Cat Power (33 page)

It took a lot of back-and-forth before Chan was convinced that Kasper was the right man for the job. “I really wanted a good engineer,” Chan recalled. “Someone I could really talk to in the studio. Every time I've tried to do that, it's some guy who is like, ‘What you don't realize here is that you're going to have a lot of feedback.’ I have to deal with that so much being a girl. That shit pisses me off so much!” By this stage in her career, Chan's pathological fear of being outmatched in the studio was manifesting itself as paranoid bossiness.

“I was looking for somebody who would let me do what I wanted to do,” Chan explained. “I only sit in a room with someone who presses knobs because I don't really know how to do it. I'd love to do that by myself, but I need to have someone in there. Someone who will just shut the fuck up.” Kasper insisted that he could be that guy, and eventually Chan believed him. In fact, she came to trust the producer so completely that she almost abandoned her strict rules against high-concept recording to work with Kasper on a polished, traditional Motown album, much like what she would later create with
The Greatest
. “Adam and I talked about him actually doing production, like
producing
, in a Sam Cooke-ish,
R&B kind of way. Like old Marvin Gaye,” Chan recalled. But the singer wasn't yet ready to relinquish that much control. “I don't know. It's like you can't be yourself if someone's directing you. You can't, it doesn't make sense,” she has said. “If you have someone directing you, you lose all your stuff. I just hate that fucking idea, it sounds so gross to me.”

Chan's hesitance to expose herself to outside influences extended to her work with other musicians. Outside of her most trusted bandmates (Steve Shelley, Tim Foljahn, Glen Thrasher, Jim White), at this point in her career Chan rarely worked with other artists. On
You Are Free
, she warily broke this rule and let Kasper recruit complete strangers for the record. One of the first calls Kasper made was to composer David Campbell, who has worked with everyone from Maroon 5 to Air to Alanis Morissette to Wilco—and also happens to be Beck's father. “Adam Kasper called me,” Campbell remembers. “The way he painted it, he was helping her do the record, but I mean, he produced the record. He was being modest.” Kasper sent Campbell versions of “Werewolf” and “Good Woman,” the two tracks on which Kasper and Chan decided they wanted string arrangements. Then, once Campbell had worked on some ideas, he invited Chan and Kasper to come to his house in Los Angeles so that he could play them his compositions.

Considering Chan's caution about working with strangers, she was very cool about letting Campbell do his work. “Sometimes artists get very directly involved in the creation of an arrangement,” he explains, “but in this case they kind of left it to me to come up with what I felt.” Before Campbell played his compositions for Chan and Kasper, he sensed that she was nervous. “She was excited and apprehensive and all kinds of cool emotions,” Campbell remembers. The composer noticed Chan's shyness, which he attributed to her lack of experience working with others.
“I'm not sure how many times she'd ever done this kind of process, maybe she never had,” he recalls. “It was new territory.”

Even though Chan trusted Kasper, she still disagreed with him all the time. “There were times in the studio when I freaked out,” Chan has said. “We'd get in fights and the next day it would be okay.” Resolutions to their disagreements came quickly, but the battles were intense. “Adam did try to talk me out and talk me into things a lot,” Chan has said. “We did have arguments, and there were times I know he questioned being my friend ever again.” Kasper has worked with Queens of the Stone Age, R.E.M., and Nirvana, and was producing both Pearl Jam's
Riot Act
and the Foo Fighters'
One by One
during the time
You Are Free
was made. Demand for the producer's time was very high, so Chan had to fly to meet him during his odd days off. In exchange for working on Kasper's schedule, Chan got to record in the fancy, well-appointed Seattle studio spaces Kasper was using for the Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters records. “I worked on his schedule,” Chan has said. “He does a lot of big-money stuff, so the studios he was getting were really amazing—amazing amps, amazing guitars, amazing mikes, amazing spaces—really organic, strange, interesting places. When he had off time, we'd go in and then try to remember what we did, like, two months ago and pull that tape up. I'd be like, ‘Uh, no, I wanna do something new,’ and then I'd write a new song. So it basically worked like that—every few months getting together and essentially writing new songs.”

Chan was less emotionally stable in 2003 than she had been in 1993, but she was infinitely more confident in the studio.
You Are Free
was on track to be the first semislick Cat Power album ever, recorded in a posh studio with fancy guest stars. In addition to Campbell, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder and Foo Fighters lead singer and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl make significant contributions to
You Are Free
. Both of these
artists had already been vocal about their adoration of Cat Power, Grohl having once referred to Chan's voice as “the most satisfying orgasm I could imagine.”

