Chan Marshall is holed up with the accepted adulation if her activity in a Soho auberge room, and for this abrupt moment, she couldn't be happier. The bedding are rumpled. Room-service trays are everywhere, covered with the debris of her endure few commons – half-eaten bake-apple plates, drained-dry beer bottles. As late-after apex sunshine pushes through bankrupt shades, Marshall is rolling about on pale-green bedding with her beloved: a snuffling French bi-weekly alleged Mona.
"Do you wuv your mommy?" Marshall asks her dog in a squeaky babyish voice. "Do you?" Mona offers a bark in acknowledgment and leaps off the bed, toenails skittering on the board floor. Marshall, 36 – who, beneath the name Cat Power, has accounting and articulate some of the a lot of alluringly sad and apparitional songs of the endure ten years – sits up and giggles. "I got her endure Christmas – she was like a big asleep potato," she says in her absolute speaking voice, which is whispery, musical, with abandoned traces of her adolescence Southern accent. "She was so scared, shaking, with these big, big eyes."
Mona isn't afraid anymore. And her buyer isn't either, admitting there's still something brittle about her. Marshall is sipping chamomile tea that she says tastes like balloon gum, and smoker the aboriginal in an amaranthine alternation of Marlboro Lights. She's thin, maybe too thin, and tan, maybe too tan. There are annoyed circles beneath her amber eyes. She's cutting no architecture and a apart arrested shirt that looks like it ability accept belonged to a boyfriend; her pale-blue jeans are formed up like she's able to attack into something unpleasant, absolute a comfortable brace of white slipper-socks. Marshall can't assume to breach what she admits is a constant addiction of afresh assuming the aforementioned affecting catechism to whoever's in her presence: 'Are you mad at me?"
In added than a decade of recording as Cat Power, Chan (pronounced "Shawn") Marshall has accomplished the affectionate of steady, ancient aesthetic advance that few Gen X musicians accept managed, affective from scratchy, barely-there songs of raw affliction to her 2006 masterpiece, The Greatest, with its able Memphis-soul backing, jauntily anxious songwriting and whiskey-and-honey vocals. But even afore she suffered a spectacular, alcohol-fueled brainy breakdown in January 2006 – in which she chock-full bistro and sleeping and started accepting hallucinations about behemothic pyramids – Marshall was in crisis of accepting bigger accepted as a bassinet case than as a musician.
Her rep as a reside aerialist was tragicomically awful, added Ol' Dirty Bastard than Joni Mitchell. At her best, she would adumbrate abaft her hair, altercate with the complete man, cut songs short, afford tears, get drunk; at her affliction – an abominable 1999 New York show, to be absolute – she concluded up coiled into a bound brawl at the bend of the stage. (To be fair, it turns out that accurate freakout was aggressive by alarm over a actual absolute gun-wielding stalker.)
Marshall's 2006 breakdown came from the aforementioned aphotic abode as the songs on The Greatest: She was devastated by her breakdown with Daniel Cury, a archetypal she still calls the adulation of her life. She was accessible to die – at one point abandoning affairs to annihilate herself abandoned because she saw a advertisement for an accessible Mary J. Blige anthology that she capital to hear. She concluded up spending seven abhorrent canicule in the brainy and substance-abuse area of a Miami hospital in aboriginal 2006 and emerged transformed, if not absolutely sober, as the beer bottles in her allowance adjure (she eschews AA and practices her own adaptation of balance administration instead).
She went on bout with the Memphis Rhythm Band, the Southern-soul veterans who recorded The Greatest with her – and abashed her audience: She was al of a sudden a show-woman, even a ham, dancing onstage instead of weeping. "It was like I woke up," she says, aflame the smile that explains why appearance photographers accept been amorous with her for years. "I feel added myself now and more, like, able. And beneath accommodated to accept to any of the active abrogating questioning, debilitating, you know, afraid affair anymore."
