Cat Power (38 page)

Hodges helped Chan explain what she heard in her head to the rest of the band, but in the songwriting department, the self-described white girl from Georgia didn't need much help. “Reminded me of Bob Dylan,” the bluesman says of Chan's songs. “He's a great poet, but she sings better.” Chan's understanding of simplicity in songwriting particularly impressed Hodges. “The more simple the better, because people will understand where you're coming from,” the guitarist explains.

“Everything Smokey Robinson writes is simple,” Hodges continues. “Everything Stevie Wonder writes is simple. Everything Al Green writes is simple. Simplicity is the answer. Most people try to play a hundred notes, whereas you should maybe only play six—but you've got to find the right notes to play.” If comparing Chan to Dylan, one of the singer's most revered heroes, isn't high enough praise, Hodges took the compliment even further. “People ask me, ‘Who does she remind me of?’” he says. “I say, ‘She reminds me of Chan.’ Nobody else. That's just her. She's original.”

The
Greatest
sessions were very traditional. Each track was recorded in a single take, and the entire album was completed in three days, not including rehearsal time and mixing. This is how Hodges likes to work. “Even doing Al Green's stuff—to do a whole album would take three
days.” On each of the three days the players recorded songs from morning to night, and at the end of the third day the album was finished. The pace was hard on Chan, and she was unable to relax and really sing the way she would have liked. “I was tracking live while playing the guitar or the piano, depending on the song, with these legendary people. So my voice wasn't really open on that record,” Chan has said.

The arrangement and execution of the
Greatest
tracks was finalized in the studio with the Memphis Rhythm Band, but Chan had been working on the songs they recorded for more than two years. “I usually write when I'm alone with a piano or a guitar and I get that feeling like you're hungry for a cookie or chocolate or something,” Chan has said. “It's almost a feeling of emotion. If I'm not near an instrument I'll just go and write, but if I am near an instrument, then I just start playing and the melody just comes, and then those are the words, but I never really write with something in mind. It's usually something that I'm thinking about, but whatever's in my subconscious comes out, and that's what the song will translate as.”

Chan wrote many of the songs on
The Greatest
sitting by herself at the piano in her living room in Cabbagetown. “In Atlanta I wrote ‘Lived in Bars’ and ‘The Greatest’ on my piano,” she remembered, “on the same street in Cabbagetown where my grandfather brought his thirteen-year-old bride.” Chan actually wrote a third song that completes the triplet but has not yet recorded it.
“The Greatest
is about the workingman, about families in the South. Poor. No education. Working, always working,” the singer has said. “It's about trying to stay alive and have respect for yourself. Everyone in the history of the world suffers and gets through things.”

“I have no idea how she connects with a song. She's a mystery,” Ensemble frontman and Chan collaborator Olivier Alary says. “I helped her
move a piano back into her house. We were waiting for a guy to take the piano because it was very heavy. The piano was on the porch, and it was dark and hot, and all the crickets, and I was like, ‘Please play that song 'Evolution.’ Sitting next to her on the piano—in the studio you hear a voice through the speakers, but there sitting next to her, I really felt it was not her singing, it was ghosts singing. She doesn't have the same speaking voice as the singing voice. It was otherworldly.”

The album's title track, “The Greatest,” is the first song, and it sets the tone of redemption through pain for the entire album. Warm, gentle piano opens the track before Chan's voice comes in, inviting and sorrowful at once. “Once I wanted to be the greatest/Two fists of solid rock/With brains that could explain any feeling,” Chan sings over lilting piano and mellifluous steel guitar. This image of fists clenched in defense against the world became an effigy for the entire album. A pair of golden boxing gloves on a chain decorates the album's cover, and when she played the album live, Chan would frequently dance around onstage as though she was sparring with (and clobbering) an unseen demon. “The boxer is an element of strength, concentration, and setting a goal for yourself,” the singer has explained. “‘The Greatest’ is an homage to humanity. It's important, I think, to have a statement of intent.”

Not all of the tracks on
The Greatest are
about battling back against the world: Some are about love, both lost and found. “That's about my ex-boyfriend,” Chan has said of “Empty Shell.” “The breakup of this love of my life was right after the album
You Are Free
had come out. I came over to London, and after soundcheck I was writing it. It was a really painful time.” The optimistic love song on the record is “Could We,” which Chan wrote after realizing that she could be drawn to new boys even after losing someone she thought was the one. “I was so happy,” the singer has said of how she felt writing it. “I had separated
from someone, and we all know what that can be like. Then the spring of last year, something happened. In spring there's the birds and the bees and everything's sweet and new life and fresh, and I started dating again.”

The promise relayed on “Could We” does not carry over to the other love songs on
The Greatest
. “Where Is My Love,” for example, is meant to be taken literally, and was inspired by the singer's sadness at not having yet settled down to start a family. “I have five best girlfriends,” Chan has said. “One of them would always start singing, ‘Where is my love— where is
myyyyy
love?’ when we were twenty-three and drunk on the street. I wrote that song for her, but once I sat down and started to play it, I started bawling. I realized it rings true for me too. I don't have any kids, and all of my friends have babies. I don't have a husband. I think about it.”

