Cat Power (25 page)

Chan's old married life was blissful so long as Bill was around, but in May 1997
Red Apple Falls
was released and the singer went out on the road to support it. This meant that Chan spent a lot of time alone. Locals remember seeing her making the twenty-minute walk along the rusty train tracks from her house into Prosperity, where she'd browse at the junk shop, sit under the gazebo in the main square, or eat lunch by herself at the Back Porch, the local watering hole. Surprisingly, other than vague memories, Chan didn't make much of an impression on her neighbors. In New York City, or Atlanta, or most other places Chan has lived over the years, she can't walk down the street without greeting people
she knows from way back, people she met yesterday or doesn't know at all but wants to talk to anyway. In Prosperity, though, she barely made a ripple.

Chan Marshall is an urban pioneer who left the oppression and backwater degeneracy she associated with the South for the Northeast. If all she wanted was a family, she could have stayed in Atlanta, married young, and started having babies like both her sister and her mother did, but something drove her to pursue more than that. Yet when she achieved fame, success, and a career in music, she immediately longed for the life she left at home. This conflict still has not been settled in Chan's life, and when she was twenty-five it was even more unresolved. Chan managed to stay in Prosperity for the better part of a year. But in the fall of 1997, when Bill left for tour, Chan freaked out.

“I was in South Carolina by myself for an entire month,” Chan has said. “There's no sounds or lights, just crickets and darkness. It's an old house, and if you're in a bad state of mind, you sometimes see things that aren't there and you go crazy.” Chan battled back the darkness by sequestering herself in her farmhouse, turning on all the lights, and staying awake. After several days of self-induced sleeplessness, she started hallucinating. She also started writing songs.

In one deranged night Chan wrote six of the eleven dense, emotionally fraught tracks that would appear on Cat Power's next album,
Moon Pix
, including “No Sense,” “Metal Heart,” “Say,” “Cross Bones Style,” and “You May Know Him.” The idea of an artist toiling away all night in a fit of inspiration is romantic, but it does not describe Chan's experience. It's not as though she finally found her muse; Chan literally thought she was going crazy. “I got woken up by someone in the field behind my house in South Carolina,” Chan has said. “The earth started shaking, and dark spirits were smashing up against every window of my
house. I woke up and had my kitten next to me …and I started praying to God to help me.”

Something was coaxing Chan out into the field. “A voice was telling me my past would be forgotten if I would just meet him—whoever he was—in the field,” she has said. “And I woke up screaming, ‘No! I won't meet you!’ And I knew who it was: the sneaky old serpent. My nightmare was surrounding my house like a tornado. So I just ran and got my guitar because I was trying to distract myself. I had to turn on the lights and sing to God. I got a tape recorder and recorded the next sixty minutes. And I played these long changes, into six different songs. That's where I got the record.”

Chan often talks about being visited in her dreams by ghosts. “I feel like there's some sort of spectral sort of existence that follows me around,” the singer has said. “I feel kind of haunted by it. I feel like there's a power and energy that really wants in.” At first light the following morning, Chan jumped into her truck and drove straight to New York, a twelve-hour trip. “I told my friends, ‘I thought I saw these demons in my house. It was pretty insane. But they were real and I know you think I'm crazy, but I could see them,’” the singer has remembered. “And they were like, ‘Chan, you're insane, you need some help.’ So I went back home the next day. And then when I got home the very next day, two friends of mine both died on the same day. And then that woke me up. And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm not crazy.’”

Whatever it was that happened on that deranged, stormy summer night in Prosperity, whatever it was that took place between Chan and her shaman back in Africa, she put all of it into the songs she wrote for
Moon Pix
. And as soon as she came out of her hallucinatory haze, Chan contacted Matador and asked them to get her into the studio. “I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, hey Matador? How are y'all doing?’” the singer
has said. “‘Ummmm, would y'all pay for my ticket to Australia so I can get the fuck out of where I'm at?’”

In total, Chan was only away from touring and recording for less than a year. For her it was a huge break from her
Community-
era life, but for the fans and for the people at Matador, Chan was hardly even gone. The break did symbolize a serious attempt to retire from the music business, but Chan was never so sure it would work that she severed ties with her record label. In fact, Cosloy had no idea Chan was considering quitting. “She never said, ‘I don't want to play music anymore,’” he says. “In my experience, somebody saying, ‘I'm gonna move to wherever and buy a house with Bill Callahan,’ that's not such a strange thing. Saying, ‘I'm gonna move to wherever and have kids with Bill Callahan,’ that's happened to people I know about five times.”

Matt Voigt, a warm, laid-back Australian in his mid-thirties, was at home in Melbourne enjoying a mellow Christmas holiday on December 30, 1997, when he got a phone call from the owner of Sing Sing studios, where he
works as a sound engineer. “He said, ‘Well, this American lady has come in and she wants to record an album,’” Voigt remembers. “‘Can you start on New Year's Day?’ I was like, ‘Well, no, not on New Year's Day,’ so we decided to start the next day. She just walked in off the street, basically.”

