The 10 best songs by Cat Power
It was 18 years ago, but friends still tease me about the time I accidentally rejected a hug from Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall. It was at a music festival in Detroit in July of 2006, and Chan was greeting fans after her afternoon performance, a joyous and beautiful set backed by the Memphis Rhythm Band, playing mostly the new songs from the album The Greatest. The incident was a simple sitcom mix-up: I reached out for a handshake at the same moment she unexpectedly leaned in for a cuddle, resulting in an awkward bumping of knuckles and elbows, followed by chuckles. No further attempts were made to correct the situation, and alas, no future opportunities have presented themselves since.
It’s not the most entertaining anecdote of all time, I grant you, but in historical context, it does feel more weighty in a weird way. Just a few months earlier—though I wasn’t aware of it at the time—Marshall had been at one of the low points of her life, as a break-up, a drug binge, and a psychotic breakdown landed her in professional care for a week. She was running out of money and needed to delay touring The Greatest indefinitely. Of course, these demons weren’t entirely new.
For most of the first decade of her career, which began as a lo-fi rising star on the famed New York indie label Matador, Cat Power’s mental health struggles had been reported on ad nauseam, often with a judgmental strain typical of the 1990s. She regularly suffered from stage fright as a performer and had a tendency to go off script a tad—sometimes mumbling through lyrics with her back to the crowd or just walking off without warning. Her fans, though, were unusually understanding and supportive for the most part, probably because Marshall’s music was the type that cuts deeper with the empathetic, the introspective, and the vulnerable.
With all this in mind, it feels fairly remarkable that my one comedic crossing of paths with Chan Marshall came on a warm, sunny summer’s day, and that her energy—throughout that concert and afterward—was equally warm, at ease, welcoming, and light-hearted. She had turned a corner, maybe not the last one, but an important one. And that kind of hopefulness can often be a part of the Cat Power experience, too. Yes, Marshall has always been a complicated artist best suited for deliberate, reverberating, minor chord confessionals, but she’s also funny, playful, and unashamed (or unaware) of her own coolness.
The voice, of course, is the singularity, even as it has evolved from the whispery, yearning mystery of the early records to the wiser, smokier confidence of the later ones. It’s why she’s spent half her career as a covers artist, including her latest project, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. For Far Out’s countdown of the best Cat Power songs, though, we’re going to keep the focus on Chan Marshall, plucking a selection of her original tracks spanning the past 30 years.
The 10 best Cat Power songs:
10. ‘Manhattan’
This 2012 track isn’t your typical New York City anthem, although it does evoke the sense of a city that’s still humming a bit at 3am. The rhythm, punctuated by just a few recurring notes on the piano, is not energised but definitely mesmerising, as Marshall repeats that “you’ll never be, never be, never be Manhattan,” probably because you can’t afford to live there anymore.
“There’s this beautiful Langston Hughes poem about the Statue of Liberty—or that mentions the Statue of Liberty,” Cat Power explained to Interview. “I’d had this song in my head for a long time.” The piece is a tribute to both the legendary poet and her own ideas of what the word “liberty” means in the modern hyper-capitalist context.
9. ‘Black’
Our lone selection from 2018’s very good Wanderer album. This one has all the earmarks of an overlooked gem with a long shelf life ahead of it. Wanderer generated most of its press from Chan’s angry break with Matador Records, her overdue collab with Lana Del Rey (‘Woman’), and a cover of ‘Stay’—a song that always sounded like Rihanna was covering a Cat Power song to begin with.
‘Black’, though, is just a wonderful haunting folk number about death, plain and simple, starting right out of the gate with Marshall summoning the image of “La grande faucheuse”, the angel of death in French mythology. The lyrics revisit those dark days from her past and the people who helped her through, some of whom then couldn’t save themselves: “How was I to know Black would have turned from me to you?”
8. ‘He War’
“I’m not that hot new chick / And if you won’t let me run with it / We’re on to your same old trick.” Appearing on 2003’s You Are Free album, ‘He War’ is a bitter breakup song with a 1993 Liz Phair-ish guitar lick but a very 2000s vocal style. The cadence of the quoted bit above, in particular, reveals Chan’s longtime love of a good hip-hop couplet, delivered with the appropriate F-U attitude of a Missy Elliott chorus.
The music video for ‘He War’, directed by Brett Vapneck, makes some interesting choices, too, showing the demise of the singer’s relationship not through the usual miming of fights or tears but through a beach holiday spent an arm’s reach apart.
7. ‘Metal Heart’
An enduring fan favourite among the Cat Power lifers, ‘Metal Heart’ is fairly unique in that it’s been recorded by both the green and seasoned versions of Chan Marshall, first on her 1998 record Moon Pix and then ten years later on Jukebox. The original scattershot guitar version is among the sadder songs of the entire 1990s, a trusted mixtape closer for a soon-to-be ex: “How selfish of you / To believe in the meaning of all the bad dreaming.”
The 2008 self-cover is no less sad but decidedly less resigned to staying in that state perpetually. Marshall sounds a bit more pissed off than crushed, and the accompaniment is now driven by confident piano chords and some more refined electric guitar embellishments. When she sings, “I once was lost, but now I’m found / Was blind, but now I see you,” the older, wiser Cat Power is slamming a door and walking away, not collapsing into a heap. Hearing the two versions back to back is really more powerful than hearing either on its own.