Both Grohl and Vedder obviously were and still are more famous than Chan, which was, in part, why appearing on her record was good for their careers. Being associated with Cat Power gave both of these icons of nineties alternative rock the sheen of contemporary relevance.

The benefit for Chan was that she got to collaborate with two supremely gifted musicians who would attract even more attention to her new record. Yet in typical look-at-me-wait-don't-look-at-me conflict, Chan didn't want anyone to talk about the fact that famous people were appearing on her record. In the liner notes, both musicians are referred to only by their initials, a desperate attempt as coyness that's so ineffective it's almost parody.

If Chan really wanted to keep Vedder and Grohl's work secret, she should have made that super-clear to them. Via a post on the Foo Fighters website, Grohl announced that he was on the new Cat Power album, and Vedder mentioned it in an interview with
The Onion
that ran in November 2002. “I've been listening to Cat Power for a number of years now, and I think she's gonna come out with a new one
record
next year,” Vedder said. “I added a couple of things to her record. We actually got in a room and sang together, and that was one of the highlights of last year—or was it this year? This year, I think. It might be under a pseudonym, though. That might be a secret.
Laughs.
”

The presence of these bold-name collaborators is just one of the ways in which
You Are Free
represents an important milestone in the evolution of Cat Power. Though Chan would resist it mightily throughout the year or so she worked with Kasper, the singer was no longer the reserved, naïve tomboy who gave fans a mainline to her soul on albums
like
What Would the Community Think
and
Moon Pix
. Chan looked completely different, now that she was a shaggy-haired beauty with gowns in her closet and a model on her arm, but more importantly, her song-writing was different. The songs Chan was writing were no longer the brutally spare dirges she'd recorded throughout the 1990s. The singer had moved on.

Using
The Covers Record
as a much-needed hiatus from singing about exactly what she felt, Chan was able to hold onto that idea even as she wrote new, original songs for
You Are Free
. There's little doubt that in most of Cat Power's post
-Covers
work, she is still singing about herself, but she has yet to make another record as directly confessional as any of the four albums that preceded it.
You Are Free
is all about intimacy by proxy.

“I went to a lot of different kinds of schools: the inner-city school, the cornfield school, the rich-but-fucked-up-kids school,” Chan has said. “The human condition is always the same. It doesn't matter what kind of person you meet. It is always the same stories everywhere. That is always really depressing. Not depressing. But things happen to innocent kids by adults and by society, because society controls children and what they're supposed to think and do and say. I think it is really disgusting that things like that aren't talked about more openly. In the adult world, they keep it hidden. That is really hard for people in society, especially for children. Nobody protects their beautiful differences. They want to keep differences under wraps so everybody can be the same.”

Before
You Are Free
, Chan hadn't spent more than a week recording any one Cat Power album, so this system of working intensely for a day or two, then letting the songs sit untouched for months at a time, was new for her. “After a year there were like forty different songs,” Chan has said. “I was going a little insane.” Of the forty songs Chan and Kasper recorded, only fourteen made it onto the album. Kasper helped
Chan narrow down the collection, but it still felt a little as though Chan was choosing with her eyes closed. “At some point, you don't know what you're doing,” she has said. “There's no formula. It's like when you're brushing your teeth and then you're over there on one tooth and you think, What makes you wanna go over to that tooth?”

The lack of a strict recording schedule allowed Chan to luxuriate in a seemingly limitless series of sonic options. In the past, the singer had only a few days of relatively low-rent studio time in which to bang out an entire record. She went in with a handful of prewritten songs, recorded her album, and went home. This time, because she was working with Kasper, Chan had time to be a rock star, which befitted the glossier, more produced album she was creating. “Sometimes I would show up, fly into a place, and have four or five days open but just work on one day,” Chan has recalled. “We'd sit there with two bottles of scotch, packs of cigarettes, laughing and listening to old songs and going, ‘This is so stupid! Ooh, ooh, ooh! I have an idea! Is the tape rolling?’ Sometimes it was like, ‘What are we doing?’

“All your songs are completely stripped-down at first, and that's the way they sound to you,” Chan has explained, “but then you get into the studio and you try a little bit of this, then a little bit of this, 'cause you got time on your hands, 'cause it's a fucking free studio.” All that free time made Chan uneasy. “I felt like I was making a mess because I don't
normally
do it this way,” the singer has said. “Usually you put the amp in the same place and you record in three days. The difficult thing was the idea of the songs lingering…. The difficult thing was never fucking getting around to finishing it because we had so much liberty.” Chan struggled during the recording of
You Are Free
to relax into the idea that building her songs out from their most basic structure could improve rather than ruin them.