Cat Power Still Has Stories to Tell

Chan Marshall is getting over a bout of pneumonia. You can hear it in her voice, the gravelly aftermath of what was surely a long week. Three days ago, however, when she took to the Tonight Show stage to perform “Like a Rolling Stone,” you’d have never known how sick she’s been. I’m on Zoom with Marshall, and she can’t help but multitask—stopping mid-way through her sentences because she’s either responding to text messages from her label or she’s posting on Instagram. Both instances she very candidly fesses up to, and then adamantly apologizes for them. At one point, she reads out a message as she’s typing it. This is what you get with Cat Power: a refreshing reality. She’s juggling multiple lives, and you can’t help but awe over how honest she is about it all.

A week ago today, Marshall dropped her latest album—Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. It’s her fourth covers album, but her first project where she’s done such a deliberate, intentional project that pays respect to one single artist. Instead of picking songs from across Bob Dylan’s catalog, she instead did a pound-for-pound recreation of the infamous titular set. I considered asking her “Why Dylan?,” but everyone has already answered that question. Of course it’s Dylan, how could it not be? The more interesting matter is “Why his ‘Royal Albert Hall’ performance from 1966?” When Marshall got an offer to play a show at the historic concert hall in November 2022, her immediate response was “Absolutely”—proclaiming that Dylan’s recording is the only reason she ever knew of the venue in the first place. I think that’s probably not 100% true, though, as The Beatles sing about it in “A Day in the Life” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But it was D.A. Pennebaker’s 16mm film Dont Look Back—which documented Dylan’s England tour in 1965—that played a crucial part in shaping Marshall’s understanding of him and his legacy.

“When I was younger—when I was 19, 20—I saw Dont Look Back. I already knew Bob and loved Bob, but Dont Look Back was centered around that trip he made, when he went electric, to that venue in London,” she says. “He had already gone electric the year before at Newport [Folk Festival], but I regarded that venue as part of that point in time when he quit the protest songs and created this movement that came forward from the beat poets taking acid. You know, music started to change right then and the revolution started.”

For Marshall, there are parallels between where America was in 1966 and where America is now in 2023. She points to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict and the constant stories and messages of war that are flooding our television sets and the apps on our phones. “At the same time Bob went electric in London, it was a moment in time where there really needed to be some kind of spearhead, conscious movement forward,” she explains. “I felt like that last year when I went to go do this show. It was an afterthought to record it but, when I made my mind up to record it, it was because of things going on in America—with changing the history [curriculum] in public schools, LGBTQ, everything going on with the Republican Party [going] against things in America that people have diligently worked hard to make safe, different states overturning the abortion law. Things are really messy—messed up—and we’re not even talking about the military complex right now with our taxes. So, I felt like it was just a no-brainer.”

While Marshall keeps pretty true to each of the 15 songs in the set—aside from the inevitable Cat Power-ification of the vocals—the one difference in continuity is the setting. Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall show didn’t actually take place there. No, he performed at the Manchester Free Trade Hall and subsequent bootleg tapes misattributed the location. But the name stuck and became canon forever. At the time, it was a pivotal moment not just for Dylan, but for rock ‘n’ roll altogether. It signaled a shift in the psyche of contemporary music—as Bob, who had so deftly become the States’ most revered protest singer, the “spokesman of a generation,” left much of his acoustic musings behind for more amplified, electric songwriting. While he performed the first half of the set acoustically, he turned the knob on his guitar up and invited his backing band The Hawks onto the stage to rip through renditions of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” For Marshall, her choice to record her set came from a desire to preserve that 1966 concert in time and create an “other” reality for Dylan and The Hawks, one where the second half of the set was revered and they didn’t spend the next six months of their tour getting booed.

On Cat Power Sings Dylan, Marshall doesn’t approach the source material with the ferociousness that Dylan and his band did 57 years ago—but she didn’t need to. In fact, I’d argue that her refusal to edit much of his songbook comes from a place of respect rather than mimicry. We’ve heard what Marshall can do to a song that’s not her own. The restraint she puts on display across Cat Power Sings Dylan is nothing short of revelatory. If she wanted to rewrite the algorithm of a song like “Just Like a Woman,” she very well could have just as she did 23 years ago with The Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason.” Instead, this album is celebratory in intention and first-rate in execution. The emphasis is on the tightness of the band and the way Marshall’s admiration for Dylan can be heard across every note she sings. When an audience member screams “Judas!” before “Ballad of a Thin Man,” it’s like an uncanny script is being followed, even if the heckler throws out their taunt one song too early.