6. ‘Ruin’
The lead single from Sun, released in 2012, ‘Ruin’ is the only track on this album to feature a backing band (the Dirty Blues Band), as Marshall opted to play all the instruments on the other songs, not feeling like the full band sessions had clicked.
If the rest of the Dirty Blues Band recordings sounded remotely as good as ‘Ruin’, it’s hard to imagine why they were scrapped, but alas, we were all wise enough by this point to trust in Cat Power’s better instincts. And she did at least recognise that this song deserves its place on Sun, serving as a nice companion piece to ‘Manhattan’.
Where the latter is locked into the mythology of one specific place, ‘Ruin’ is a travelling song, name-checking a dozen destinations over a skittery, slightly unnerving piano line; you imagine Marshall looking out the window of a tour bus in Soweto or Calcutta and reflecting back on that apartment back in Manhattan; the trivial annoyances of the young American urban professional: “Bitching, complaining and some people ain’t got shit to eat.”
5. ‘Lived In Bars’
I considered selecting the title track from 2006’s The Greatest, but pretty as it is (and popular; it has by far the most streams of any other song on the record), ‘The Greatest’ is sort of a grand reconfiguration of ‘Moon River’, and a bit less interesting than this song, which starts out as a typical sort of slow, sad Chan ballad before left-turning into one of the warmest tunes in her entire catalogue, greatly aided by the presence of the Memphis Rhythm Band.
There’s a reason every Cat Power fan finally decided to try introducing their parents to her music through this album. It’s mature, it’s melodic, it’s palatable, but it’s not remotely a sell-out attempt or a reach beyond her comfort zone. It’s just sad to think that this album was recorded during a difficult period in Marshall’s life, considering what a wonderful, life-affirming listen it remains almost 20 years later.
4. ‘Nude as the News’
For many people, this was the entry point into the Chan Marshall experience. It’s from the 1996 album What Would the Community Think, which is actually the third Cat Power studio album, but one that came hot on the heels of her first two releases, Dear Sir and Myra Lee. This was the best song she’d written up to this point and fit very snuggly among the other Matador Records heroes of the moment, including the aforementioned Phair (before her venture into pure pop), as well as Pavement and Guided By Voices.
As for the fiery lyrics: “Jackson, Jesse, I’ve got a son in me / And he’s related to you / He’s related to you / He is waiting to meet you.” For a long time, it wasn’t clear what metaphor vs reality was here and whether it mattered. But Marshall did eventually reveal that the song was inspired by an abortion she’d had at the age of 20, and thus, the reality did matter quite a bit.
Unlike some of her “cool” Matador label-mates, who were content to leave every lyrical choice open to interpretation, Cat Power seemed compelled to tear down any barriers of artifice in what she was doing. As a result, her fans usually connected with her songs on a much more personal level.
3. ‘Maybe Not’
I’m realising that I mentioned that Cat Power can be pretty funny and light-hearted, but I’m not doing a great job including that aspect of her oeuvre in this list. To explain how serious ‘Maybe Not’ sounds, consider that The National took a shot at covering the song in 2017, and even they didn’t have the gravitas to get it quite right.
The standout track on You Are Free, ‘Maybe Not’ is a worshipless hymn—a meaning-of-life duet sung by duelling angels (Chan harmonising with herself), seemingly pleading with another lost soul to turn toward something more hopeful, even if they have to create a new path from scratch: “Listen to me, don’t walk that street / There’s always an end to it.”
2. ‘Cross Bones Style’
This was my own personal introduction to Cat Power in 1998, and I’ve been regularly re-visiting it for the quarter-century since. The visuals from the music video, directed by Brett Vapnek, are hard to separate from the tune at this point, but it doesn’t hurt that no one has ever looked cooler on film than Chan does here, sort of casually head-bobbing her way through the whole thing like the girl at the party that is DJing later and does not suffer fools (the video was supposedly inspired by Madonna’s ‘Lucky Star’ video from 1983… but it kind of feels more like a post-apocalyptic parody of it).
Marshall has said that ‘Cross Bones Style’ was written after she met two children in Africa who were forced to sleep in trees at night after their parents, involved in the diamond mining trade, had been murdered. Then again, the song has also been grouped in with several others from Moon Pix that Chan reportedly wrote in the immediate aftermath of a fever dream she had one night at a farmhouse in South Carolina. Whatever the inspiration, the song is certainly dreamlike and hypnotic, with a haunting chorus that hints at mighty Cat Power feats still to come.
1. ‘Living Proof’ – The Greatest
I can’t help but top the list with my own favourite song from The Greatest and one I still remember vividly from that sunny festival show in Detroit in 2006. There was the feeling that you were seeing Cat Power as something entirely new, the latest exciting signing to the Stax label circa 1966. ‘Living Proof’ is a perfect soul anthem and probably the most feel-good song Marshall has yet written.
And yet, at the same time, it’s also defiant, strong-willed, not taking shit. Where once a younger Cat Power might have been asking for living proof and leaving it at that, she is now providing the response to her own call. “You’re supposed to have the answer / You’re supposed to have living proof / Well I am your answer, I am living.”
