The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Cat Power
March 2003
In You Are Free (Matador), as in most of the music that travels under the name of Cat Power, you can feel the world come to a complete stop.
It might be the room you're sitting in, the neighborhood outside, the country surrounding any place you might find yourself, or anywhere the singer, 31-year-old Georgia native Chan Marshall, might be. You're listening to someone who has come to terms with dead ends. "You've got to hear her," a northern woman said to me in Memphis a few years ago; she was telling me how Memphis had turned out to be a dead end for her.
Playing Cat Power's 1998 Moon Pix a few weeks later, I had the same reaction most people do when they hear Cat Power for the first time: When does something happen? It's not only that Cat Power music is slow, or that Marshall uses her voice like a kind of drone. It's that she conjures up an emptiness so complete, a room so fully occupied by nothing, that on her territory time itself ceases to pass. There's no history, no future. On You Are Free, the first song, "I Don't Blame You"—with no accompaniment but a simple, vamping piano—moves like those early scenes in Morvern Callar, with Samantha Morton wandering through her apartment, stepping around the body of her suicide boyfriend as if she's wondering what it is.
What's really unsettling about Cat Power music—frightening, in certain moods—is that there is no frame of reference. Marshall may sound like Kim Gordon on her first album, Myra Lee, recorded in 1994 for Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley's ultracool Smells Like Records label—but after that she dissolves her songs more than she offers them to anyone. On You Are Free "Good Woman" is four minutes in which a tantalizing, beckoning piece of music seems most of all determined never to actually start: the most complete music Chan Marshall has made.
It opens with a fuzzed guitar, playing the kind of bent modal figure you can find all over Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack (1996). It's joined by a scratchy mountain fiddle, an old, old sound that seems to grow out of the lines of the guitar like a vine.
Coming together, the first notes rise like a promise. That's what draws you in, but it's as far as the music will go. From this point on, it's as if the instruments and the singer are endlessly tuning up. Children's voices lead the singer into a verse from one side, a man's voice leads her from the other side, but she steps away.
You could play this song all day, trying to make it come out differently. You don't want it to end; you don't want the song to abandon you. But dramatizing abandonment—what happens when the world stops, when the room you inhabit is empty—is what the song is all about.
"The music he played felt abandoned by him," Geoff Dyer writes of Chet Baker in But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. "He played the old ballads and standards with a long series of caresses that led nowhere and subsided into nothing. . . Every time he played a note he waved it goodbye. Sometimes he didn't even wave." That's how Marshall treats other people's songs: Skip Spence's "Weighted Down" (on the 1996 "Nude as the News" single, retitled "Schizophrenia's Weighted Me Down"), her deadly reading of the folk song, "Moonshiner" on Moon Pix, the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" or Bob Dylan's "Paths of Victory" on The Covers Record in 2000, her emptying out of Robert Johnson's previously uncoverable 1936 "Come on in My Kitchen" on the Sonic Youth-curated All Tomorrow's Parties collection in 2002. She turns gold—hits in one form or another—into lead; songs that could never become hits. She takes away the glamour of their reputations, the allure of their rhythms. She abandons the songs to their own devices. Nothing is left but bones dressed in rags—and then those bones stand up and walk.
On You Are Free, Chan Marshall performs the same operation on her own music; she abandons her own songs. It's a queer little drama: As with the empty room in which the drama takes place, the drama can expand to where it touches everything. "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," the country singer Alan Jackson piously asked the country after the terrorist attacks of 2001. If you hear You Are Free as Cat Power's answer record, the answer is, right where I always was.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, March 2003
I first learned about Cat Power as a guest artist with Flaming Lips on Austin City Limits. Wow. Later on she covered my favorite Michael Hurley song. In awe. Apparently there's lots more to learn about. Thanks.