Cat Power

Earlier this year, AOL Music caught up with Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall, Cat performed tracks from her 2008 album Jukebox and told us about that album, touring and more...

Chan Marshall is having somewhat of a difficult time getting used to performing at this AOL Session. The problem: The room isn't big enough for her enthusiasm. As the woman better known as Cat Power and her stirring four-piece band move through a handful of songs, including Silver Stallion, Don't Explain and New York from her Jukebox album, Marshall is positively effervescent, bouncing, bounding, and even swinging and snapping her fingers Sinatra style in the opening Naked. In the halls it's the same thing as she stops to greet everyone, talk Miley Cyrus with a young fan and discuss the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

AOL: You had remarked that it was a little weird because you were a little more stationary than you like, but how did the performance feel out there otherwise?
CM: It's funny because my band are so together that we don't need to practice or anything, but I felt like we were searching for room. We were crunching and attacking and playing - it was interesting, the dynamic was interesting today, 'cause we just saw each other today. We hadn't seen each other in a couple of weeks or so, or 10 days.

AOL: Are you in the midst of a full tour?
CM: We've been touring two weeks on, two weeks off. Sometimes three weeks on, 10 days off since not this past November but the year before, solid. Since the tail end of the Greatest tour when I had to get a new band 'cause my old band, Memphis Rhythm, needed to go home to their families and jobs and things like this. So I recruited them, we started doing the Greatest tour and then it wound into, "Wow, let's keep playing these songs."

AOL: Can you talk a little bit about what you were looking for in the songs you included on the album?
CM: Well, the whole way that Jukebox came about was needing to finish up the Greatest tour, 'cause the Memphis band needed to go home. So I got Judah from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Jim White from Dirty Three, who had been old friends of mine for a long time. Judah recommended Erik Paparazzi to play bass, and then Gregg Foreman from Delta 72. So when we met to practice The Greatest songs for the end of that tour, we ended up playing covers. So by the time we went on tour, we'd do The Greatest songs and then we'd just have such a great time together playing these old songs that we all kind of loved. They ended up being 30 songs total, but the idea to record a record came out after we had already been touring for three months, and I didn't want to let go of them. I didn't want to let go of the feeling, 'cause The Greatest record was the first time I ever didn't play an instrument and I just sang. And so playing with these guys, totally different material, it just opened me up a lot more in a lot of different ways.

AOL: How does being an interpreter of songs affect you as a singer/songwriter?
CM: It's an interesting division, 'cause when I'm writing songs all those memories of growing up and life are in my original material, right? But then when I'm doing these covers, I still have all these other flooding memories growing up and stuff, too. So my heart and soul are in equal parts in different ways. And also, interpretively, the words actually sometimes, with different songs, take on different meanings to me once I'm singing them live with an audience. It's like the songs are teaching themselves to me for the first time.

AOL: Were there any songs on this album that really changed for you when you played them live?
CM: Lost Someone, the James Brown song, sometimes when I'm playing it or singing it I just think about the love of my life, who I'm not with anymore. And I mean every word I'm saying: "I lost someone," you know. And it kills me every time I sing it because I still have that loss. [And] like Dark End of the Street, when we play that, whether it was a love song or not, whatever that song was written about, I kind of enact it to the audience as if it's like political activism. So when I'm up there with just a voice and these people looking at me, I want to talk to them, right? There's so many of them, so I'm here to sing. So I'm singing to them, "They may find us, they may find us someday." So that song, for instance, has taken a little bit more of a political kind of power, individual strength kind of communal message with me. I'm sure someone listening to it is like, "It doesn't sound like that to me."

AOL: How did you choose the ones that you did include on the record? Were there any that didn't work 'cause sometimes when you perform a song, you may love the song, but it didn't click in terms of performance?
CM: Exactly. I'm so glad you mentioned that. For instance, I got a little subversive communication from someone who said, regarding a film, I should do I Believe in You, by Bob Dylan, for this film He's Not There. It wasn't allowed, so I said, "Well, you know what, since it became a little mystery of being mentioned I should do that song, I'm going to do that song right." So we went in, recorded the song the way we work. "Cause we're all nuts; we're not 9-to-5ers with stable degrees of lifestyle or whatever. So it's, like, one take, going in/going out, and if it's not one take we do it 20 times and then we never put it on the record. So 'I Believe in You,' we did it once, and I will never do it again.

AOL: Song for Bobby gets into that teenage mindset of being a fan, of being that kid discovering music and how you love it again. When you're writing a song like that and doing these songs, does it sort of help take you back to that time when you are that kid?
CM: Absolutely, that's the whole thing about growing up and growing older that I notice. My grandmother, for instance, I never knew her as a kid but I can see right through her aged, physical self. She's just like a kid. I think we all always have our child self, that's who we are. So, yeah, Song to Bobby is definitely goofy. When I had the honour to meet [Bob Dylan] live April 23rd, he's a goofball. You're like a kid, right. Anyone that believes in anything, it's like belief in Santa Claus or something, that teenage belief and that hope and that stuff, that's the stuff that changes the world. It's not older people getting tired that change the world. It's that young belief.

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