Friends see the aforementioned changes. "Her demons were a little out of ascendancy aback afresh – she's array of fabricated accompany with them now," says Judah Bauer from the Jon Spencer Dejection Explosion, who has accepted Marshall for a decade and plays guitar in her accepted band. "Her intentions are different: She's branch added adjoin life," It's the third anniversary of December, and Marshall is in New York adequate a attenuate ages off: She spent the time in her accommodation in Miami, seeing friends, watching what she calls "my Oprah and Tyra," and walking Mona on the bank at aurora and sundown. Marshall has an anthology ready, alleged Sun, all about the affliction and joy of her activation - but you will not be audition that one for a while. "Because these [new] songs beggarly a lot to me, and The Greatest meant a lot to me," she says. "And I'm not traveling to do it appropriate now. I'm not traveling to go aback in there area it hurts appropriate now. I'm traveling to do what fucking makes me feel acceptable appropriate now." So on January 22nd, she instead appear Jukebox, a stylish, atmospheric covers anthology bedeviled by songs she heard growing up: tunes by James Brown ("Lost Someone"), Joni Mitchell ("Blue"), Billie Holiday ("Don't Explain") – and even Frank Sinatra ("New York, New York").
With abetment from her versatile, Stones-y new band, Dirty Delta Dejection (which includes her longtime drummer, Jim White of Australian indie rockers the Dirty Three, as able-bodied as Bauer), the anthology offers a rougher yield on The Greatest's soul-and-country vibe; it's altogether clashing 2000's Covers Record, which featured all-but-unrecognizable, ashen remakes. "With all my added records, I feel a faculty of aching for that accepting who wrote them then," Marshall says. "People say they adulation The Greatest, but my articulation was not strong, and I was in a state. So I feel like Jukebox is my aboriginal almanac – even admitting I apperceive that sounds so brainless and juvenile. It was my aboriginal time recording and accepting happy. I'm so blessed that there are, like, songs that accomplish me happy."
The next day, Marshall is in the bath of her auberge room, accidentally peeing with the aperture open. As she does so, she happens to be cogent me that she doesn't accept she needs the affectionate of attitude that surrounds Bob Dylan, one of her idols. "There's no mystery," she says. "I've got annihilation to lose by talking." She had just been speaking in agonisingly aboveboard detail about her affliction over the aborticide she had if she was twenty years old – she has accounting at atomic one song, "Nude as the News," about the son she's assertive she should accept had. "It's the better aberration I anytime made," she says.
Marshall isn't big on boundaries, which helps explain her aptitude for creating a convincing acquaintance with her admirers and just about anyone she meets. If I see her that additional afternoon, she's cutting my scarf, which I'd accidentally larboard abaft the antecedent day. As Marshall tells belief from her activity – abounding of them disturbing, including one about a 1998 adventure in which she believes she saw hundreds of angry booze clawing at her window in the average of the night – she follows a anecdotal argumentation that is, at times, eccentric. She all-overs into assorted accents: British, French, South African, forth with variations on the Southern inflections of her youth. She's still actual abundant the babe she was as a kid: She burps repeatedly, un-self-consciously, and picks her adenoids a few times. Altogether, she's such a dark, absorbing array of quirks that she doesn't assume absolutely absolute – she's like an overwritten appearance from an indie cine that can't adjudge if it's a ball or a drama. (Maggie Gyllenhaal happens to be blind out in the auberge antechamber bench on the aboriginal day – absolute casting.)
For all of Marshall's openness, there is one accountable she will not address. One compress diagnosed her with posttraumatic accent ataxia from some accident or contest that took abode during her adolescence – a vagabond, Southern Gothic accomplishments that saw her bouncing amid her parents. She refers askance to "violence" in her accomplishments and says that whatever happened is "common," but she will not be specific.
Marshall comes from a continued bandage of poverty-stricken alcoholics. Her affectionate great-grandmother was a share-cropper who had her grandmother acrimonious affection at 5 years old, the child's fingers bleeding from the burrs. Marshall's parents met at a gig in Atlanta by one of the bar bands her artist ancestor played in. "The adventure goes that he took this babe Nancy home that night and that he asked Nancy for Mom's number," Marshall says, "And my dad said she was the a lot of admirable woman he'd anytime seen. He saw her from beyond the room."
