“I’ve never told anybody this, but that is about Kurt Cobain. It’s about him blowing his head off.” That was Chan Marshall speaking to The Guardian in 2012. She would possibly as properly have stated, “I’ve never told anybody this, but the sky is blue.” Everyone knew. Everyone knew the Cobain connection the primary time that they heard “I Don’t Blame You,” the primary track on Cat Power’s 2003 album You Are Free. I don’t bear in mind ever entertaining the concept “I Don’t Blame You” was not about Cobain. Certain issues by no means actually must be stated. Certain issues are understood.
“Last time I saw you, you were onstage. Your hair was wild, your eyes were bright, and you were in a rage. You were swinging your guitar around ’cause they wanted to hear that sound, but you didn’t want to play. And I don’t blame you.” That was how Chan Marshall opened “I Don’t Blame You.” Right away, the which means was apparent. So was the subtext.
You Are Free was the primary album of authentic Cat Power songs in 5 years. After Marshall had been transferring in underground circles for years and after she’d thought of leaving music behind completely, 1998’s stark, skeletal, unsparing Moon Pix had turned her right into a type of cool-kid superstar — somebody who may mannequin designer garments in magazines. It additionally turned Chan Marshall into somebody who would play her songs in packed golf equipment, with a whole bunch of individuals observing her. This didn’t sit proper together with her.
Cat Power exhibits had been infamous for his or her discomfort ranges. There can be tales about Chan Marshall stopping exhibits within the center, crying, operating offstage. I by no means noticed something like that occur, however on the Cat Power exhibits that I noticed within the late ’90s and early ’00s, I did see somebody who didn’t like consideration. The individuals who got here to Cat Power exhibits weren’t lookie-loos, essentially, however there was one thing performative about the way in which they’d yell encouragement at Marshall at any time when she faltered in between songs. The vibe was fucked. Chan Marshall wasn’t well-known-famous, however she was well-known sufficient to flinch away from all these eyeballs.
Lots of Cat Power songs are about embracing oblivion, in regards to the comforting attraction of the void. When Marshall lastly consented to make one other album, she had a big-money engineer and a few extraordinarily well-known visitor musicians, however she wasn’t attempting to develop into a star. Instead, she reacted with horror at any time when she noticed herself changing into an abstraction in different individuals’s minds — one thing that you simply have to do to develop into a star or perhaps a mid-level indie musician. “I Don’t Blame You” is a track of commiseration for somebody who needed to carry all of the bullshit of tens of millions of strangers, somebody who was all the time seen however seldom understood. Maybe it’s additionally a track about Chan Marshall forgiving herself, rationalizing her personal urge for food for self-annihilation. But humorous issues occur when songs exit into the world. A number of months after the discharge of You Are Free, an album that can flip 20 years outdated tomorrow, Chan Marshall discovered herself performing “I Don’t Blame You” on British tv.
After Moon Pix made her semi-famous-ish, Chan Marshall retreated, which solely drew individuals in additional. When Marshall adopted Moon Pix with The Covers Record, her 2000 assortment of different individuals’s songs, it’d’ve been a transfer away from the highlight, however that album grew to become its personal type of word-of-mouth hit. When Marshall lastly recorded You Are Free, she appeared reluctant. Marshall produced the album herself, however she did it with a big-deal engineer. Adam Kasper had already produced big data for the Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Queens Of The Stone Age. He volunteered his providers for no matter Marshall wanted. Marshall wasn’t certain about him.
There’s an enchanting Pitchfork interview from the second simply earlier than Cat Power launched You Are Free. In the dialog, Marshall pushes again towards most of the questions and even the concept she must be doing the interview in any respect. She additionally describes how Adam Kasper got here into her life. She says a good friend advisable Kasper and that he volunteered is providers as engineer, producer, no matter she wanted: “I was like, hmmm… sounds a little too friendly, ’cause I didn’t know him at all… I don’t want anyone ever producing me unless I’m giving my soul to them. Like, unless they’re writing the songs and I love them so much and I want them to fucking tell me what to do. But I’ll never do that.”
Chan Marshall’s preferrred collaborator, as she put it then, was “someone who will just shut the fuck up.” That was Adam Kasper. You Are Free is the primary Cat Power album that couldn’t plausibly be described as “lo-fi,” however that doesn’t imply that it’s accessible. The album flits backwards and forwards between Marshall’s misty, spectral ballads and fuzzed-out conjurings that sound, on at the very least degree, like rock songs. A number of of Adam Kasper’s different shoppers present up, however they maintain their contributions minimal. Eddie Vedder sings backup on two songs, his baritone murmur including ballast to Mashall’s hazy twang. Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain’s outdated bandmate, performs drums on a number of songs and bass one one, however he by no means drops bombs on the observe. The most seen collaborator is Dirty Three/Bad Seeds violinist Warren Ellis, whose uncooked scrape was already acquainted to Marshall.
