Cat Power - The Catwoman's Kiss

Cat Power might seem like the perfect stage name for a commercial pop singer in the Sugababes mould, accompanied by videos full of skin-tight outfits, thigh-high boots and fake sado-maso sensuality. Instead, it's the pseudonym chosen by a charming American girl, Charlyn Marie "Chan" Marshall, from whom we shouldn't expect anything of the sort. What she shares with feline character is perhaps a sense of solitude, and the alluring ambiguity of someone who is within reach yet retains an aura of mystery - analogies (or clichés) that end right there. Her music has already been dubbed "dark-folk" by critics across the Atlantic. Acoustic textures, then, coated in a dark patina and a pervasive sense of melancholy. Her songs are arranged in the most minimal way: just piano, or guitar and drums. Nothing else is needed for her hoarse, seductive voice to reach the listener's heart.

Cat Power's is an American story made of wandering and passion. The daughter of separated parents (her father is a musician), Chan spent her adolescence between North Carolina, Georgia and New York. Often alone, reserved by nature, she nurtured a great passion for music by listening to her idols: Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan. She began playing piano and guitar at twenty and made her debut with a self-released 7" in '93. After a long stretch of wandering across the States, she landed in Manhattan's bohemian underground scene, where, during a show alongside Liz Phair, she met Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Two Dollar Guitars guitarist Tim Foljahn, who immediately agreed to join her. From that point on, Chan started calling herself Cat Power and began taking her work seriously. Yet her chronic shyness remained, making live performances difficult for her. "I hate it when people clap and you have to say 'thank you!'" she recalls. "It's an awkward moment. I'd rather they just stayed quiet and listened."

Before signing to Matador, one of the most prestigious indie labels in the United States, Cat Power put together two early, unpolished efforts with Shelley and Tim Foljahn: the EP Dear Sir, released on the Italian label Runt in 1994, and Myra Lee on Smells Like Records (the label run by Liz Phair and Solex) the same year. The first EP, in particular, reveals her talent for recounting fierce autobiographical stories, set against an ethereal folk backdrop capable of Patti Smith-style lyrical surges. Songs like "3 Times" and "Headlights" rest on her distinctive contralto, reminiscent of Grace Slick, while tracks like "Rockets" and "Itchyhead" showcase Foljahn's spectral guitar work and Shelley's obsessive drumming. Marshall's dark mood lends a chill to these delicate folk songs.

Her Matador debut, What Would The Community Think? (1996), reveals all the emotional depth of her songwriting, alternating cathartic confessions in the vein of Nick Drake (“In This Hole”) with bitter serenades in the style of Laura Nyro (“Good Clean Fun”, “King Rides By”), deathly ballads (“The Fate of the Human Carbine”) and solemn elegies (“Bathysphere”), while “Nude As The News” and “Enough” can also rely on the relentless drive of the drumming.

Two years later came Moon Pix, recorded in Australia with the help of Jim White and Mick Turner – drummer and guitarist respectively of Australia's Dirty Three. The album revisits Marshall's rudimentary, embryonic sound, built on a melodic structure as bare as it is enigmatically captivating. Cat Power's songs are transpositions of streams of consciousness, musical transcriptions of a therapy session or an open-hearted confession. Her vocal warbles are light yet penetrating, more velvety than Patti Smith's rasp, darker than Hope Sandoval's lullabies. “American Flag” opens the doors to a world that is both enchanted and desolate; “Cross Bones Style” sounds almost like it could have come off a Van Morrison record, so intense and magnetic is it; the sinuous guitar of “He Turns Down” is paired with flute and a hypnotically repetitive rhythm; the thunderclap that bursts into the funereal waltz of “Say” opens an initiation rite that continues with the relentless “Back Of Your Head”, a bleak portrait of a drug dealer, before culminating in the desperate wail of “Moonshiner”, the confession of a whisky bootlegger foreshadowing a gradual descent into Hell, only slightly softened by the mystical notes of “You May Know Him” and the invocation to children in the aching “Colors And The Kids”, which echoes the tenderest moments of Joni Mitchell. But her models also include the thriller-like self-analyses of Lisa Germano, the passionate odes of Sinéad O'Connor, and the rawest episodes of Carole King. “When I play the guitar and strike a note,” the New York-born singer-songwriter explains, “I feel that note vibrate on my arms and through my body, in my bones, in my heart. And in my mind I see colors and memories resurface, moods. So when I sit down with the guitar, it's whatever I'm holding inside that drives me to express myself and try to communicate these images, these hopes, my pain or my joy – basically everything I'm feeling in that moment.”

