CAT POWER - Redux

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the last twenty years, especially for singer-songwriters like Cat Power, always regarded as daughters of an era – the second half of the Nineties and the early 2000s – that today feels like a distant memory, to say the least. For Chan Marshall, though, things haven't just changed irreversibly on the songwriting front, but on a strictly personal level too. And thankfully so, one might add.

Over the past five years, in fact, the queen of American indie-rock has finally decided to set the bottle aside and count, alongside her fans, the days spent sober, positioning herself on social media as an example to follow for anyone waging their own battle against alcoholism. A form of openness that does her credit, and that highlights how she is a woman who seems strong and rebellious on the surface but is in truth deeply fragile and full of fears.

Chan has also decided to celebrate the anniversary of that great album that is “The Greatest“, releasing the EP “Redux”, backed by Grammy Award winner Stuart Sikes at Church House Studios in Austin, and 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 Paparozzi (Lizard Music), and drummer Jim White (Dirty Three, Hard Quartet).

There are “only” three songs on offer. Or rather, three covers to restore Marshall's proverbial knack for lovingly roughing up classics fished out from here and there, as that minor miracle of “The Cover Records“ demonstrated. But it's “Jukebox“, her other covers record, that's the real reference point for framing “Redux”, since the American singer-songwriter reworks the chosen songs entirely through a rhythm and blues lens, doing so without overdoing it too much – that is, without deconstructing the originals as heavily as she did on “The Cover Records”.

That much is clear right from the opening track, James Brown's “Try Me” by James Brown, a cover that was actually meant to appear on “The Greatest”, and especially “Nothing Compares 2 U“, the hit of all hits written by Prince and made famous worldwide by Sinead O’Connor, which Marshall dedicates to Teenie Hodges, the guitarist who stood by her side during the “The Greatest” era, who sadly passed away in 2014. Both are rereadings cast in that rhythm and blues mould that ultimately work, with Chan Marshall's gritty voice in fine form, following the rougher, more ragged performances of “Sun“, arguably the cat's least successful album. Closing out the trio is a brisker, more seventies-flavoured version of “Could We”, one of the twelve gems from “The Greatest”.

“Redux” is a taste of what Cat Power might still have in store, notwithstanding the lack of new material. All that's left to do, then, is wait for the much-anticipated new LP from one of the most singular and magically troubled singer-songwriters of an era as complicated as it is boundary-pushing, in music and beyond.

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29/01/2026