The artist we know as Cat Power is describing the seismic changes that motherhood has brought to her life. Certain things that I would remember. But the singer-songwriter who normally so voluble is suddenly not talking. Her large eyes, darkened by mascara, widen, and a smile creeps from the corner of her mouth. She blinks rapidly. A child in front of her is climbing up the art deco brass railings. Marshall leans forward and waves at him. Meeting Marshall, you understand her music in an instant. The music, hopping between folk, gospel, rock, blues and pop, is sad, but not depressing.
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Improbably, Chan Marshall — who records as Cat Power , who was once the face of Chanel, who has never made a bad album — is still something of a cult figure. Maybe not quite yet. The great appeal of the Cat Power back catalogue is that Marshall is aggressively unflinching. Willing to stare at her demons, progress, grow, regress, and create music that tackles the complexities of human life, no matter what that might mean, or who she might alienate. Implicit in every Cat Power album is the promise of power and reckoning — personal or otherwise. She makes music for people who have lived life, who are worn down, or for those who keep grasping at something that is forever just out of reach — in other words, pretty much all of us. It was in a dream. I wrote these songs [that became Moon Pix ] that night, waiting for the sun to rise, because my house was surrounded by trillion spirits pressing against my glass, trying to get in.
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For nearly a quarter of a century she had made the road her home, fighting the never-ending war of a career as an independent musician, exposing her emotional turmoil, night after night, for supportive but demanding audiences. Suddenly, she was having a child, and it felt like winning the lottery. She had dreamed of eight children — four biological and four adopted — plus animals and a garden.
Cat Power, the indie-rock icon who has been known to cancel a tour to take care of herself, is okay. Except when she makes it our business. How okay is she? In the pictures on her phone, he is on a playground near their home in Miami, the fronds of distant palms ringing his towhead like a halo, her smile huge. Marshall vapes, speaking freely if somewhat elliptically, using eye contact like punctuation to underscore her point, and offers me water with the solicitousness of a great waitress. Marshall is a singularly gifted American artist in communicating grief and conjuring disillusionment, consistently celebrated unless her darkness gets, well, too dark. She says the cheap rent has allowed her to foster her career. Most everything in New York has transformed for Marshall, she says.