The Covers Record (2000) offers a highly personal take on rock classics and “oddities” such as “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “Paths Of Victory” by Bob Dylan, “Wild Is The Wind” (a standard once sung by Nina Simone and David Bowie), “Kingsport Town” (a traditional, again as interpreted by Dylan), “Sea Of Love” by Phil Phillips (from 1959), “I Found A Reason” by the Velvet Underground, and “Salty Dog”, a Procol Harum warhorse. “Red Apples” by Smog is the only “contemporary” track. It's an eccentric effort that shows off Marshall's talent both as a (re)arranger and as a vocalist, even if it adds nothing new to her own catalogue.

But it's in 2003, with You Are Free, that Cat Power, at 31, arrives at her classic “mature album.” Anyone fearing that Adam Kasper's production (Queens Of The Stone Age, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam) might push Marshall toward more commercial sounds is mistaken, and any such worry evaporates from the very first hushed piano notes of “I Don't Blame You.” The other, prestigious guest appearances only add further lustre to Marshall's aching ballads: whether it's Dave Grohl (Nirvana) on drums for the album's rockier moments, or Warren Ellis (Dirty Three) on violin, or Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), more restrained than ever as he provides backing vocals on a couple of tracks, these guests all seem to tread almost timidly, on tiptoe, respecting the magical, faintly dreamlike aura in which Cat Power's songs are suspended – songs whose sensibility can recall certain dreamlike dives by Kate Bush, or Joni Mitchell and Carole King, while among her contemporaries, the more instrumentally animated tracks recall the early work of PJ Harvey (as heard in the potential single “Speak For Me” and in “He War”).

So, even where the arrangements are fuller, Chan Marshall's expressiveness is never hidden, and if you listen closely, these are far from ordinary rock songs. Nor have we lost the delicate, melancholic, free songwriter capable of narrating her own fragility as well as her passion and desires through spare ballads that seem to stand only by some miracle – a miracle that, fortunately, repeats itself often throughout You Are Free. The album is full of gems, starting with the skillful reworkings of other people's songs, “Werewolf” by country-blues singer Michael Hurley, and John Lee Hooker's “Crawlin' Black Spider”, here renamed “Keep On Runnin'”, or among her own compositions, the wonderful duet with Eddie Vedder on the closing “Evolution”, or the aching country-folk of “Good Woman”, beautifully enriched by Warren Ellis's violin.

With her fragile voice, which at times seems on the verge of breaking yet can also be captivating and mysterious, and with her taut, spare songs, Cat Power tells stories that can bring you to tears, like “Names”, in which she lists, briefly and with devastating force, the stories of children who were victims of abuse. “During my childhood,” she recalls, “a lot of kids told me things, and I soon realized that so many of them had been abused, had lost their innocence to sexual violence or beatings. And the crazy thing is it all seemed so normal. I'm sorry I wasn't a stronger person back then – I didn't know how to react when my friend told me her father had been having sex with her since she was little. And now that I'm an adult, I realize these things happen all the time, even though nobody talks about it.” But Marshall's songbook also lives up to the album's title: “Don't you want to be free?” she asks in “Baby Doll”, and again, “We can all be free”, in one of the album's high points, “Maybe Not” – two musically bare-bones ballads in which Cat Power asks us to join her, however we can (“Maybe not with words, maybe not with a look but with your mind…”), in her act of freedom, through which she gives us this album, so full of life in so many of its facets. Chan Marshall reveals herself to us completely, laying herself bare. And yet there's something in her music that eludes us, something ungraspable; perhaps it's that part of the other half of the sky that men will never manage to grasp. Or perhaps that's the secret of a masterpiece.

The popularity achieved with You Are Free, however, can become a problem: “I'm not scared of it, I simply don't want it and I don't like it,” Cat Power said in an MTV interview. “Do you remember the popular kids in high school? Well, they were usually the cruelest. And the same mechanism shows up in society: the pursuit of popularity, the attempt to gain money, power and social standing. It's all a lie, and I don't want it in my life.”

On The Greatest (2006), it seems our lovely Cat wanted to treat us to a divertissement. She conjured up a vaguely soul-inflected persona, toyed with strings, rickety pianos and Memphis-style guitars, without ever abandoning the delicate folk-blues that made the world fall in love with her in the first place.

Surrounded by, among others, musicians of the caliber of Teenie Hodges (guitar), Leroy Hodges (bass, previously of Al Green and the Hi Rhythm Section fame) and drummer Steve Potts, the girl from Georgia opens the show with the big ballad of the title track, steeped in delicate emotion, her voice resting on a bed of strings while everything glides along on sweet piano chords. She then lets herself be lulled by the swaying “Could We”, with those playful horns slipping in and out like blades through a rubber wall.