Chan was in town staying with her friend Jim White of the Australian instrumental rock trio the Dirty Three, but she hadn't made any formal plans to record until she arrived in Melbourne and played White the songs she'd written in South Carolina. Chan, White, and Mick Turner, also of the Dirty Three, demoed most of the tracks that would appear on
Moon Pix
, and some of these original, incredibly spare recordings made it onto the album. “She did a few songs in Jim's bathroom in his home,” Voigt remembers. “One of the tracks that made it directly onto the album was ‘Peking Saint’—that one was done in Jim's bathroom with one mike.”

Jim White is a heroic figure to many of the renowned musicians who have worked with him. PJ Harvey likened his drumming to ballet dancing; Joanna Newsom has described him as a “player” who can “cling, with a palpable, high-stakes looseness and gorgeous blind faith, to the downbeat.” All ornate praise from harpists aside, White has been absolutely crucial to Cat Power's evolution. Chan has always relied on older, saner male drummers to keep her focused both onstage and in life. Back in Cabbagetown it was Glen Thrasher. In New York it was Steve Shelley. And beginning with the recording of
Moon Pix
, it was Jim White.

After working out the arrangements with White prior to pressing record, Chan entered Sing Sing studios on January 2 as confident as she ever had been about the album she was about to make. In the past, Chan's in-the-studio philosophy involved working up the courage to
show up, closing her eyes, and just playing, hoping that whatever came out wouldn't horrify her the next day. During the
Community
sessions Chan started to get a sense of the creative possibilities involved in recording versus playing live, but she was tentative about exploring them; she didn't want to feel as if her albums were inauthentic because they were bolstered by in-the-studio trickery. This time, Chan decided she was over all of that. “The first thing she said when she came in was, ‘I want a drum beat, and I want it to kind of sound like this,’” Voigt remembers. Chan pulled out a copy of the Beastie Boys'
Liscensed to Ill
and played “Paul Revere.” The subtle but uncredited sample courses throughout
Moon Pix
's opening track, “American Flag.” “So we got the drum beat from the Beastie Boys album. We reversed the loop and slowed it down, and then she played on top of that.” They spent an entire day recording “American Flag.”

Chan's experimentation with samples and multiple vocal loops was reflective of a larger shift in her attitude toward making music. She still felt insecure, but she was no longer willing to be intimidated or bossed around. In the early years of her career, Chan dealt with plenty of patronizing sound dudes and dictatorial studio engineers, and between them and her condescending father, the singer had enough of men telling her what to do with her music. By the time she showed up at Sing Sing, Chan had gained enough confidence to dictate her own terms, and she never let anyone boss her around onstage or in the studio again. “She had a strong idea of what she wanted to do,” Voigt remembers. “My role was just to get her ideas onto the tape. I would come up with the odd idea, and if she liked it, then that was great, but it was all her show.”

For Chan, there's a certain judgmental objectification that goes along with being condescended to by studio guys, and she's extremely
sensitive to it. “In the same way as when someone on the street kind of looks you up and down and laughs, it's the same kind of vibe,” the singer has said. “It's like, ‘Fuck off! What do I fucking care if you think I don't know what fucking feedback sounds like?’ I definitely get mad, angry, and aggressive, and I don't like getting aggressive.”

Moon Pix
took less than a week to record, and another handful of days to mix. In the evenings, after the day's work was done, Chan and the Dirty Three guys would head out into the city to eat dinner and drink, but while they were in the studio, it was all business. Chan's old insecurities did creep into the sessions whenever she had to record alone. “If you've seen her live in shows, you know how much she apologizes and stops playing,” Voigt says. “Well, it was exactly the same in the studio. She'd be at the point of tears and then start crying and say how sorry she was and stop.”

Voigt reacted to this with the same bewilderment most people feel when Chan starts picking apart what seems to anyone else like an exquisitely vulnerable performance. “I was just like, ‘I've just heard the most amazing voice ever! What are you apologizing for?’” Voigt remembers. “I suppose it comes down to her feeling so vulnerable that when she does open up and sing, it's very emotional for her.” Voigt remembers a direct connection between Chan's stability in the studio and White's presence. “When Jim was there, she was a bit more stable,” Voigt recalls. “Jim had ideas of how the tracks should be, and he offered lots of positive suggestions. Chan just listened and they went ahead and did it. Jim gave her confidence that it was all going to be okay.”

The
Moon Pix
sessions marked Chan's first attempt to really be the boss in the studio, but that doesn't mean she was happy with the results. “It was either tears and apologies or, ‘Oh, well, that's okay, let's
move on,’” Voigt remembers. Chan wasn't thrilled with the way
Moon Pix
came out, but she did see the record as a step forward for her in terms of bridging the gap between what she heard in her head and what actually appears on the record. “Maybe
happy
is not the right word,
interested
is,” the singer has since said. “I'm becoming a woman, and as a person I'm changing and getting better and better. I don't consider myself a qualified musician, but I know I've become really involved with the whole fabric
of a record
.”