Cat Power

A Little Bit of Magic

Words by Jake Uitti

One note twirled out from singer Cat Power’s tongue and it’s clear: the artist is a genre unto herself. When the songwriter, also known as Chan Marshall, offers her voice in melody, it’s like a homemade amalgamation of different woods: birch, cedar, maple, applewood (folk, rock, blues, bluegrass), all fused and nailed together to create some echoing birdhouse tone that’s completely singular. It’s a mysticalgoing-on-mythical combination that many in Marshall’s wake have attempted to mimic or adapt. But that’s the thing with singularity, there’s but one, simply by defnition. And so Marshall strides and stumbles through life knowing this, whether or not she admits it to herself out loud, knowing she’s a oneof-one, which must be both paradise and fraught. All the while still, Marshall continues to release glorious new work, both original and cover albums, applying her unique lens overtop each composition. Marshall’s latest offering, Covers, is a new record of just that, with a release date a mere week before her 50th birthday.

“Being a little kid with my grandmother,” says Marshall, “she would sing all these old songs. So, it makes sense, because since I was a little girl, I’ve been singing these songs. I’m the granddaughter of a time when that’s all they used to do. Back in the day with Gershwin, they all did that. Everybody did everybody’s songs.”

Marshall grew up in the South. She was born in Atlanta and spent her formative years in The Big Peach City. She learned about religion from a young age, both its powers of connecting a community and creating greed. She was raised by her grandmother until she was about fve years old. Her grandmother, in fact, passed away in late 2019 just before the COVID-19 pandemic offcially hit the United States. Like religion, Marshall knew the healing benefts of music before she learned of the avarice that can also attach to it. There she was, humming with her grandmother, a fgure for Marshall much like her best friend.

“When I think of music,” Marshall says, “I think of country music or old gospel stuff because [my grandmother] was Southern Baptist. I think of old timey songs and her cooking, just singing with her and learning to whistle with her and learning to snap.”

For much of her life, Marshall believed she’d taken on the identity of a musician from her father and stepfather, both of whom were songwriters and guitar players. But eventually Marshall began to realize her musical roots went even deeper.

“I realized once she was gone,” Marshall says of her grandmother, “that it was actually her who taught me how to sing, taught me how much love and joy there is in singing.”

It’s easy to hear the joy in Marshall’s voice as she sings in her own signature style on her new 12-track Covers album. The record, which features songs by Frank Ocean, The Pogues, Billie Holiday, and others is thick and pointed. It’s the mark of an expert dipping into others’ expertise. On “Pa Pa Power,” a song by rock duo Dead Man’s Bones (co-founded by actor Ryan Gosling), Marshall’s voice punches and breaks like the body of a veteran prize fghter. “It’s just obvious that I would want to do other songs besides my own,” Marshall says. “Because I love to sing.”

During her career, Marshall has both worked with some of the biggest names on the planet and earned countless fans. Somehow, though, she maintains a coveted sense of anonymity that fellow collaborators like Yoko Ono, Eddie Vedder, and Dave Grohl do not similarly enjoy. Her work, too, has been covered by a number of artists, including quite recently by Dave Gahan of the famed band, Depeche Mode.

“I could never imagine in a million fucking years that the guy from Depeche Mode would cover my song,” Marshall says, happily.

In fact, it’s that type of reworking and reintroducing songs that she loves so dearly and personally. For Marshall, it’s a real joy in a time when she can easily drift mentally off to global disasters like rampant cancer, polluted oceans, police killings, and political troubles in countries like Afghanistan, to name a few. After all, Marshall says that she knows nothing is certain—she tells her son this often, she says—but in each moment, we are faced with the chance to make a choice. With each, we learn another aspect to life’s great lesson. No one knows what they’re doing here, completely. Yet, we keep trying. The key, she says, is to work at not what is easy, but what is best. That’s where the joy of fulfllment comes from, which is perhaps all the compass that Marshall can trust.

“It’s almost like songs, to me, are a mirror,” Marshall says. “They illuminate. I like the way they illuminate parts of me that need to be seen. And you can share that!... Music can heal. It might not last for long, or it might last the rest of your life. And every time you put on that fucking song, you will be revealed and revived.”