Alternating uninhibitedly, ballads and vibrant surges strike a frankly precarious balance. One after another come “Lived In Bars” (a moderately desperate mood in a soul-jazz key), the velvety elegy of “Islands”, and the tiptoeing, honky-tonk-pianoed distraction of “After It All”. All within the norm, all under control. Not even “The Moon”, with its subdued tones, skillfully distilled through small touches of organ and polished yet assertive guitar work, raises the stakes much.

But of course, the blues-inflected folk of “Living Proof” and the more overtly rock “Love & Communication” – aren't they masterpieces? And what about the ballad “Empty Shell”, the autumnal flavors of “Willie”, the skeletal waltz of “Hate”, or “Where Is My Love”, a final touch of class finally backed by inspiration worthy of her past: an abyss of loneliness clumsily covered by the black drape of melancholy.

The Greatest isn't a bad record per se, but it will remain among the Georgia-born singer-songwriter's lesser works.

Two years go by, and Cat Power, for the second time in her career, tackles an album made up almost entirely of covers, this time chosen and performed with a sensibility not far removed from that of The Greatest, and therefore inevitably shaped by a predilection for classic, direct, bluesy sounds.

Yet Jukebox is no mere exercise in style: in its choice of songs and songwriters to reinterpret, it proves anything but obvious, and indeed reflects a thorough, careful search in line with her sonic approach of recent years.

Aside from the velvety reading of “New York” and the female-perspective rendition of the Hank Williams classic “Ramblin' (Wo)Man”, Cat Power here takes on demanding originals that, in some tracks, bring her back to the roots of Black American tradition. That's the case with the album's central section, which moves from the soul heart of “Aretha, Sing One For Me” to tributes to two recently deceased Black icons, James Brown (“Lost Someone”) and Mississippi blues pioneer Jessie Mae Hemphill (“Lord, Help The Poor And Needy”). It's precisely in these tracks that Marshall's sonic shift is most clearly felt, making them come across as a bit too rough and dusty for her vocal qualities, unlike, for instance, the hushed, piano-led reading of Billie Holiday's “Don't Explain”. It's in tracks like this one that the always-impeccable form is joined by genuine interpretive intensity, yielding truly remarkable results, above all in the two songs she wrote herself: the self-cover of “Metal Heart” and the previously unreleased “Song To Bobby”, both marked by enchanting piano touches and more subdued rhythms. In such instrumental and compositional settings, the brilliance of a performer who still fears few rivals truly shines, though even on Jukebox she offers only fitful flashes of her class, alternated with less convincing passages, overall confirming that Cat Power remains below the peaks of her career – and yet, by now, perfectly at ease in her new role as a seasoned blueswoman, worn here with her usual expressive grace, if in a slightly more measured way than on the previous album.

Jukebox was followed just a few months later by an appendix of six more covers, Dark End Of The Street, where it's still classic soul and blues that make up the playground on which Cat Power enjoys exercising her well-known interpretive gifts, now mature enough to transform her own image from that of the "girl with a guitar" into a "woman of great class", aware of her charm and able to dose it out with skill, taking on challenging originals that are, for the most part, far removed from her original artistic stamp.

There's no surprise left in seeing her tackle smoky, nocturnal readings of songs by Aretha Franklin (the title track and "It Ain't Far") or Otis Redding – "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)" – nor in her letting herself go, with velvety movements, on an oblique and supremely elegant "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The stylistic shift she's undergone is demonstrated even more clearly when she manages to bend to her new shape originals coming from quite different musical traditions, as in the case of "Ye Auld Triangle" by the Pogues, here wrapped in a desert-like, boozy aura, whose jazzy pace finds a fitting counterpoint in silky vocals and measured piano notes.

In the end, it's the piano passages that come across as the most convincing, or at least the ones in which Cat Power's usual personality is most recognizable; partly overshadowed by the overall roots-leaning approach, it instead comes to the fore in the hushed, intensely moving homage to Sandy Denny that is "Who Knows Where The Time Goes".

At the end of six years without any original records, punctuated by yet another emotional storm, Cat Power once again flees from herself, this time sealing in image and sound a moment that, among other things, coincides with turning the corner into her forties. She escapes to Paris, cuts her hair short, and in just three days gives shape to songs written and mulled over for a long time, entrusting them to the care of Philippe Zdar (Cassius), who adds an unpredictable synthetic sheen, electronic rhythms and funky syncopation.