And the band—guitarist Arsun Sorrenti, bassist Erik Paparozzi, pianist Aaron Embry, organist Jordan Summers and drummer Josh Adams—needed barely any time at all to master the material. “It only took a couple of days to say certain things like ‘Let’s slow down the tempo here. Let’s make it more even. Let’s not play with ego, let’s just reel it in and play it as it should lay with respect. Let’s make it tempered,’” Marshall says, “because, I think, the product that we have grown up with is raucous. I didn’t want it to have to go out like a shot in the dark like that. I wanted it to have temperance and strength, but not necessarily messy. I wanted it to feel and sound classy and preserved because, while Bob’s walking around on planet Earth—a lot of times, after someone’s passed, people do tributes—I wanted to do something beautiful for Bob, since he’s here with us. Something safe and lovely for him and for those who are still here who, maybe, were even at that concert.” There’s a famous photograph of Marshall holding up a copy of Another Side of Bob Dylan almost 20 years ago. But, if she were to pick one of his studio albums to give a full Cat Power treatment, it would be Blood on the Tracks.

After her Royal Albert Hall performance concluded, Marshall did catch wind that two people in the audience had been at the original show at the Manchester Free Trade Hall—a full-circle moment that still has her speechless. “I don’t know what to say. It was beautiful, it was like a bouquet of feelings for me, for everyone,” she says after a pause. While performing, she was particularly excited to play “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” “It just feels hot, it’s got that groove. That’s the funnest part, because it’s sexy, you know? And who doesn’t like something sexy?” she says, before clarifying with a chuckle: “I mean, obviously, as an adult.”

But it was the final song of the acoustic set, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” that proved most difficult for Marshall that night—and it still does, as she and the band have started to take the set on the road here in the States. She says the song has “many scars,” that its reverence has substituted hope with pain. “I’m in mid-life right now and that song is the hardest because it echoes of age to me, of a world that once was,” Marshall says. “And here we are, it just sounds like a mirror to me, some sort of dream of a mirror of hope. We’re letting that song down, we’re letting that spirit down—that revolutionary spirit from back then. Did we do our best for the children of that song? Did we help this world? It makes me really sad to sing now.” I make note of how, when I was younger, I preferred the Byrds interpretation of the song—likely because they stripped it down to just a few verses and created jangle pop with it. “The Byrds, as a kid hearing it, it quilted our ears. It was the style they played, it was softer, somehow, like the dream we’re living in,” Marshall adds. “With Bob’s version of it, I just hear scars. When I’m singing it, it hurts, because we, as humans, didn’t do a very good job. It’s heartbreaking for me.”

One of my favorite things Marshall has ever said is this quote from an interview in 2022: “…songs belong to us because people come and go, versions come and go, but it’s the actual song that belongs to us because all different people have done all these different songs and they become part of our story individually.” When considering how these 15 Bob Dylan songs become not just a part of the story of Chan Marshall, but of the story of Cat Power, it’s much more universal than anything else. “They relate to me just like they relate to everybody,” she says. “He’s our American songwriting homing device. I have a job because of him, he created my work.” While she might think Dylan’s songs belong to her just as much as they do anything else, I can hear his impact on her across 12 albums. I tell her that I’ve always thought of her 2012 song “Nothin’ But Time” as the Cat Power take on “Desolation Row.” While Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited epic found him turning away from drugs and hope and placing his focus on the reality before him and writing about his surroundings like carnival attractions, Marshall’s songwriting on the Sun penultimate song is much more gentle, done for a beloved person she considers a daughter figure who was, at the time in a rough spot.

“When she was young and struggling through a lot of things, I couldn’t—when young kids are going through things, you can only just do your best day-to-day, day-in and day-out. You have to grit your teeth and just try to let them know you’re there and you’re listening. You can’t really say too much to kids when they’re really going through it, because they need to learn how to express what they’re going through—because they can’t listen to you when they reach a certain age. But I wrote that for her because I just didn’t know what to do. And she’s amazing, she’s come to the other side. She still struggles, like we all struggle with different realities we’ve been born with—maybe our fucked up situations we come from or this and that. She still struggles, of course, but she’s on the right side of things. She got a scholarship from UCLA, she’s doing great. And she knows that song was written for her, and I love that song.”