Chan Marshall labored on You Are Free in between excursions and travels, not following any explicit plan. Sometimes, she labored with different musicians. Usually, she didn’t. Some songs appear engineered to win Cat Power an even bigger viewers. Some are about Marshall’s ambivalence about these theoretical larger audiences. Some are each; “Free,” the album’s second track, is a spaced-out chug-rocker in regards to the illusory nature of fame: “Don’t be in love with the autograph/ Just be in love when you love that song, on and on.” The recording course of looks like it ought to’ve led to one thing slapdash and all-over-the-place, however Chan Marshall’s voice, authorial and in any other case, is simply too sturdy for that. Even the rockers carry the vaporous, languid strangeness that all the time set Cat Power aside.
Chan Marshall didn’t write each track on You Are Free. As ever, there are covers. Marshall turns Michael Hurley’s outsider-folk track “Werewolf” right into a seance, and she or he reimagines blues nice John Lee Hooker’s terse accusation “Crawlin’ Black Spider” because the misplaced, desolate incantation “Keep On Runnin’.” Those cowl selections appear deeply deliberate. Chan Marshall won’t phrase it in these phrases, and she or he won’t even consider these items consciously, however I see these two covers, at the very least partially, as Marshall’s means of setting herself aside from the rest that was taking place in music in 2003. Marshall’s friends weren’t the opposite artists on the Matador Records roster or those populating America’s indie golf equipment; they had been the ragged, historical voices that discovered their means into your bones.
Some of the songs on You Are Free converse to a bottomless, overwhelming disappointment. “Good Woman” is a howl of devotion from one damaged individual to a different, whereas “Names” is a heart-wrecking catalog of the youngsters who Marshall knew when she was younger. In Marshall’s telling, these children went by means of Biblical travails: demise, molestation, rape. One child, Charles, professed his like to Marshall after they had been each 14, however then Marshall moved some other place. Over a mercilessly quiet piano development, Marshall sings what occurred to Charles within the easiest phrases possible: “He began to smoke crack. Then he had to sell ass. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where they are.”
In that Pitchfork interview, Rodrigo Perez, the author, asks Chan Marshall whether or not she actually knew these children. Her reply: “I know them. I don’t know where they are. My friend said he saw one, ‘Charles,’ and said he’s alive. But some of the other ones, I know I’ve tried to find on the…” She trails off for a second. She can’t consider the phrase “internet.” Then she whispers: “They’re not there.”
A track like “Names” shouldn’t be the type of factor that you simply play within the background if you’re having dinner. But that’s the factor about Cat Power. In her writing, Chan Marshall digs deep into the depths of human desperation and depravity. But she all the time makes it sound so stunning. Marshall’s voice — tender, honeyed, all the time someplace flickering within the distance — nonetheless casts its spell even when she’s singing in an costly studio. Her elliptical songwriting type by no means misplaced its core. You may solely gloss up a Cat Power file a lot.
Earlier this week, Lana Del Rey advised Billie Eilish that she’d primarily realized to sing whereas listening to Cat Power: “Her low tones, I would practice them. The way she sang that song where she’s like, [sings] ‘Bay-be-doll,’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could sing like that.’ I realized I had a low register, too. And when I learned that she played a big concert in New York with her back turned to the audience, that was when I realized I might have a chance.” All of this tracks. Cat Power took all that darkness, and she or he made it fairly. She made it into the type of factor that would glimmer softly within the background. That was her reward, and possibly it was her curse.
Freedom is a giant theme on You Are Free. It goes means past the title. It’s on the core of a track like “I Don’t Blame You” — the liberty of annihilation, the liberty to let your self develop into nothing. Listening to You Are Free immediately, I get the sensation that Chan Marshall believed normal performance to be a mere position, one which she may fortunately shrug off. About midway into You Are Free, one can find “Maybe Not,” a trembling piano-ballad that just about reads as a fantasy: “We can all be free. Maybe not with words. Maybe not with a look. But with your mind.” Chan Marshall sang that track on the Late Show With David Letterman.
Chan Marshall did loads of work to advertise You Are Free. She did the type of work that didn’t essentially come simply to her. She gave interviews. She made a music video. She toured arduous. I noticed Cat Power for the second time on that You Are Free tour, and she or he was much less halting, much less visibly shaken, than after I’d first seen her a number of years earlier. Still, I didn’t get the sensation that Chan Marshall needed to be there in that room on that evening. She gave the impression to be drawing into herself. I left that evening pondering that the native openers, Lungfish facet undertaking the Pupils, had completely blown her off the stage. Dan Higgs was a bizarre and singular presence, too, however he was additionally a performer. Chan Marshall was not. Not but, anyway.
Maybe that’s the essential attraction of Cat Power. You take heed to these data, and also you hear somebody figuring issues out. Chan Marshall operated as a uncooked nerve for years and years. She flinched away from individuals’s consideration, and that made individuals wish to pay extra consideration. Marshall struggled after she launched You Are Free. She went by means of a foul breakup. Her consuming bought worse. But Marshall survived. She finally reached the stage of her life the place she could possibly be comfy as a touring musician, and she or he’s been in that stage for a very long time. She hasn’t launched one other album like You Are Free. Nobody has.