Cat Power on motherhood, music and moving on
A more poised, self-possessed version of the indie-rock veteran was on display in Toronto
Thirty minutes stolen backstage with Chan Marshall before a gig isn’t even remotely enough time to properly get a grip on Chan Marshall as a human be- ing, but it is enought to see that she’ s got a better grip on what she does as Cat Power than sheee has in years.
You could see it in her performance at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on Tuesday evening, too. A Cat Power show was once a bit of a roll of the dice, either a tentative experience or one that could dissolve into such complete shambles that you’d leave feeling acutely worried f for the immensely talented, yet obvi- ously troubled singer/songwriter pouring her heart out onstage. This one, though, was almost... triumphant.
It still requires a heroic number of cigarettes for Marshall to get through a performance and she’ll never be a chatterbox onstage, but Tuesday’s career-spanning set — delivered with the aid of an understated and subtly on-point drums/keys/guitar backing trio — was arguably her most confident and collected Toronto date of the past 20 years. By the time the tingly strains of Sun’s “Manhattan,” the closest thing to a pure pop song Cat Power has ever written, came around she’d even freed herself from the microphone stand and begun prowling the stage with a smile on her face, punctuating the tune with a spirited “Woo!” every so often. The room, rapt and silent f for the duration, was bubbling over with enthusiasm by the end of the set, and Marshall veritably glowed in response. “Thank you for accepting me for me. I love you,” she said in parting, and she could not have sounded more sincere. Turns out carrying a grudge and having something to prove might have been good for Cat Power — as was giving birth three years ago to the son, Boaz, who adorns the cover of her just-released 10th album, Wanderer. He was just three months old when Marshall began recording the self-produced, mostly self-played Wanderer alone in Miami, but he was a driving f force behind its creation. Marshall had clashed with Matador Records during the making of her previous album, 2012’s Sun — they demanded “a hit record” of her, she says, and pressured her to work with “top producers
and a famous band” — so much that it was understood going into Wanderer that it would be the end of their two-decadelong relationship with Cat Power.
“Because of what I’d gone through before with them, I actually wasn’t sure what I was going to do — like, if I wanted to change my life, change my path, you know?” says Marshall over a glass of wine and the omnipresent cigarette in a dressing room before Tuesday’s show. “And then I was in South Africa and I got home from that and I realized I was pregnant. I just knew what I had to do. I had to create this permanent forcefield around me, on a psychospiritual level.
“I never talked to anybody about it. I just went forward and did everything I needed to do to protect my body, myself, my child, my music … When you become a parent to a child, I don’t wanna say you’re unstoppable, but there’s this spiritual force — this ancestral sort of alignment — that keeps you perfectly protective of everything around you somehow. That’s what it felt like.”
A voice-first return to Cat Power’s minimalist, blues-edged indie-folk roots, Wanderer was eventually rejected outright by Matador — a rather uncharitable move, really, considering that Marshall had actually gifted the label with a hit record in the form of Sun, which debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 in September of 2012 during a week when Matchbox Twenty and Imagine Dragons held down the top spots. She found out that the label had been calling her mixer (former Elliott Smith producer Rob Schnapf) behind her back, “just being a force on his phone,” trying to get him to sway her to write more pop-oriented material. She was gutted.
“When they said it was no good and they handed the record back there was a year of time that went by and I wasn’t sure where I was going to be releasing it and if I would release it,” she says. “I always felt in my 20s ‘Would I do something else — Would I be a writer? Would I be a painter?’ So what would I do now with my son?”
Eleventh-hour inspiration arrived from an unlikely source: Los Angeles dream-pop siren Lana Del Rey, who “thanked me really beautifully” in the liner notes to her 2017 Lust for Life album and then invited Cat Power to tour with her in the U.K.
By the end of that tour, Marshall — now signed to esteemed U.K. indie label Domino Records — invited Del Rey to sing on a tune she had lying around called “Woman,” which was actually the first song she’d started recording for Wanderer, but had left off the final track listing.
“‘Woman’ wasn’t attached to the album. It wasn’t a part of the album,” she says. “I didn’t know how to articulate why I wasn’t able to or ready to release this song, but through becoming friends with Lana and speaking about businessmen we’d dealt with and fathers and lovers, men, that’s when I realized that I probably wasn’t putting ‘Woman’ on my album because I would be alone with my sad song. So I asked Lana would she sing on it because I understood then it wouldn’t just be my ‘alone’ perspective, which it had always been. Then I asked Domino if I could include this on the record right before the mastering and that became the single.”
Oh, yes, Cat Power delivered a hit. Since its release two months ago, “Woman” has logged more than three million YouTube views. So much for strategizing. Wanderer succeeds precisely because Marshall didn’t overthink it.
“I wanted to do what I like doing — like, being open to universal artistry and individual, personal space. Whatever appeared to me to lay onto the song, I did. And whatever didn’t appear, I didn’t do it,” she says. “With Sun — all that pressure on me to create a hit album when you’re not a hit artist — I had to think outside of my natural context of the process. I had to go backwards. I had to do something I’d never done before and that did something to me. It really did something to me.
“So for this process, I wanted to make sure that it was just reserved for whatever my divine process might be. If there’s anything divine in the universe, please, I just want to sing some songs that come to me, and these songs came to me and that’s that.”
“Woman,” performed with Lana Del Rey, has logged more than three million YouTube views