inhabit in that it doesn’t hide behind a cowboy hat and a John Deere tractor. Her sound transcends the country music genre and borders fearless female Folk.

Middle Cyclone doesn’t apologize for being both poppy at times (in the track, “People Gotta A Lotta Nerve) and sophisticated with melodies that spread like butter on toast and instrumental clarity that floats like a buoy on a soft current. At the end of the album all you want to do is plant yourself in a rocking chair on an open porch, a sprig of wheat hanging off your mouth while the sun sets and the smell of Wisteria and butterscotch settle in your sinuses. Silhouettes of corn stalks and cotton fields and orange reflections on the grass become all that’s important—for at least an hour or so anyway.