Cat Power overcomes ‘dark spirits’ with song
New Album, Sun, has a real pop feel to it
Chan Marshall has things on her mind. Big things. Among them a forthcoming British tour and her latest album, Sun.
But her thoughts soon stray elsewhere.
Lighting up the first of several cigarettes, she takes an opening question about her current single, Manhattan, as a cue to revisit her memories of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (“I lived in the East Village at the time, and I saw all these people go by with their briefcases and suits, covered in ash, still acting civilized.”)
She then goes on to discuss the Arab Spring, the banking crisis, the CIA and wealthy U.S. institutions — hardly ordinary conversational gambits for a musician on a promotional tour. But then, very little about Marshall is ordinary.
Under the pseudonym Cat Power (initially the name of a band she co-founded as a teenager), Marshall has earned a reputation as a notoriously erratic live performer. Her music — from the brittle beauty of her 1998 breakthrough album, Moon Pix, to the fervid Memphis soul of 2006’s The Greatest — is steeped in the kind of melancholy that suggests a turbulent, often troubled, personality.
Sun marks another stylistic shift. Released last autumn, its warm electronic pulse and piano-led grooves, overlaid with the gorgeous swoon of her singing voice, make it Marshall’s most overtly “pop” record to date. It’s also her biggest seller, the first album in the history of her record label, Matador, to crack the Billboard top 10.
She describes the new album as a manifesto for “personal fulfilment,” a state that has consistently eluded her.
Born Charlyn Marie Marshall in Atlanta, Georgia, her grandmother raised her until the age of four. Then she shifted between cities and divorced parents (a pianist father and a mother she describes merely as “a bad-ass”).
When Marshall embarked on Sun she appeared finally to have achieved a certain stability in her life. Her fitful live shows were a thing of the past, as were her bouts of heavy drinking. And in the six years since The Greatest had come out, she’d settled into domestic life in Los Angeles with actor Giovanni Ribisi and his teenage daughter.
But it didn’t last. Just before the album was completed, he left her for the British model Agyness Deyn, whom he’s since married. Some months later came the cancellation of Cat Power’s European tour.
Today, Marshall blames the pulled gigs on a medical condition that causes rapid swelling of the skin and airways. “I had to cancel the European shows because I was in and out of hospital with angioedema,” she says. “I’d get a bump which would itch and itch, then turn into a blister. That was the beginning. It just seizes you and there’s nothing you can do.
“The same thing happened when The Greatest came out. A week beforehand I was in the hospital. I felt a failure and was angry about it. But you’re incapacitated, you can’t get up. It makes you see how quickly you can be dead, without choosing it.”
Marshall says mental exhaustion and alcohol abuse contributed to that earlier collapse. Her recovery involved a spell in the psychiatric facility at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, an experience she’s likened to “a pit of hell.”
It wasn’t her first psychotic episode. After the release of 1996’s What Would the Community Think, she underwent something of a career crisis.
“I thought what I needed to do was help children, go to school and be a teacher,” she says. “I was young and thought I was a failure.”
She sought an escape by holing up in a South Carolina farmhouse. “I was by myself for three months in the country, surrounded by fields. One morning I had a vision, woke up and could feel something beyond the trees outside my window. Then I heard a voice: ‘Chan, come and meet me outside and all the past will be forgotten.’ I remember sitting up in bed and saying ‘No!’
“And when I said that, I felt as if something was coming fast, straight from under the earth, these dark spirits — I know that sounds completely insane — so I sprang out of bed.
“Then they came, thousands of them, all up against the kitchen window. They were clear, black as night, trying to get into my soul. That’s when I grabbed my acoustic guitar. I thought that if people were going to find my body, I needed to leave a tape. “So I just played the songs that became Moon Pix. It was horrifying.”
Fifteen years later, Marshall feels “confident that I’m doing pretty good. I’ve had nightmares since I was two years old, but I haven’t had one since this happened. And I’m real happy about that.”
Marshall is entertaining company, if a little hard to keep track of. Her fidgety physical demeanour is mirrored in her speech patterns, her words spilling out along apparently random trails of logic. She’s funny, too. Often she pulls up, mid-sentence, flashes a quizzical look and asks: “What was the question again?”
The overriding impression, though, is of someone who’s been through an awful lot in her 41 years, both good and bad. And though she seems some way off from finding true inner peace, Chan Marshall at least appears to know what she’s looking for.