Since 2000, Marshall has put out a covers album between two triumphant projects. The Covers Record came out in between Moon Pix and You Are Free, Jukebox came out in between The Greatest and Sun and, now, Cat Power Sings Dylan—paired with 2022’s Covers—is set to bridge the gap between Wanderer and her next chapter. It’s incredible how much of a command Marshall’s found when it comes to interpreting other people’s work, be it Phil Phillips’ “Sea of Love” becoming her most-famous song, or her giving Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” an alternate life as an indie rock gem. The way the Cat Power catalog has been sequenced feels like a masterfully paced treasure trove that finds Marshall taking deep exhales in-between long, emotional inhales. And doing cover records helps her enjoy her own original work more, because that’s what she’s been doing since she was a kid growing up in the South and listening to her stepdad’s record collection.

“It’s like giving flowers to people, that’s how it feels,” Marshall says. “Offering these songs to the world feels open and like a wellspring—anyone can do what I’m doing, covering songs, because everyone covered everybody’s songs until MTV came out. It makes me enjoy my work more, because I get to do my thing with other people’s material. I feel more confident, in a way, because it’s not my material, so I can just enjoy it the way I’ve enjoyed it my entire life. I can enjoy it and say ‘I don’t know how it’s supposed to be because I’m just redoing it. I don’t fucking know, and I don’t really care to find a theory or a style or something—because I’m just doing it and it feels open and it feels free.’ So, when I do my own material, I think it’s helped me feel more open towards doing my own thing, my own lyrics, my own production and my own musicality. It only strengthens my personal endeavors in music.”

2023 marks the 25th anniversary of Cat Power’s breakthrough album, Moon Pix. I ask Marshall if there was a moment where it became obvious that the record was catching on and that she wasn’t going to just be a folk singer living in Prosperity, North Carolina with Bill Callahan anymore. She laughs, pauses and then asks me to repeat the question again, so I do. “Well, I had an unfortunate stalker situation at the time that winter,” she says. I don’t pry, assuming that she might be referring to the guy she knew from her time in Greensboro who, at a release show after Moon Pix came out, showed up backstage with a gun. She immediately told some folks from Matador, her ex-label, and they shrugged it off—calling her crazy and kickstarting the idea that Chan Marshall is a “train wreck” on stage. But, she says, much of that era is just a blur now. “It’s always been one Greyhound bus, one train, one plane, one backseat, one car rental, one van to another, one floor, one youth hostel, one couch. One place to another, there’s never really been a definitive change,” Marshall adds.

The real clear change came eight years later when, after a psychological breakdown due to stress, she forced herself to get sober, go to therapy and get honest about her PTSD. This was around the time Marshall put out The Greatest, her 2006 magnum opus. “I met Karl Lagerfeld on the sidewalk and I got a great review in Rolling Stone. Drake came to my dressing room three years before his first record came out, asking me for industry advice,” she says. “That’s when I knew things were starting to get a little weird. And by weirdness, I mean at the table—I wouldn’t even say at the table, I’d say at a luncheon. I was in the cafeteria, for sure. I wouldn’t say that I was at the table. If this Bob Dylan record brings me to a certain table, that’s all well and good. It’s hard to feel appreciated or accepted in all these days and times because of this choose-a-side type of mentality we’re up against constantly around the world. I’ve never really felt part of a crew or clique.”

And yes, you read that right. Before Drake released So Far Gone in 2009, he was knocking on Cat Power’s door for advice. His uncle, Teenie Hodges, had become a father-figure to Marshall, and he asked her if she would have a private meeting with Drake and answer questions about the private, insular world of the record industry. But, as Chan Marshall is known to do, she dropped a massive, never-before-said anecdote and then followed it up with something profound—as if the previous sentiment was not nearly as interesting.

“Sometimes it takes a great loss to understand where we are today,” she notes. “All of a sudden, it just appears to you and it hurts when it’s too late. But the glory—the beauty—of that, of self-discovery or awakenings, is that you do have the rest of the afternoon and the evening and tomorrow to get your shit together. And I believe that people are so strong-willed that they can make a huge impact on their life for the better and the lives around them just by making that conscious decision to do so. Teenie, I found out too late that he was a father-figure to me. It took many years for me to realize that and, thank God I realized it.” As for the whole Drake part? “He came in—I wouldn’t say he was terribly friendly at all—he had his questions ready and I answered them in-depth and honestly and directly and that was that. He went on his way and became a mega-star and mega-influencer of the youth. It was business. It wasn’t about things like Dylan, it wasn’t about things like the Holy Spirit or revolutionary thought. It was about business moving forward.”