They had Chan in 1971, if they were still teenagers. They breach up if she was a baby, and activity got rough. Her mom affiliated a agent – addition barband artist – and they confused all over the South, while her dad backward in Atlanta. Marshall recalls both her ancestor and stepfather jamming out dejection on electric guitars – the affectionate of clichéd riffs she still can't and will not play. She aswell remembers her ancestor shooing her abroad from his piano if she was small, cogent her it wasn't a toy. Drugs and booze were consistently around; she drank beer out of babyish bottles, watched ancestors associates smoke bongs in foreground of her. She chock-full assertive in God if she was seven.
And by top school, Marshall was a mess. "I was so unhappy," she says. "I was, like, consistently baleful and, you know, not havin' friends. I just started demography LSD and smokin' all the pot I could get and drinkin' annihilation I could drink. I got arrested for shoplifting, and my mom beatific me to my dad. I'd get top all day and all night." She flunked her green year and afresh abandoned out if her father's accommodation got crowded: A new adherent had confused in. Marshall had to get her own place, so she bare a full-time job.
She concluded up alive for three and a bisected years at an Atlanta pizza collective alleged Fellini's, amidst by tattooed dudes, abounding of them musicians – "gorgeous adolescent things." "She was in the appropriate place, because anybody she formed with there had a difficult history," says Clay Harper, her boss. "She had a lot of activity and character. And she was acceptable for business because she was aswell cute." One day, on a whim, she bought a Silvertone guitar and a little amp from one of her crushes and put it by the daybed in her tiny apartment. Eventually, instead of alert to one of three annal she played over and over on her bargain stereo – Aretha Franklin's This Girl's in Adulation With You, Sinéad O'Connor's The Lion and the Cobra and Joni Mitchell's Blue - she started teaching herself to play. Soon she was in an awful, blatant bandage alleged Cat Power. After added and added accompany started accepting into heroin – some dying – Marshall confused to New York. She begin herself arena music again, barrier into a high-profile gig aperture for Liz Phair in 1994. The Cat Ability name (taken from a Cat Diesel hat anyone was cutting at Fellini's) stuck, even if the bandage didn't.
Last April, Marshall met Bob Dylan at one of his concerts in Paris. Judging by "Song to Bobby" – the abandoned new agreement on Jukebox – it was an affecting experience. "At endure we meet," Dylan said. If she had met addition hero, Patti Smith, a few years back, she was too bashed and depressed to accessible up; it was altered with Dylan. "I adulation you," Marshall told him.
"I like the complete of that," Dylan replied. "At atomic somebody does." She'd acquainted a abysmal affiliation with Dylan back age nine, if she begin his Greatest Hits among her father's annal – area she would after ascertain Otis Redding, Billie Holiday, Buddy Holly and the Stones. But the Dylan almanac was special. "He was all abandoned on that dejected cover," Marshall says. "I didn't apperceive annihilation about abandoned music. It acquainted like he was singing to me."
The abandoned added non-cover tune on Jukebox is "Metal Heart," a song accounting and recorded for her fourth album, 1998's Moon Pix. The aboriginal adaptation is apathetic and about unbearably sad, a account of a damaged accepting "losing the affidavit why" and blocking herself off from the world: architecture a metal heart. The new adaptation is far better-played and better-sung – but by the end. it's aswell defiant, maybe triumphant: Marshall howls, "Metal heart, you're not account a thing," with a antibacterial force.
Does she still accept a metal heart? It's aboriginal evening, and the lights are dim in her auberge allowance as Marshall considers the question, while Mona sleeps nearby. She's cutting a light-green shirt buttoned to the top, her hair in a ponytail – weirdly, she looks like Patti Smith in Dylan approach or Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There. "Not so much," she says, afresh all-overs her head. "I mean, yeah – that's allotment of who I am, I guess. But I assumption it's accessible now." She smiles, her teeth aboriginal white adjoin her tan. "I apart that motherfucker," she says.
This adventure is from the February 7th, 2008 affair of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Affair 1045: February 7, 2008
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