This is, from the very first superficial impression, the main novelty of Sun, which wraps Marshall's moves in a shell aimed at an at times forced modernization, one that often ends up reducing her unmistakably smoky timbre to hieratic, essentially cold declamations rather than peaceful ones. Here and there, the recognizable signature of her songwriting is still faintly perceptible, but the bulk of the record is a teeming mass of disjointed keyboards and synthetic outpourings poised between Eighties nostalgia and an understandable attempt to modernize what she's built over more than fifteen years of career. Understandable and justified, yes, but not for that particularly successful, as the result too often feels airless, as if Cat Power's new sonic clothes were a bit too tight for her to wear with ease.

Sun nonetheless comes across as a new beginning, a clean break with the past and, perhaps, the opening of a completely different chapter in Cat Power's artistic journey, one in which, if nothing else, she has returned after a long time to being driven by the urge to tell her own story through music.

Six years on, the cat returns to the scene after roaming far and wide across the States and various corners of the planet. Out of this "wandering" comes her tenth record, Wanderer. A title that well explains the spirit running through the record, with folk, Delta blues and a sporadic but telling return to the acoustic leanings of her 2003 masterpiece, You Are Free, all blended and wrung out into a bucket that's, as usual, brimming with melancholy and unease, but also with a strong urge to be reborn and reinvent herself inwardly. Eleven tracks that tell of her travels, of her many encounters with chance musicians along the dusty roads of the American South, polished to perfection by Rob Schnapf (co-producer, with Tom Rothrock, of several albums by the dearly missed Elliott Smith), a long-serving producer who supplies the warmth needed for Marshall's restless mood.

The Atlanta singer-songwriter, after the half-misstep of Sun, largely rediscovers the right self-awareness and her own inimitable style, coming across as decidedly more at ease right from the video for the lead single, "Woman", in the company of someone who could in some ways be called one of her many "heirs", Lana Del Rey, at least in terms of artistic cockiness, not to mention their shared reverence for the stylistic tropes of post-'45 America, between Mustangs, big plaid shirts, cowboy boots, and stars-and-stripes flags pretty much everywhere. The track, however, turns out to be by far the weakest of the bunch, with a simplistic refrain and sloppy lyrics that add nothing to the travel diary.

After a whispered intro meant to lead the listener into the depths of an album that unfolds as a continuous self-narration through snapshots of life, the gorgeous "In Your Face" takes flight, essentially the record's true opening track, suspended over a few intense piano notes, Marshall's guitar recognizable from a mile away, and words that voice a feeling of resentment toward an America that has lost its own identity, that keeps gazing at its own reflection without raising its eyes, and without lifting a finger, only now beginning to see the rest of the world for what it is: “Your feel so above the hunger of the streets/ With your safe and your document in its place/ Your money, your gun, your conscience we like/ You forbid you a certain things/ See where you are as you begin to sink in your mirror/ In your mirror, in your mirror, in your face”. A country, then, sitting down, incapable of listening. The invitation to get back up, to take to the streets and genuinely tune in to one's neighbor, is underlined by the words of the following "You Get", whose acoustic gait and central melody bring back some of the solutions adopted on the aforementioned "You Are Free". The emotions soar even higher on the evocative piano notes of "Horizon", a new, inspired ballad, between lost horizons and distant gazes.

Cat Power's well-known knack for upending other people's songs, through unrecognizable covers completely reshaped to her own standards, resurfaces on "Stay", borrowed from none other than Rihanna and cradled by a handful of piano chords and a sweetest of crescendos that's hard to resist.

With this long-awaited return, Chan Marshall sets back in motion a wild heart left too long in the attic, amid uninspiring releases, badly ended concerts and questionable looks. This certainly isn't the cat at her very best, but at certain moments that old ability to scratch at the strings of the soul we know so well, and will never stop loving, comes back to the fore.

There periodically comes a time in the crystalline arc of Chan Marshall's talent when the Atlanta singer-songwriter has to return to herself. The way she finds herself again, and finds her way back onto the tormented path between art and life, is by reinterpreting the songs she loves most, the ones that crop up here and there across her original albums, like a club crooner – the kind of venue where filmmaker Jem Cohen immortalized her in the intense portrait "From Fur City" (2002) – or like a performer burning with passion, such as Nina Simone, whose "Wild Is The Wind" she had masterfully reinterpreted in the past. So Chan puts on the guise of Cat Power and becomes all the lives and all the voices of the songs she feels are her own, thanks to that unique power songs have of becoming everyone's shared property.

Ready to record new songs with the band, Cat Power upends everything and self-produces Covers in Los Angeles with Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Steve Gunn, Kurt Vile, M Ward), delivering twelve original reinterpretations of songs she has absorbed and made her own, forming a repertoire spanning various degrees of the past, tracks renewed through her arrangements via classic rock and folk instrumentation.

