Being able to just sing-just singing-totally changed me. But I saw you play just a few months ago and I almost felt like I was watching a completely different person. RACHEL: Perhaps, but it was also pretty transformative too, right? When you performed back in the early 2000s, you often seemed so uncomfortable on stage. MARSHALL: I lost my mind from having so much fun.
RACHEL: On your last few tours, you’ve worked with two excellent backing bands, an experience that allowed you just to sing. I felt like I didn’t have the resources before. ” Or it’s the opposite, where you’re around people who say things like, “You should play more instruments,” and your default reaction is, “Oh, no. MARSHALL: It was that thing where you’re surrounded by people who keep telling you, “You have such a great voice, you should just sing. RACHEL: You just felt like you couldn’t do it before? I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT ME DOING SO MANY COVERS. RACHEL: Has making a record where you play every single instrument been on your mind for a while? Push a different button, make a different sound. You know, I’m like, “Push this button, make this sound.
#I WANNA TAKE YOU TO A GAY BAR SONG KITTENS HOW TO#
I didn’t have any idea how to play a lot of these things. You want to try that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, let’s try that out.” That was when the real sound of this record started to take shape. and Malibu and one of the assistants at the studio says, “You know, we have all these other synthesizers in the back. This time, I wanted to work in real studios and work like a professional. I’d usually record things in a couple of takes-sometimes I’d just do it again if someone farted or I accidentally fell off the piano bench or something. In the past I might just write my songs by recording myself on a little tape recorder. How was it different from the ways you’ve worked before?ĬHAN MARSHALL: So many ways. COLE RACHEL: I know you recorded this new record in several cities. Cole Rachel met up with the 40-year-old Marshall at the Bowery Hotel in New York City for a late brunch and endless glasses of iced tea. The resulting album, which she recorded in fits and starts at studios in Los Angeles, Miami, and Paris over the past three years, is arguably the most complex (not to mention patently optimistic) of her career. Having spent the past few years touring with accomplished backing bands-a scenario that allowed her to put down her guitar and focus purely on singing-Marshall was eager to flex all of her musical muscles, teaching herself how to create beats and play a variety of vintage synths. On the aptly titled Sun (Matador), she turns yet another corner with a record that is a carnival of synthesizers, programmed beats, looping guitars, and live drums-all of which Marshall played and recorded herself. This fall, Marshall will release the first Cat Power album of original material in more than six years. Having spent so many years seemingly hiding in plain sight, performing in front of countless audiences but still somehow lost in her own private reverie, this new version of Cat Power stepped to the front of the stage-abetted by some of the finest blues players in the world-and bloomed.
It wasn’t until the creative and commercial watershed of 2006’s The Greatest- Marshall’s take on Memphis soul music-that she finally began to shake the past. As a result, the perceived image of Marshall as a fragile, unpredictable troubadour is one that has followed her for years. Her infamously erratic live shows-characterized by rambling interludes, breakdowns, and a predilection for stopping midsong-reflected her battles with a variety of personal issues, anxieties, and addictions. Her penchant for reinterpreting other people’s songs (her wholly irreverent take on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is already a classic) placed her in the rarefied territory of a Nina Simone, or even a Bob Dylan, two artists whose songs she has often sung, and whose own storied-and sometimes troubled-careers occasionally mirrored her own. (She is one of the few vocalists who can tease abject heartbreak from a line as cryptic as “Yellow hair / you are such a funny bear.”) But the release of The Covers Record in 2000 propelled Marshall into a more mainstream arena. She quickly became the unwitting fantasy object for both rock critics and music fans obsessed with the hypnotic and often inscrutable nature of her work. Born in Atlanta, Marshall first emerged with her debut album, Dear Sir (1995), during the golden age of the mid- ’90s Alternative Nation, her minimalist compositions as emotionally harrowing as they were beautiful. If there really is such a thing as a true “indie-rock” rock star, then Chan Marshall-the mercurial singer-songwriter known as Cat Power-is it.
I MISS MY FRIENDS, SO MANY OF WHOM CAME TO NEW YORK FOR THE SAME REASONS I CAME HERE, WHICH WAS NOT TO WORK ON WALL STREET Chan Marshall