She calls it “the situation”, as if it were an asteroid the size of Bowen Island hurtling toward an urban centre, or an outbreak of some deadly and communicable disease. What triggered it, though, she doesn’t want to say.

Neko Case’s fierce and perplexing mix of candour and circumspection is an outward manifestation of the inner struggle she went through while making her most recent LP, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You: how much to reveal and how much to conceal. Or, to put it another way, how to maintain her privacy without compromising a songwriting process she likes to describe as “mildly edited vomiting”.

“You have thoughts, and you let them out, and you write them down on paper,” Case explains in a phone interview from her home in rural Vermont. “You add to them, and then generally strip them back to your original thought. It’s kind of that simple, but it really does happen that way a lot. And then sometimes you’ll change something, or you’ll be writing this whole other song and you’ll be like, ‘All I need is three lines from that other song, so I’m going to put them in this song, and then ta-dah! Yah! Problem solved.’ So sometimes it’s putting things back the way they should be, and sometimes it’s collaging.”

Don’t think that songwriting offers Case a way of dealing with the aforementioned situation, however. Therapy, it’s not.

“It wasn’t even remotely cathartic and didn’t mend my feelings at all,” she says. “People always ask me if I made this record because of the situation, but I actually made the record despite the situation.”

And again, she doesn’t offer an easy explanation for her plight. What’s clear, though, is that when Case was writing The Worse Things Get she was also struggling with crippling depression. The autobiographical songs here are often blurred by distance—“I was regarding myself from afar,” she reveals in the interview—and the relationship songs aren’t quite what they seem, either. Some of those, she allows, are about “looking at the other people and wishing that you could communicate with them, but you’re kind of in a Ziploc bag. You miss your fellow humans that you’re right next to.” And “Calling Cards”, in particular, is about the paradoxical situation of finding yourself in a good place and wanting it to be impractically, impossibly better.

“It’s a love song to my bandmates, all of them,” Case says. “I would just have this feeling on tour with the New Pornographers where I’d be like, ‘Oh, I wish Paul [Rigby] and Kelly [Hogan] were here right now. They’d love this.’ Or being out with my own band and being like, ‘Oh, I wish the New Pornographers could be here too. Oh, how we would laugh!’ Or you’re somewhere and you hear the new Destroyer record in a record store and you’re like, ‘Oh, Dan [Bejar], I’m so proud of you.’ It’s like you’re cheerleading them from far away, and feeling their presence—missing them, but in a healthy, nice way.”

If “Calling Cards” is eloquently wistful, other songs on The Worse Things Get can be heartbreakingly sad. “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” is a brutal snapshot of bad parenting witnessed in an airport. In turn, the similarly minimalistic, echo-laced “Where Did I Leave That Fire” finds Case declaiming “I wanted so badly not to be me,” which is as good a definition of depression as any. Yet the latter ends with a joke, and Case confides that while her depression might be an ongoing thing, she has powerful allies.

“I laugh at myself constantly,” she says, her voice audibly lightening. “Oh my god. Like, I don’t let myself be pathetic about it. And I have a lot of animals, and they don’t let you stay in bed for 12 days. They don’t let you go for it in a dramatic way. They’re like, ‘It’s time for breakfast, man!’ And so you’re like, ‘You know, you’re right. It is time for breakfast. Thank you. Of course! How stupid of me.’

“‘Dear dogs: what time is it right now?’” she adds, now laughing openly. “‘It’s time to go outside and poop on the lawn!’”

Neko Case plays the Vogue Theatre on Wednesday (April 15).