Cat Power ♪ Wanderer

Pop Music

October 8, 2018 Issue

Cat Power’s Past Imbues “Wanderer” with Empathy and Weight

Decades after her début, the indie rocker’s interest in soul and blues idioms remains, but she has never sounded more like a folksinger.

By Amanda Petrusich

In the past two decades, Chan Marshall has provided a template for generations of young women coming up in the aggressively male genre of indie rock.

Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh for The New Yorker

È un fardello strano essere l'unico rimasto in piedi, suggerisce Marshall, a diventare 

l'unico possessore di qualche conoscenza oscura. "Se sei il prossimo ad uscire con 

questa storia, è quando impazzisci, è nero", canta. Gran parte dell'album riguarda il 

fatto spiacevole di rimanere vivi anche quando pensavi di non poter continuare, 

anche quando le persone che ami non ci sono, anche quando i paesaggi che 

conoscevi intimamente sono diventati strani, anche se tutto ciò che 

ti circonda continua a cambiare . Che cosa significa, davvero, 

sopravvivere? Pochissimi viaggiatori ritornano per trovare il posto da cui sono 

venuti proprio mentre lo lasciavano. Come fa una persona a lottare con una casa 

che sembra familiare e irriconoscibile?

Cat Power è stato raramente un progetto di gruppo e Marshall ha eseguito 

e prodotto "Wanderer" da sola. La maggior parte dell'album è solo chitarra, 

pianoforte e la sua voce senza fronzoli. Ma Marshall è anche un collaboratore 

istintivo, che ha realizzato due dischi usando canzoni di altre persone 

("The Covers Record", del 2000, e "Jukebox", del 2008). 

Chan Marshall was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972 and raised in North Carolina and Tennessee. She came of age as a musician in New York, where, in the early nineteen-nineties, she began recording under the name Cat Power. Her first releases, made with the drummer Steve Shelley, of Sonic Youth, reflect the city’s antagonism and discord. Sometimes, when you are young and far from home, it feels good to camp out in the corner of a dim, sticky dive, strum a single chord on a two-string guitar, and mumble the word “no” for fifteen minutes.

Marshall is now forty-six. In the decades since her début, she has provided a rare and important template for generations of indie-rock singers, and particularly for young women trying to come up in an aggressively male genre. It’s not difficult to draw a direct line from Marshall to contemporary artists such as Mitski, Angel Olsen, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, and Soccer Mommy—tough but vulnerable singers who write and often produce their own material, independent of a band. “Wanderer,” released this week, is the first Cat Power album since 1996 not to be on Matador, the independent record label that signed Marshall shortly after she moved to New York. (The album is being put out by Domino.) In recent interviews, Marshall has suggested that Matador pressured her to write hits. She told the Times that an executive at the label had played her an Adele record for inspiration. (A spokesperson for Matador responded that the label and Marshall had faced “disagreements over matters both artistic and business,” but that “Chan Marshall is without question one of the most talented, brilliant artists we’ve been fortunate to know.”)

In 2015, Marshall gave birth to a son. He appears on the cover of “Wanderer,” alongside the neck of an electric guitar. Although in the past Marshall has returned, in a musical sense, to the landscapes of her childhood—most notably on “The Greatest,” from 2006, which she recorded with a crew of Memphis studio musicians, many culled from the Stax and Hi Records house bands—“Wanderer” has a more explicitly Southern sensibility than anything else she’s done. Her interest in soul and blues idioms remains, but she has never sounded more like a folksinger.

“Wanderer” is about the complex, protracted condition of leaving home only to spend the rest of your life plagued by some invisible force luring you back. On much of the album, Marshall connects to a lineage of American searchers, from the itinerant bluesmen of the prewar Delta to drifting troubadours like the Texan folksinger Townes Van Zandt, all restless spirits who took off with only their songs to sustain them. Marshall is largely uninterested in the trappings of modern adulthood, and seems to place little value in the notion of being held down, or in holding someone else down. But a life of even gentle goodbyes can still exhaust a person. The title track details the melancholy of letting go:

Wild heart, young man, goddamn
I never wanted to keep
For your gold is ages old before the end of your story
Give my hand to Jesus when it went away with you
Oh wanderer, I’ve been wondering.

