Cat Power (32 page)

Most of the tracks on
The Covers Record
, however, feel frustratingly unfocused and casual, as if Chan was teaching piano lessons and needed
something to play, so she learned these tunes. There's none of the delicate sorrow, none of the defeated optimism, none of the stark intimacy that fans and critics had come to expect from this deranged, redemptive performer.

What the album lacks in depth and personality it makes up somewhat in rock-geek credibility, because the song selection proves how complete Chan's knowledge of music history is. The singer's insecurities about her education as an artist go back to her father convincing her that music was another subject in school she wasn't smart enough to understand, but Chan can keep up with the snootiest of record-store clerks. “She was schooled,” Foljahn says. “The guys she hung out with, Mark Moore and these other Atlanta people, they had vast record collections. She had all the Dylan bootlegs before a lot of people that I knew in New York. She listened to record-collector stuff.”

Stewart Lupton first bonded with Chan over a mutual love for obscure Americana. “We were into old folk music like the Harry Smith anthology,” Lupton remembers. “Everything that Dylan copped. I could start a line and she could finish it. She knows her stuff. I always sought her out when I saw her just 'cause she's fun to talk to. It's fun to have a friend where you can break into song, and she was fun to talk Dylan with.” The pair even discussed doing a cover of Dylan's “Dark Eyes,” the last (and woefully underappreciated) track on
Empire Burlesque
, which Dylan performed as a duet with Patti Smith during the pair's 1993 tour. “It is so beautiful and inscrutable, so many wormholes opening and closing,” Lupton enthuses in an e-mail about the live version of this track. “His penchant/curiosity for prostitutes, New Orleans, and the tiny hurricanes of romance and fate, the coattails of Destiny disappearing around a crowded street corner, the velocity of it all. If your aim is true it will moisten your eyes. I have been whispering in Chan's ear
the notion of recording our own version. It feels like the next right thing to do.”

Matador abided by Chan's request and released
The Covers Record
in March 2000, but the label didn't consider the album a major priority. They knew Chan had stockpiled original songs, presumed an album of new material couldn't be far behind, and wanted to wait until they had it in hand before leveraging the post
-Moon Pix buzz
for a big Cat Power promotion campaign. This decision turned out to be a massive mistake. “This is where the ugly record-company stuff comes in,” Cosloy explains. “There was a thought on our part that there was going to be a new album very shortly after the covers album. We made a miscalculation, and to this day it's something that's never really been resolved between us and Chan.”

Chan was not pleased. “The whole record label and the booking agent, they think, ‘This isn't a very big record. It's just kinda like a little thing she's doing. It's her side project,’” the singer has said of
Covers
. “I'm like, No, it's not…. This is probably the most important stuff that I've ever …tried to do. But the thing is that they're making it seem like it's actually smaller than what I've done. And in the past I never cared about what I did, and now they're sayin' that it's smaller than what I've done, and I actually loved it. It's all marketing and motives.”

Chan had finally made an album she liked, but it was still very important to her to insist that, even if she was a musician, she wasn't really a rock star. And
Covers
represented her defiance of the expectation that she should be. So when Matador didn't get this, they became the enemy. “If I were a ballet dancer, I'd probably be doing some ballet somewhere. If I were a monkey, or if I worked with monkeys, I would be hangin' out with monkeys all the time.… Since I'm a musician, I happen to play for people,” Chan has explained. “My dad is a musician.
I grew up always going to see him play. Since I'm a musician, it just seemed natural that I would play, too. … I'm not like Prince, or Beck, or Blues Explosion, you now … that like have fun and trip around and jump off their amps and say, ‘Fuck yeah!’ and all that, and ‘All right!’ and actually put ‘All right!’ and ‘Yeah!’ in their lyrics. I'm not like that. … I know that people want to see the rock, and I can't give it to 'em.”

The fact that
The Covers Record
was so personally significant to Chan even though she didn't write the songs made it even more insulting when Matador chose to back-burner the record. And from a business standpoint, Chan was furious because she knew her fan base better than any professional marketer, and she was sure the album would connect. “It wasn't that we didn't think the covers album was brilliant,” Cosloy insists. “We thought it was amazing. We were big fans of her ability to take somebody else's stuff and render it unrecognizable but also remind you why the material was so great in the first place. She's really great at stripping that stuff down and getting to the absolute heart of it. She was good at that way before
The Covers Record.”

The label's concern was capitalizing on the momentum they saw after
Moon Pix
came out. “Our feeling was, we've got a lot of momentum, we're coming off of a very successful project with
Moon Pix,”
Cosloy says. “This is a covers record. We've been stressing for so long that this woman is a genius songwriter. She
is
a genius songwriter, let's not go crazy and try to triple the sales with the covers album, because if we fall short and then we've got a new album eight months later—we're very conscious of trying to space things out properly.

