Cat Power (31 page)

Chan decided to record
The Covers Record
because she felt safer playing other people's songs than she did playing her own, but Chan's all-covers shows, both before and after the album's release, were not necessarily less unhinged. Henry Owings was booking the Echo Lounge in Atlanta during this tour and remembers being driven to a state of abject fury by Chan's self-defeating apathy. “Chan wanted to do, sit-down, two shows in one night: rows of chairs in the club, people watching the movie, and her on a mini-grand piano onstage, playing along with the music. We'd never projected a movie in there, so we were making this makeshift screen of bedsheets on the back wall. Both shows were already sold out, and there was a line, and it was drizzling outside. Showtime was about twenty minutes away, and I was a bundle of nerves. I was
like, ‘I just want to get this fucking done,’ because she had made a couple of little jabs, a couple of little comments where she was talking about how I wasn't able to get the screen up right, or this piano needs to be moved, or we need to move these chairs closer, and it was kind of ticking me off.

“She's doing the soundcheck,” Owings continues, “and twenty minutes from doors opening, she's hunched over on the piano bench, and I'm frantically trying to get this goddamn screen up. I'm like, ‘Could somebody give me a hand here, please? I need to get this up.’ And she just said: ‘I don't even know why you're bothering. The show's gonna suck anyway.’ At this point I throw the staple gun down, and I'm looking at her, and I am thumping her chest: ‘If you're gonna say that, do you want me to go outside and tell everyone that the show's gonna suck? Because I don't have time for this.’ I threw the staple gun, and I walked out, and I never came back, and I just let her rot on the vine. I understand the stress of her being the only one there. I get it. But there also comes a certain amount of professionalism, even in the roughest sense of the word that I've become accustomed to. Be it with some dirgey metal band or a girl on acoustic guitar. You don't say shit like that.”

By this time, Chan was still in the midst of her second professional identity crisis. She was compelled yet again by the idea of settling down, starting a family, and living what she routinely terms “a normal life,” but the success of
Moon Pix
, not to mention her own unquiet creative mind, would not allow it. Both
The Covers Record
and
The Passion of Joan of Arc
tour were attempts to have it both ways, to remain a professional, performing musician by trade without sacrificing her sanity. “I just want to chill out. I can't rock. I don't want to rock anymore,” she said at the time. “I mean, I do later, maybe, but right now I'm just taking it as it comes.”

Musicians will traditionally do a covers album to fulfill one last release of their recording contract, or because they have no other ideas, or because they are lazy, or because they are vain and want to show off their impressive ability to improve on someone else's songs, or because they genuinely want to pay tribute to another artist. There are many standard reasons, but none of them apply to Chan. For her it was about hiding—from her fans, from her critics, and from herself. The last Cat Power album was incredibly personal, and it transformed Chan into the type of star whose fans needed something from her. The tour almost killed her, but she made it through, and by the late 1990s she had a nice boyfriend and some money and didn't want to go back to the way things had been before. She didn't want to record songs that would land her in a fetal position during every show.

During the
Moon Pix
tour, when Chan managed to actually play her songs, the arrangements were very traditionally rock ‘n’ roll, especially for Cat Power. According to Chan, this was part of the problem. “I changed a lot of the chords to make them more rockin',” Chan had said. She found herself turning to the security of cover songs when the pressure to rock out became too intense. “Every now and then I'd say, ‘Please don't play. I'm going to do this one right now,’” Chan has said. “I needed some grounding because I felt like rock was so
raaargh vroomagh
. I was like, ‘Nuh, nuh, nuh, no.’ By the end… I'd say, ‘Relax.’ Because I felt like what I was giving, I wasn't feeling. You know, having to be like
‘Yeeaaahhh
.’ It was just like, ‘God damn, shut up!’”

We saw Chan's face for the first time on the cover of
Moon Pix
, but the abstract sculpture that adorns
The Covers Record
reinforces the idea that Chan's gone underground again, only to be glimpsed as a shadow behind, to borrow Greil Marcus's word, the scrim of her music.
Moon Pix
featured a full band and the most experimental production
of Chan's career. On
Covers
, the singer is once again alone with her songs, mostly backing herself on guitar or piano. She practically recorded the record alone as well. “I ended up in the studio recording with this young man at this place called Night Owl Studios across from Penn Station,” Chan remembers. “I did most of the songs there just very, very, very, very quickly, and there's like four songs that are from different recording sessions.”

