Open emotion but not an open book
Look right through Chan Marshall and see yourself. That’s what the singer-songwriter, who performs under the name Cat Power, would prefer. She lives out an infamously neurotic relationship with the intimate, gripping songs that she writes, one minute clinging to them desperately, the next walking off stage and abandoning a song half-sung. It turns out that you can’t really come into contact with Marshall without being part of this intense internal struggle.
When she picks up the phone from a hotel room on her current tour (she plays the Henry Fonda Music Box Theatre on April 29), the first thing she says in her soft voice, with its slight trace of her Georgia roots, is that she’s fighting with her boyfriend. It doesn’t have anything to do with our conversation, but it’s exactly why people care so deeply about her music.
“If we had the time to talk to each other about these things, people wouldn’t make music,” she says about the fight, her mind darting from one thought to the next. “Because they’d be able to communicate and it wouldn’t be so hard to struggle with your feelings and memories of feelings and future hopes. We get trained by soap operas on television, ‘Oh, that’s how we feel when that happens.’”
So much of Marshall’s work is about probing for expressions that aren’t on the soaps, ways of feeling that haven’t been vocalized, it’s no wonder she has developed legions of devoted fans.
The 31-year-old post-punker, whose first name is pronounced “Shawn,” is writing a new lexicon of contemporary experience, one free of irony or cliches. It’s that of a street-smart, love-wise poet, but not overly confessional and definitely not victimized. Her last two albums, 1998’s “Moonpix” and a 2000 collection of other artists’ songs called “The Cover Record,” each sold around 200,000 copies worldwide.
She also sounds like no other person writing music right now. Marshall’s recordings and performances contain so little artifice that they are more like a quiet dialogue than rock music -- a dialogue with an imaginary friend.
It is rock music, though: gorgeous, hybrid Neil Young-Patti Smith blues stripped bare, just the bones of arrangements on dry piano and acoustic guitar, with the occasional drums or strings. She is not a technically accomplished player nor overt in musical references, but what she offers is a certain gravity that feels real.
On her latest album, “You Are Free,” her beautiful, steady voice takes on the electronic folk of Beth Orton (“Speak for Me”), at other times veering into minimal new wave (“Free”) and even cowgirl campfire songs (“Good Woman”).
But in many ways, it is this aforementioned relationship to the songs that has taken over her life and the lives of her fans.
Since her early albums, “Dear Sir” (1995) and “Myra Lee” (1996), her lo-fi songs have been so loaded with intimacy, and yet so delightfully thin on personal details, that they’ve had listeners scratching for the person behind the work.
The boundaries between her need to speak in this way and her fans’ voracious appetite for authenticity are so thin that they have inspired a kind of cult of personality, leaving the skeletal songs to just hang there in the middle, fragile but not going away, ownerless.
“Chan is not someone whose music is fundamentally different from her as a person,” says Jeremy Smith, 31, creator of one of the best Cat Power fan Web sites, Moonpix (www.moonpix.com). “There is no contrivance with her.”
A commune in the South
Still, what can one really know about Marshall? Her own interpretation of the facts is slippery. Her maternal grandfather was a Native American and her musician dad was from Montgomery, Ala. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mom moved Chan, her older sister and younger brother around the South. At one point in the late ‘70s they lived in a commune with hippie funk band Mother’s Finest and fashion designer Patrick Kelly.
“You’ve got these stoner, wild ... people living in the country,” Marshall recalls, “and all the problems that come with drug use and running away ... and having kids when you’re too young, makes you kind of crazy.”
Chan’s mom changed her name to Ziggy, after Ziggy Stardust. “When people ask me about the South, it’s like, yeah, I remember sitting on that tobacco field or being in this little two-room shack in the woods,” she adds, “but yet knowing who David Bowie was.”
After living with her dad briefly in Atlanta, she was out on her own in that city’s just-burgeoning post-punk scene, where she formed a group called Cat Power (it was the first name that popped into her head) in 1992. Shortly afterward, she moved to New York and started hanging out at ABC No Rio, an East Village performance space and punk collective that offered shows by guys such as Beck.
After only a few solo gigs, studio wizard Wharton Tiers offered to record her songs. What she did in one day became her first two albums.
Since then, it’s been a legacy of intense fan worship, especially from young college-age women. Her legendary stage fright, which has had her end concerts in extended onstage screaming or play with her back to the audience, only seems to have endeared her more to the painfully shy.
“Someone told me that there was four stars for ‘You Are Free’ in Rolling Stone. And that’s great for me to know, because all that means is that I can tell every person: You can do the same thing that I’m doing,” Marshall says.
A recent sold-out solo show at the Knitting Factory Hollywood had a worshipful crowd, including Hollywood designers and directors, on their feet and straining for her every harrowing note. Marshall is not being coy when she says she’s amazed she’s come this far.
“My grandmother put it perfectly when she said, ‘I’m so thankful because you’re not a prostitute or a drug addict,’ ” she says flatly. “And for some people that might sound like, ‘Oh my God, that hurts.’ But I knew what she was saying. Given the situation and the relationship with my family, she’s right!”
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Cat Power
When: April 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Henry Fonda Music Box Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
Price: $16
Contact: (323) 468-1770