“We consciously went out with a very muted campaign for
The Covers Record,”
Cosloy admits. “We spent very, very little money on display advertising. We decided: We're going to lowball this and let it find its audience, and over time it did very, very well, but I think that move
may have been interpreted on her part as a lack of confidence on our part in her or the record. For her it's an important record. She actually believes that that was a great album, which it was.”

Chan saw
The Covers Record
as a serious album, but the reviews shared Matador's assessment that it was a novelty designed to tide fans over before a proper follow-up to
Moon Pix
. “While we await her next album of new material, due next winter,”
Rolling Stone's
Rob Sheffield wrote in his review,
“The Covers Record
provides a stopgap fix of her unnerving, cold-blooded voice and shaky acoustic guitar.” Old-school Cat Power fans were equally puzzled by the album, which features only one song penned by Chan, “In This Hole,” which was itself a cover of the track that originally appeared on
What Would the Community Think
.

Surprisingly, for a collection of new fans, some of them the most venerated rock critics in the world,
The Covers Record
represented the best of Cat Power. Writing for
The New Yorker
in 2007, Sasha Frere-Jones praised what he heard as Chan's improved vocal abilities. “Something, probably cigarettes, had rubbed some texture into her voice, and she had learned how to manipulate her breathy middle range,” he wrote. “She had found the place, between an incantation and a whisper, where her voice wanted to settle, and revealed herself to be a conjurer, like Nina Simone and Patti Smith: someone who could bring a song home, not through force but by teasing and delaying words, and by resisting standard line readings.” Frere-Jones also commented on what Chan herself already knew: that as a covers artist, she brings a strength and confidence to the music that doesn't exist when she plays her own compositions.
“The Covers Record
also provided Marshall with songs that she needed but hadn't been able to write: personal but poetically indirect, intimate but still odd.”

“I think her songwriting is very dodgy. I don't think it really holds
together,” Greil Marcus says. “I think her songs are opportunities or platforms for her to find a way into some kind of emotional nakedness, but nevertheless preserve that sense of distance and sarcasm and doubt.” This gift, to inhabit songs as if they're rented hotel rooms you temporarily call home, impressed Marcus and others like him who had never heard anything all that commanding in Cat Power's original songs but found themselves obsessed with the covers album. “I listened to
The Covers Record
pretty early and really liked that. Particularly ‘Sea of Love’ and ‘Paths of Victory.’ There is anonymity in her music where you don't have to wrestle with the sense of a real person. It's all fictional.”

After the release of The Covers Record in March 2000, Chan continued to tour relentlessly. Her life consisted of long stretches on the road, typically with Currie in tow, followed by a month or so spent visiting her family in North
Carolina and checking in with friends in Atlanta and New York, all of which was fueled by a constant supply of whatever booze she could find—scotch, beer, tequila—a lit Parliament in her hand at all times: Chan, she woke up with whiskey and went to sleep with wine.

Thurston Moore remembers Chan coming to visit him and his family in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 2002. “We wanted to raise money for our daughter's school because they had no revenue, so we told the school that we would do a benefit for them,” Moore remembers. “We had some local musicians play, Sonic Youth played, and Kim
Gordon, Moore's wife and Sonic Youth's bassist
asked Chan to play. She played solo and stayed at our place.” With Chan living in their home, it was hard for Moore and Gordon to miss her alarming behavior. “She was nipping at the bottle,” Moore recalls. “I could tell she needed her cigarettes and she needed her alcohol.”

Because Matador underpromoted
The Covers Record
, Chan was faced with almost instant pressure, after its release, to come out with a new album. A year passed, then eighteen months, another tour, another trip to Paris, to Mexico, to Miami, another series of evasive phone conversations about when she might enter the studio, and yet nothing had come of it. With her whiskey and her cigarettes reassuringly within reach and Currie by her side, Chan had all the fuel she needed to procrastinate. “All I did was hang out with my boyfriend,” Chan has said of the time that passed between
The Covers Record
and
You Are Free
. “I just tried to have fun on my off days with my boyfriend. Go to a snowy mountain and ride those skimobile things, or swimming topless.”

Finally, in early 2002, Chan relented and began looking for an engineer to help her record the next Cat Power album. She was characteristically adamant that whomever she worked with understand his or her
role: push the right button at the right moment, while Chan alone would determine what the songs should sound like. After lamenting the difficulty she was having finding a qualified but suitably compliant person to work with, a friend recommended Seattle-based superproducer Adam Kasper. “I got an e-mail
from Adam
saying: ‘Engineer, producer, whatever you want,’” Chan has said. “I was like, ‘Hmmm… sounds a little too friendly,’ because I didn't know him at all. I'd never met him before. So I e-mailed him back, and I was like, ‘I'm not interested in a producer, I only want an engineer, and I want to get that straight, so if you're interested, fine, if you're not, you're not.’”