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All Music Guide:
Casey Neill is a Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter who takes his cues from the political protest-oriented modern-day punk-folk of Billy Bragg, as well as Celtic music and poetic singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan. Neill was raised on the East Coast but moved to Olympia, WA to attend Evergreen State University, where he became interested in environmentalism and protest music. Neill recorded an eponymous debut album for the Appleseed label in 1998, and subsequently formed the Casey Neill Trio with fiddler Anthea Lawrence and multi-instrumentalist Zak Borden (mandolin, mandola, bodhran, harmonica). This group issued the album Skree in 1999; Portland West followed two years later.
Wikipedia:
Casey Neill is an American musician. He leads Portland, Oregon-based band Casey Neill & The Norway Rats, singing with a raspy vocal quality and playing electric and acoustic guitars. Neill's style, folk-punk, mixes influences from punk, Celtic and folk music, and has been compared to R.E.M. and The Pogues.
The Norway Rats include Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists on keyboards and accordion, among other established Portland musicians Jesse Emerson, Little Sue, Hanz Araki and Ezra Holbrook of Dr Theopolis.
History
After graduating from The Evergreen State College with an ethnomusicology education, Neill developed as an artist in the underground music community of the Pacific Northwest, releasing two early cassette releases and then his first CD, Rifraff, in 1995. Two songs from that album, Rifraff and Dancing on The Ruins of Multinational Corporations, became the defacto soundtracks for many Earth First! and other logging protests during the 1990s, a time of growing tension between environmentalists and the logging communities of the Pacific Northwest. Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations is still sung by protest communities around the world.
Highly regarded Scottish musician and producer Johnny Cunningham, one of Neill’s early supporters, produced his albums Skree and Brooklyn Bridge. Cunningham plays fiddle on these albums plus Live on 11th Street, the last live recording of him before his untimely passing in 2003. Besides including some of his current bandmates and Johnny Cunningham, Brooklyn Bridge features cameos from Chris Funk of the Decemberists, John Wesley Harding, Erin McKeown and Phil Cunningham, Johnny’s brother.
Neill has been included on numerous compilations. One tribute release, Where Have All the Flowers Gone: the Songs of Pete Seeger (Appleseed Recordings), won Top Independent Release of 1998 from the American Association of Independent Music. The compilation includes Neill alongside tracks from Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg, two artists to whom Neill has been compared.
