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Neko Case, Whose Home Almost Certainly Caught on Fire, Called a Local Paper to Curse at Them From Sweden

INDIO, CA - APRIL 11: Musician Neko Case performs onstage during day 1 of the 2014 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on April 11, 2014 in Indio, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Coachella)

Yesterday, reports began circulating that a fire destroyed a barn and damaged the Vermont home belonging to acclaimed New Pornographers singer Neko Case. Despite the Associated Press and local newspapers reporting the property as belonging to Neko Case, she denied it was her house several times on Twitter.

But voting records show that Case is registered to the address of the fire. As well, the address consists of two pieces of property that Case is shown to have purchased in 2006 and 2014; in 2015, she ceded ownership of the properties to Cobb Timber LLC for “one dollar.” Snopes even looked into this, and further reported that responders to the fire had to move several “expensive guitars” in order to combat the blaze.

However, perhaps the most compelling evidence that the house definitely belongs to Neko Case–besides this 2012 Country Living spread that shows Neko Case in the house–is this excerpt from an article published by the Caledonian Record yesterday:

Case also made an expletive-laden phone call to the Caledonian-Record on Tuesday morning at approximately 9:30 a.m., insisting that the paper’s online story be taken down because she didn’t want her address revealed.

SPIN spoke to Dana Gray, Executive Editor of the Caledonian-Record, who received the phone call from Neko Case shortly after his paper published the story.

“I had no intention of using the fact that she made that call,” Gray said. “We were just looking to report a fire tragedy like we would any other fire tragedy in our coverage area. It was after she started making posts on social media denying ownership of the house that our credibility as a publication was called into question.”

“The fact that it was her house made it more interesting of a story,” Gray said. “But we really weren’t trying to do more of a story than we usually do on a structure fire.”

Gray elaborated on the content of the phone call: “Lots of F-bombs and lots of yelling.”

The cause of the fire is still unknown. The Grammy-nominated singer was in Sweden at the time of the blaze. A request to her management for comment has yet to be returned.

This is all to say that Neko Case’s house almost certainly was on fire, and that’s a terrible thing.