Marshall’s lyrics have always been at least vaguely concerned with heartbreak, but she’s rarely specific about its origins. Instead, her wistfulness is omnipresent. You get the sense that she knows more than anybody should about the eternal seesaw of love and loss. “Twist of fate would have me sing at your wedding / With a baby on my mind, and your soul in between,” she sings. There’s something hazy and calm in her voice that calls to mind bouncing along a dirt road at sunrise, watching the horizon slowly come into focus—the pink hope of a new morning, and of a clear shot out of town. “Wanderer” isn’t quite an unaccompanied ballad (her own voice is layered behind her, in a ghostly self-harmony), but it nonetheless recalls the early recordings of Appalachian singers who unleashed plaintive songs of sorrow with no instrumental backing. Marshall’s performance here has a similar feel—unmediated and pure. Most of her songs dissect or lament some sort of struggle, but her vocals never sound strained or even especially effortful. Her phrasing is its own miracle.

The album closes with a reprise of sorts: “Wanderer/Exit,” which features the same lyrics, now set to a minor-key melody that resembles that of Lead Belly’s “In the Pines.” It’s darker and moodier, imbued with foreboding. It suggests that wandering, as both a life style and a philosophy, can be as lonesome as it is liberating. If you never stay long enough to plant your feet for a fight, you will never know the catharsis and relief of forgiveness.

For a brief period in the mid- to late aughts, Marshall became known for her erratic live performances, which sometimes ended before they began, or included moments when she faced away from the audience. When I interviewed her in 2012, at her home, in Miami Beach, she told me about hearing voices on a recent flight from Nashville. The experience terrified her. Not long afterward, she checked into the psychiatric ward of Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center, where doctors told her that she was experiencing an acute psychotic break. On her recordings from this era—from “The Greatest” through “Sun”—Marshall sometimes sounds just out of reach, as if her body had shown up at the studio but her mind was elsewhere. On “Wanderer,” she seems whole and present again. Her past imbues her new work with empathy and weight. “Woman,” a duet with Lana Del Rey, explores ideas of recovery and self-knowledge:

The doctor said I was better than ever,
Man, you shoulda seen me
The doctor said I was not my past, he said I was finally free.

In interviews, Marshall is often jittery and verbose, but in the studio she is remarkably concise. She has long known how to build a few spare electric-guitar strums into something rich and resonant. “Woman” becomes a kind of trembling manifesto. “I’m a woman, I’m a woman, I’m a woman, I’m a woman,” Marshall and Del Rey insist. Both singers have had to publicly reckon with complex pasts, and been subject to sexist commentaries on their stamina, talent, and authenticity. When they harmonize on the chorus, it feels as if that one sentence contains everything an observer might need to know about them.

On “Black,” Marshall begins to grapple with the guilt of having bested her demons. It’s a nervous, doleful song in which she laments the strange experience of having outlived someone who once helped her back to life:

CAT POWER - Wanderer (2018) (Album)

A dead man now, once was a friend

Ran all the way upstairs just to make my defense—saved me
Threw me in the bath, with the ice and a slap
Can of Coke down my throat, almost his whole hand fittin’ in—I was dying.

It’s an odd burden to be the one left standing, Marshall suggests—to become the sole possessor of some dark knowledge. “If you’re the next one to get left with this story, that’s when you go mad, that’s black,” she sings. Much of the album is about the uncomfortable fact of remaining alive even when you thought you couldn’t continue, even when the people you love are gone, even when the landscapes you once knew intimately have turned strange, even as everything around you keeps changing. What does it mean, really, to survive? Very few travellers return to find the place they came from just as they left it. How does a person grapple with a home that feels both familiar and unrecognizable?

Cat Power has rarely been a group project, and Marshall performed and produced “Wanderer” by herself. Most of the album is just guitar, piano, and her unfussy vocals. But Marshall is also an instinctive collaborator, who has made two records using other people’s songs (“The Covers Record,” from 2000, and “Jukebox,” from 2008). Even if a melody isn’t Marshall’s own, her voice is so deep and expressive that it can be bent to suit almost anything. “Stay,” which appears on “Wanderer,” was written by Justin Parker, Elof Loelv, and Mikky Ekko, and made famous, in 2012, by Rihanna. It recounts the terror of falling in love—how the process subjugates people, leaves them vulnerable. When Rihanna sings “It’s hard to know which one of us is caving,” her voice is tender and spooked. Whether “caving” means submitting to an inclination to run or to remain is unclear—either way, the experience is fearsome. In Marshall’s version, she mostly skips the verses, singing only the chorus and the bridge. It’s enough. Over a handful of echoing piano notes, she transforms “Stay” into a fragile, yearning torch song about the pain of wanting someone. “Stay” is an admission of desire—a brave and frightening thing for a born drifter to cop to. In the context of “Wanderer,” any entreaty to linger, however tortured, feels instantly profound. ♦