"My hugest goal was to get a Retweet from Questlove, because he has all these followers and he's so great. And he totally gave me one! I was like, 'This is a Twitter victory!'"

Act now and all this (well, the car at least) could be yours

​The cover of Neko Case's 2009 album, Middle Cyclone, featured the redheaded indie-folk singer barefoot and brandishing a sword on the hood of her 1967 Mercury Cougar, ready to head into battle. "I thought, 'If I were a 10-year-old boy in 1982, what would my fantasy album cover be?'" Case says of the image she conceived with photographer Jason Creps while living in Tucson, Arizona. "I would have a sword, because [fantasy film] The Beastmaster was big then, and I would be standing on the hood of a muscle car. I thought, 'It's either gonna be really great, or it's gonna flop.'" In the end, she got a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package.

On Friday, Case is raffling off her Cougar, which she bought about eight years ago in Denver and named Angie Dickinson shortly thereafter. She's calling the giveaway the Mercury Cougar-Rama Muscle Car-'Splosion, and the proceeds will benefit 826 National, a charity that assists children ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills and publishes books of their stories. Author Dave Eggers cofounded the organization's Valencia flagship chapter near San Francisco, and serves on the board of directors for its New York chapter.

Case, who is currently working on a new album and will be doing separate tours with both power-pop crew the New Pornographers and her own solo group later this year, hopes the car will help 826 reach its $45,000 target for the drawing. To ramp up to the grand-prize car giveaway, she and other generous donors have contributed items ranging from a guitar signed by Elton John, Elvis Costello, and others to a giant collection of Sub Pop LPs. Today, they're offering up a 1966 Gretsch "Silver Duke" guitar that she's gigged with and gotten signed by artists like Michael Stipe, Britt Daniel, Black Thought, and others. And, as if giving away her car weren't enough, she and 826 are including a bevy of other items that will also be given away Friday: a drumhead signed by the New Pornographers, a Chipotle dinner for 10, CD prize packs, and more. All of this generosity, she says, is helping soften the blow of letting go of one of her favorite rides.

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Neko Case performs, gloriously. Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images.

​Neko Case In Conversation with Sasha Frere-Jones
The New Yorker Festival
Stage 37
Saturday, October 17

"Boobs ruin everything," Neko Case said from the stage at Saturday's New Yorker Festival, referring to the pervy onslaught of cameras that greets her from performance to performance. "I just want to look like I don't even have boobs." Case, sitting opposite New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones, wore a double-breasted vest on Saturday, effectively strapping them down. She opted for cowboy boots over heels. Her red hair was untamed, and had a kind of stage presence of its own.

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​ --The Decemberists have added a New York date to their "A Short Fazed Hovel" tour. The band hits Terminal 5 on September 19th. Colin Meloy and Co. will take a break from playing the epic Hazards of Love in its entirety, instead planning a "special lottery show." In an e-mail, the band said: "In homage to that totally awesome scene in Dragon Slayer, we Decemberists will perform a set that will be entirely left to the hands of fate -- we will draw songs from a lottery and dutifully play them, regardless of their quality or presence in our memory." Tickets are now on presale. General public onsale is Friday at noon.

--This sounds like a great idea: Death Row Records, the once-vital West Coast hip-hop label that auctioned off its iconic electric chair earlier this year, is now expanding into film production. The label will shoot Sons 2 The Grave in Toronto in October. Billboard reports the film will feature Flashpoint's K.C. Collins as "a young basketball phenom returning to an embattled inner city ghetto after two gunshots cut short his dream of an NBA career." The label, which was bought by WIDEawake Entertainment Group for $18 million last year, is also planning a series of box sets from its heyday and will re-release Dr. Dre's The Chronic on September 1st as The Chronic Re-lit, a collectors disc with seven new tunes.

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