TORONTO - Neko Case is not an easy artist to categorize. Her big, hurtin' voice was made to sing country, but she also explores rock 'n' roll, torchy folk and '50s pop. And though she's American-born and bred, many people think of her as Canadian, perhaps because of her penchant for working with Canadian musicians like the Sadies, Brian Connelly and Carolyn Mark.

"I thought I was Canadian when I was growing up," Case recalls. "We lived right on the Canadian border, and we got only Canadian radio and TV. Buffy Sainte-Marie was on the radio all the time, and I named my first dog after her."

The Canadian connection continues on Case's latest release, The Tigers Have Spoken, which contains Sainte-Marie's winsome Soulful Shade Of Blue among a number of well-chosen covers. The album was recorded almost entirely live last spring at venues including Lee's Palace and the Matador in Toronto, with Case's longtime pals The Sadies.

"I didn't want to make another studio album -- I wanted something different," Case explains. "And I was missing The Sadies, and I knew the only way we'd spend any time together was to make a record.

"I had been really inspired by live recordings like The Last Waltz -- which is not really live, I think they overdubbed a lot of it. And that made me want to make a live album with no overdubbing. We worked really hard to be very pure about it."

They very nearly did it -- there's only one overdubbed guitar part on Tigers. "And that's because the direct input crapped out," Case explains. "It wasn't a bad performance, it was a technical difficulty.

"It was really tricky, but we learned a lot. We worked with a live sound recordist named Doug McClement, who was amazing."

The album does give the listener the impression of being in the club with Neko and co. And it's more than the typical live album of hits -- in fact, only a couple of tracks have appeared on disc before.

"I brought in a bunch of songs, and we decided in half an hour what we were going to do," says Case. "We wanted to do stuff we'd been playing live for years, like This Little Light and Rated X. And The Shangri-Las' Train From Kansas City was on a tape Brian Connelly made for me years ago. There are some sad songs, but I think it's a little more uptempo than usual. You don't want to do the same thing every single time."

Neko and The Sadies play an early all-ages show at the Phoenix Sunday. Johnny Dowd opens.