We meet the present with Frank Ocean ("Bad Religion") and Lana Del Rey ("White Mustang") – with whom she had duetted on the previous "Wanderer" (Domino, 2018) – but also Ryan Gosling's Dead Man's Bones ("Pa Pa Power"). Cat even reinterprets herself: from the song "Hate" on "The Greatest", whose bleak outlook she had never fully come to terms with, she draws "Unhate", returning to a place of calm: "We all have shit, trauma, something. There are times when you feel like that. But I needed to make it right".

We also find the tradition tightly bound to affection: the splendid elegy for voices and organ of “A Pair Of Brown Eyes” by the Pogues, in memory of a painful loss, and the rock power that runs through “Against The Wind” by Bob Seger in an unprecedented way, to heal the wound of another death.

“Endless Love” by Iggy Pop, heard in the film “Dogs In Space” (1986) with Michael Hutchence of INXS, ideally opens the second, vibrant part of the album. The emotional bar keeps rising, leading us deep into Chan's restless soul: from the bare folk-rock of “These Days” by Nico (and Jackson Browne), also vocally reimagined, and the country of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” by Kitty Wells – a song discovered as a teenager on some found cassette tapes – up to the edge of the abyss with “I Had A Dream Joe” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

It closes with a goosebump-inducing pair: “Here Comes A Regular” by the Replacements, recalling that last dollar in her pocket in New York slipped into the jukebox, and “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Billie Holiday, in memory of her grandmother. Songs delivered in their purest essence.

Cat Power composes the songbook of the departed, finding the ideal balance between The Covers Record and Jukebox. But above all she manages to be every voice she evokes, together with her own ghosts, while always remaining unmistakably herself, with her style, her eternal dismay and the awareness of having survived trauma, addiction, pain and fate without losing herself like other fragile souls, armed with that cursed gift of truth and absoluteness. Today we no longer have Elliott Smith, Mark Linkous, Jeff Buckley and Vic Chesnutt, but we hold on tightly to one of the last songwriters who can still make us feel moved and vulnerable.

The great feline of American indie rock, after the pandemic, finally decides to put the bottle aside and count, together with her fans, the days lived sober, presenting herself on social media as an example to follow for anyone fighting their own battle against alcoholism. A moment of sharing that ennobles her and highlights her courage, her being a woman who seems strong and rebellious but is in truth deeply fragile and full of fears.

Chan has also decided to celebrate the anniversary of that great record The Greatest, releasing the EP Redux, supported by Grammy Award winner Stuart Sikes at Church House Studios in Austin, accompanied for the occasion by Dirty Delta Blues, a sort of supergroup made up of Judah Bauer (The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) on guitar, keyboardist Gregg Foreman (The Delta 72, Jesse Malin), bassist Erik Paparozz (Lizard Music) and drummer Jim White (Dirty Three, Hard Quartet).

There are “only” three songs on offer here. Or rather, three covers that reaffirm Marshall's proverbial knack for tastefully roughing up classics plucked from here and there, as that minor miracle The Cover Records once proved. But it's Jukebox, her other covers album, that provides the real template for understanding Redux, since the American songwriter reworks the chosen tracks entirely through a rhythm and blues lens, doing so without overdoing it, that is without deconstructing the originals too much, as happened instead on The Cover Records.

This is immediately clear from the opening “Try Me” by James Brown, a cover that was in fact originally meant to be part of “The Greatest”, and in particular “Nothing Compares 2 U”, the hit of hits written by Prince and sung to the world by Sinead O’Connor, which Marshall dedicates to Teenie Hodges, the guitarist by her side during the making of “The Greatest”, who sadly passed away in 2014. Both are reinterpretations cast precisely in a rhythm and blues mold that ultimately work, with Chan Marshall's raspy voice in fine form, after the rougher outings of Sun, perhaps the feline's least successful album. Closing the triangle is then a faster, more seventies-leaning version of “Could We”, one of the twelve gems of The Greatest.

Redux is a taste of what Cat Power could still have to offer, notwithstanding the lack of new material. All that's left to do, then, is wait for the long-awaited new LP from one of the most singular and magically afflicted songwriters of an era as complicated as it is on the frontier, musically and otherwise.

Contributions by Francesco Nunziata (“The Greatest”), Raffaello Russo (“Jukebox”, “Dark End Of The Street” and “Sun”), Giuliano Delli Paoli (“Wanderer”, “Redux”), Maria Teresa Soldani (“Covers”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google