When NME reviewed Moon Pix 25 years ago, they said that Marshall toed the line between Sonic Youth and Hank Williams and that she sounded like the oldest person alive—despite being only 26 when it came out. “That is so cute,” she interjects quickly. I understand where NME was coming from, as Moon Pix is a record focused on making sense of rejection and loss. On it, Marshall sounds like she’s lived a hundred lives and, as a survivor of childhood trauma and abuse myself, the album means a lot to me largely because of that—especially a song like “Colors and the Kids,” which was a “last-minute stroke at the piano” when Marshall was having a bad time. “I sat down and I asked the assistant engineer to just stick around while everybody was at dinner or getting drunk at the ping pong table,” she says. “I was just like, ‘Can you press record and leave me alone?’ And I just made [‘Colors and the Kids’] up at the piano. I’d never played piano on tape before—since I was in fifth grade and music became names—never played that song or nothin’.”

Years ago, Marshall called Moon Pix her saving grace, and you can hear that across all 11 songs—as she wrestles with heartbreak and recurring images of damnation and, in order to avoid it, she spoke it into existence. “When we were teenagers, we wanted to be the sky,” she sings on “Colors and the Kids.” “Now all we wanna do is go to red places and try to stay outta hell”; “I once was lost, but now I’m found,” she sings on “Metal Heart.” “Was blind, but now I see you. How selfish of you, to believe in the meaning of all the bad dreaming.”

The story has always gone that Marshall had a hallucinatory nightmare one night while living in a farmhouse in South Carolina and wrote almost the entire album immediately after—and it’s the reason why so much Hell-related imagery can be found all throughout the tracklist. And it’s a true story, as Marshall suffered from horrible dreams from the time she was a kid up until her son was born in the mid-2010s. Rather than gravitate towards therapists and pills, she preferred interrogating her demons through holistic practices—expel her nighttime terrors after working with Reiki and ancestral clearing, exercises that saved her life in 2012 after she suffered an autoimmune attack due to stress. But she recounts the night Moon Pix arrived as if it happened just last week:

“I was asleep, dreaming of other things, and I heard the record player turn on and it was a classical opera—very dark, very scary, scathingly urgent. I don’t know if it was in German or Italian, but the music was loud and frightening. It woke up my conscious mind, and this man spoke to me. He said ‘Come meet me in the field.’ I was asleep, and I was like, ‘No, I’m dreaming. You’re interrupting my dream.’ And he very curtly and rudely said ‘No, come outside and meet me in the field.’ You can sleep with your eyes open sometimes and, through the field and over the pine trees, I could hear his voice and it was really loud and angry. I made myself wake up and I woke up and said ‘No.’ I was sitting up in bed and I yelled the word no.

“As soon as I did that, I felt—what felt like—an earthquake under the bed, under the grass, under the house, under the soil in the center of the earth. It felt, physically, similar to the Gates of Hell being released and all the souls were unchained and they were coming to me at the speed of darkness. I ran to every room in that house and turned on the lights and I could see shapes of black oil coming up to the [kitchen window] where the light reflects off the glass and you see your reflection, you don’t really see outside so well. I could see by the hundreds of thousands pressed against it, as if the house were underwater and all the souls were trying to enter my mine.

“The whole house was lit from within and I went into my little guest room—my kitten was there, I was alone—and that’s where I made up my songs. I had my typewriter and my little cassette recorder and I just pressed record. I got my acoustic flamenco, and that porch light on the side of the house was very bright outside. I saw my truck, I saw the gravel road, I saw the deer, I saw the highway down the driveway. And I sat with my kitten until the sun rose up.”

Bob Dylan once said that he didn’t know where all of his songs came from, that they were works of his subconscious that just happened to him. In the case of Moon Pix, Marshall speaks similarly about a divine energy that connects all of us. She insists that he’s awake all the time in animals and the vibrations of the trees and that it came alive that night and will continue to do so. “All that manifestation of energy that we have and, one day, it’s not in our vessel and it appears to be gone; that thing, the reason we’re all talking to each other, the God molecule they’ve been trying to find in Switzerland for 40 years, or whatever,” she says. “The reason the birds and the bees are alive and these molecules are floating around the atmosphere—whatever we are—it’s all the same things. I don’t know much, but I have a feeling about that. As dumb and brilliant as we are, as atheist and religion-ridden as we are, I think we all agree that we are all connected, whether we’re in denial or in the military in our brain or not.”

For two decades, Marshall has been quite vocal and candid about her longtime struggles with addiction and her sobriety. She’s gone on record about her drinking getting pretty bad in the early 2000s especially, but it was a completely different story when Moon Pix was released. “I was great,” she maintains. Two years earlier, she went on a trip to South Africa because, in her words, “[Nelson] Mandela was free.” After spending 11 days in Cape Town and meeting a lot of “white devils,” she couldn’t bear the weight of the pain she’d witnessed and left with an ex-militia man-turned-mercenary named John—who’d become a freedom fighter—on a camping trip. They spent two months traveling through the outline of South Africa, crossing through places like Tanzania and Mozambique, and learning languages, cooking food, meeting Black Africans from the land and seeing the wildlife sleeping among them.