What started as an intuition telling her not to release her new songs turned into an official plan when Chan met with Chris Lombardi in New York to discuss the progress of her new album. “I remember talking to her about this other record,” Lombardi has said, “and she was just like, ‘Oh, I don't want to do that, but I want to put these covers out.’” According to legend, Lombardi drafted a new contract on the spot, which he allegedly wrote down on a Post-it. Chan supposedly looked over the proposed advance and promptly demanded that he double it. For years, hard-core Cat Power fans have been lusting after the so-called lost Cat Power album that wasn't released as a result of this conversation, but Cosloy says it doesn't exist, or if it does, Matador doesn't have it. “She may have been recording things periodically,” Cosloy explains. “But at no point did she submit an album to us in between
Moon Pix
and
The Covers Record
. That didn't happen.”

Some of the songs Chan shelved in order to release
The Covers Record
ended up on future Cat Power albums. (For example, “He War,” which appears on
You Are Free
, was written during this period.) “I have two CDs of stuff that I haven't released,” Chan told a reporter before
The Covers Record
came out in 2000. “I'm saving them because, at the time, I was—I don't know. I feel funny about some of it, emotionally, personally, I don't know if I want to release it.” The tracks she chooses never to record are likely to remain lost forever, because she doesn't
typically test out new songs when playing live. “The ones that I haven't brought in the studio or ever played again are the first songs that I ever wrote,” Chan has said. “They are either on a cassette or I know them and I'll never play them again. Or I've forgotten them.”

The majority of the songs selected for
The Covers Record
were chosen simply because they popped into Chan's head onstage when she couldn't bear to play another one of her raw and personal tracks. She would look down at the set list taped next to her pedal board, and even though it might have said “Nude as the News,” Chan would find herself playing Smog's “Red Apples” instead. Earlier that year Chan had a piano delivered to her house in Atlanta, and this also affected the song choice for
The Covers Record
, which features much more piano playing than any of the previous Cat Power albums. Chan's version of the Velvet Underground's “I Found a Reason” emerged out of a session spent tinkering around on her new instrument one lazy Atlanta afternoon.

The song choice on
Covers
also reflects Chan's roots as a country girl who first learned to sing in church. The songs that soothed her as a child continue to bring her comfort as an adult. When asked why she included a cover of the folk classic “Salty Dog” on her album, Chan makes a direct connection to one of the tapes her grandmother made of her singing when she was a little girl. “I have one that she found,” Chan has said. “Me and my sister are both singing … ‘Salty Dog’ … When she gave me that tape, I didn't cry, but it was, ‘Oh my God, listen to that little hick.’ I loved to fucking sing. It was great. That comes from my dad. My dad used to make us sing when we were babies. Meanwhile, he's smoking grass right in front of us.”

As elegant and spare as Chan's piano playing is, she of course considers herself to be a grossly inadequate player, still no better than the ignorant kid her dad warned to stay away from the keys. “I want people to
know that I am not proud of my piano playing,” Chan has said. “It's embarrassing to people's intelligence when I play piano.” Chan has described looking out into the audience and counting the faces of the people she's sure can outplay her, because “growing up, everyone took piano lessons.” When she toured behind
The Covers Record
, Chan's solution to this problem was to play in near darkness. “I don't want
the audience
to see my hands,” Chan has explained. “It's a very bizarre feeling knowing that they can't see me, but my fucking hands are in the light.”

At first listen, it's startling to hear some of the more familiar songs Chan chose to include on
Covers
(“Wild as the Wind” or “I Found a Reason,” for example) reduced to spare parts, and in moments the effect goes beyond jarring and into the realm of brilliant reinvention. Moby Grape's longing-tinged, jangly folk-rock romp, “Naked if I Want To,” becomes a gorgeous ode to redemption. Chan strips the Rolling Stones' “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” of all its aggressive bravado, revealing a plaintive elegy at the song's core.

“For ‘Satisfaction,’ I was at home in Atlanta for a few weeks, and I was just playin' around with this acoustic guitar my dad had given me,” Chan has said. “A friend of mine had given me this old cassette. I can't remember the actual record the Stones did that song on. And my tape player wasn't working. And my truck was in the shop, so I just started playing it. I never knew how to cover songs, literally, technically. Nina Simone
“Wild Is the Wind”
—the same thing. I was in the studio last summer, recording some other songs. And the piano was there, and I know the song, and I didn't bring the tape with me or anything, so I just sat down and was figuring out, like, okay, just make it up. This is how I want it. Never did I think, I have a list.”