One of the most impressive songs on
The Greatest
is “Willie,” six minutes of classic-style soul that Chan wrote during a three-hour cab ride from Tallahassee to Pensacola, Florida, to visit Granny Lil. As opposed to several of the other songs on
The Greatest
, which are short and spare, sometimes containing only one repeating line, “Willie” is a robust, fully fleshed-out narrative. “The driver's name was Willie,” Chan has said. “He was an older gentleman. I was in a really good mood and trying to talk to him.” Initially Willie wasn't interested in chatting, but three hours is a long time, and before long the driver had told Chan his entire life story.

The pair made a detour to Willie's girlfriend's trailer to drop something off. “She was beautiful,” the singer has recalled, “with bleach-blond hair and a white T-shirt and cut-off blue-jean shorts and barefoot. When she started coming closer, I could see his face changing, and he got real happy.” After visiting Willie's girlfriend and hearing all about his
plans to propose, Chan made the driver pull over so she could grab her guitar out of the trunk. She sketched out the basic lyrics and structure of the song during the rest of the ride. “There'd be stretches when we weren't talking, and I'd be singin' the melody in my head, writing every thing down,” Chan has said. “We'd stop to get gas and the song would still be playing in my mind.”

The Greatest
is the first Cat Power album that Chan actually owned up to liking. “I feel protective about it,” the singer has said. “I've never felt that way before.” She considers it her first real album, the beginning of an era. “Technically it's my seventh record, but I feel like it's my first,” the singer has said of
The Greatest
. “When I was just starting out, I was nineteen and just experimenting with writing songs and playing guitar and singing—it was just a hobby.”

When
The Greatest
was released on January 20, 2006, it was heralded as the most fully realized album of Cat Power's career. Reviewers commented on a new and welcome sense of self-confidence within the songs that somehow didn't obscure Chan's trademark vulnerability.
Rolling Stone
contributing editor Christian Hoard wrote in his review that the most remarkable aspect of
The Greatest
is “how much Marshall accomplishes without ever straining,” and his magazine placed the album at number six on its list of the best albums of 2006. Reviewing the record for
Spin
, critic Will Hermes was so inspired, he went crazy with the redemption metaphors: “On
The Greatest
, she rises like a wounded but unbowed lioness and conjures the uncertainty of the human condition with a new certainty.”
The Greatest
was also awarded the 2006 Shortlist Music Prize, an award given to albums that have sold fewer than one million copies and have therefore not been certified Gold. Cat Power won over albums by Tom Waits, Regina Spektor, and Girl Talk, making Chan the first woman ever to win the award. Cat
Power fans new and old agreed with the critics and bought a record number of copies in the first week of release. Their enthusiasm pushed
The Greatest
to number thirty-four on the
Billboard
chart, by far Cat Power's highest charting ever.

Everyone involved wanted to celebrate victory, so they heralded the album as the great soul record Chan had been working toward all along. However, in many ways
The Greatest
is a subpar Cat Power album. The songwriting is not as consistently strong as on
Moon Pix
or
You Are Free;
“Where Is My Love” and “The Moon” are both half-baked non-songs built around trite refrains. Chan's greatest gift as a musician is her unparalleled voice, but you can actually hear more of it on
Moon Pix
or
You Are Free
than on
The Greatest
, where the stylized production sometimes gets in the way.

Even on the songs where Chan's voice and the arrangements mesh perfectly (“The Greatest,” “Willie”), the result is not nearly as satisfying as one might expect. Since Chan first started performing, it has always seemed a no-brainer to pair her rich, Georgia-inflected voice with a stellar R&B band, but something got lost in the perfection of the match. Part of the intrigue of Cat Power has always been the disconnection in Chan's music. Her best work is unsettling in a good way, off-kilter and unbalanced most of the time, then strong and clear for brief, fleeting moments. As with an eclipse, the power of the best Cat Power songs comes from sensing that the perfection within them can't last.

“She never makes the record I want her to make,” Tim Foljahn says. “I like the Memphis record, but there's always too much between me and her voice. That record sounds good, but I've heard her sing, and her voice has so much going on that you don't need much else. When you start layering all those textures behind her, it's distracting.” Greil Marcus puts it more directly.
“The Greatest
never did anything for me,” he
says. “It seemed ornate and gussied up. I didn't get it. I didn't get the title, and it didn't make me care. I've gone back to it at various times to see if it would communicate differently, and it hasn't so far.”

Other critics were harsher, affirming Chan's worst fears about her inadequacies as a musician by implying that she wasn't fit to stand on-stage with the likes of the Memphis players. “I like the
Greatest
album, but I think it would be better without them,” Charles Aaron says of Chan's band. “I don't want to have to think about them interacting with her. They're slumming! And I've been around her as she talks to people. There's no communication on a serious level happening. That's not a nice thing to say. But I feel like… they worked with
Al Green
, you know? She's Cat Power. I'm sorry, that's just not the same ballgame.”

When Chan delivered
The Greatest
to Matador, her label was thrilled. After ten years of nurturing this shy, self-sabotaging artist, Matador finally had the record in hand that could make Cat Power a big star. But then, with a major national tour set to start on February 11, a press release went out on February 6 announcing that all scheduled Cat Power dates in the United States were canceled due to unspecified health reasons. Days later, Matador announced the further cancellations scheduled to take place in Europe. The label declined to elaborate “out of respect for Chan's privacy,” but the general consensus was that Chan Marshall had finally cracked up. Which, according to her, is exactly what happened. “I was at the end of my rope,” the singer has said. “I was done. I was cooked. I was so cooked.”