“That changed me. It realigned me as a young adult,” Marshall says. “That experience—going from this white devil, capital center of Cape Town to, then, traveling with people of the earth from the outline areas of South Africa and sleeping on the ground—it really did something to my soul. It did something to my heart and my mind. I knew that I needed to move on in the trajectory of my life. When they built a statue of Mandela when they let him out, I was like, ‘Hell yeah, I’m going to South Africa right now to say what’s up to the people that I thought were free because he was free’ and I was dead wrong, man. It was a fucking nightmare. I swore that I’d never go back to hanging out with those white devils that I came across.”

Marshall had been working odd jobs around New York, serving as a nanny, a religious bookstore employee and a bartender. Making music for a living was never her goal and, once she returned from South Africa, she and Callahan left the Babylon of the Big Apple and headed back to the South. It was then that she tried to get more involved with underserved communities and start clawing at her dreams. “I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a photographer posted up in different places where people needed to learn the truth about other countries that needed help,” Marshall adds. “There I was—I didn’t have a GED—going to all of these public schools in South Carolina asking if I could work in after-school programs for tutoring to help kids read—because I could read at three, I read the Bible with my grandmother every night. I followed her finger. I couldn’t teach math, but I could help people learn to read. I was good at working with kids.”

Her mind immediately wanders back to Moon Pix. “But that nightmare, I needed those songs to do something to help me stay alive, because I was afraid that, fuck, they were coming for my soul,” she says. “That’s what I believe to be true.” The album was recorded in January 1998 at Sing Sing Studio in Melbourne, Australia, where Marshall went “to escape” the clutches of America with Bill Callahan. “I thought Prosperity was an answer. It wasn’t,” she adds. “It was just part of a destination on my journey of life. I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna pack my shit, I’m gonna come live here [in Melbourne].’ They didn’t have salt on the table, their food was great. People were more educated than Americans, they were more direct than Europeans. I was like, ‘Okay, now I’ve found my people.’ I was constantly searching for my people.”

That curiosity and exploration would, eventually, take her back to South Africa nearly 20 years later. Upon her arrival, she saw a lot of practical progress in place of the disparity that plagued the genesis of her trip in the first place. On her initial trek, she had spent a lot of time with a witch doctor, a collector and, of course, John the freedom fighter—three Black men who protected her and kept her safe. When she walked into places she promised she would return to, those men were all gone, having moved on to different parts of the continent and started families of their own. “One person remembered the witch doctor and said he could find him, and I told him I’d be back and I haven’t been back,” Marshall says. “But I know how to find them now, and I will go back and find them. There were a lot of things that helped me when I returned. I didn’t know I had my son in my belly on that trip, but I’m so glad. All it did was empower me, returning to see that progress.”

The stories that Marshall told me, she also told them to American author Denis Johnson many years ago. For a long time before Johnson died in 2017, they were email penpals and he wanted Marshall to write a book about her time in Africa that he would edit. “He wanted me to live with him and his wife,” Marshall explains. “And he said, ‘My wife will cook us meals and all you have to do is, for a week, I’m gonna ask you questions and you need to tell me exactly what happened—because he felt that I needed to write a book about this experience. And then, he passed, but I never had time to get off tour, because I’m always working month to month. That’s the lifestyle, and it sucks. But I take it because it’s a good job and I reach a lot of people.”

Marshall has turned down six book deals because the money has just never been enough. In her own words, she can’t afford to turn off her life when bills are due. She’s adamant that she would need at least a year to sit down and write the whole story, and that she’s not going to phone it in for the sake of cashing a check. “If you know me by now, I’m not going to do anything half-assed,” she says, sternly, before quickly apologizing. “Sorry, a lot of people think I do, just because they know my fun-loving character. Doesn’t mean I don’t work my fucking ass off.” The thought of compromising her own work ethic and creative output as a means of bending to the will of those around her just isn’t in Marshall’s vocabulary. By the time we hit our time limit, she’s gotta jet off to speak with the BBC. We didn’t get a chance to catch up about the recent Met Gala theme that was done in honor of her late, dear friend Karl Lagerfeld, the story of her supposed Johnny Cash dream right after he died or playing a show with Neutral Milk Hotel in 1996. But that’s the beautiful thing about Cat Power: There will be a next time, because Chan Marshall has always got a story to tell.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.